something wild (1986)

Something Wild (Jonathan Demme) may or may not have been influenced by Martin Scorsese's After Hours. In both movies, a timid white collar worker heads out on a nightmarish journey. Charles is a boring businessman and his life seems to revolve around work and career. One day, he runs into the wild girl Lulu. He is taken hostage, sort of, and she takes him on a roadtrip that mutates into a suspenseful crime story. As a film, this is nothing to cheer about: what is most problematic is perhaps how the film falls apart into pieces where the director tries out different things. However, there were some good things here. A few good scenes, surprisingly good music and well, admit it, sometimes a bad 80's movie is just what you need; Jeff Daniels & Ray Liotta overacts their quirky roles and the whole thing is rather silly, but entertaining. What the hell - John Waters is in a small part as a car salesman and some other of the smaller roles work amazingly as well. The Feelies perform at a reunion party. - - - After all: not bad even though the last 30 minutes are rather weak.

After Hours (1985)

I can't say that I'm Martin Scorsese's biggest admirer but After hours is undoubtedly one of his better movies. It is an almost completely nonsensical story but what works is the depiction of a night that starts out as a promise of an adventure and that ends as a frenzy nightmare. The protagonist roams around in a nocturnal New York and one bad thing after another happens to him. With all these coincidence, a Paul Auster-world could have been conjured up, but coincidence in this film is not elusive, nor is it beautiful: it is just hellish. This is 100 % atmosphere and sleazy locations. New York is the urban hell but the strange characters it inhabits - a crazy taxi driver, a psychotic (?) girl, a sculptor or two, a waitress who hates her job... - are chronicled with both charm and tenderness. The main character is the bored and boring office-rat who thinks he is about to take the subway train downtown to spend a nice and exciting night in the company of a new acquiantance. This is not exactly how it turns out. The cinematographer is said to have worked with Fassbinder and it is as if the spirit of that German director looms over these images: dark and seedy, yet evocative. What is perhaps the major merit of After hours is that it is so hard to explain what the hell it is supposed to be. Some of it is funny, most of it is dark and the progression of it all seems to have the character of a lunatic thriller. The film could be said to be rooted in the classic Noir-tradition: the innocent guy is involved in all kinds of plots and ends up framed for a crime. Innocence no more! When watching it, I appreciated the sense of danger and desperation: the nonsense nonewithstanding, some layers of this feeling felt real. After hours is a brave film because it dodges the familiar film structure and it does very little to invite us into a familiar universe of intelligible goals and intensions. It takes us on a ride in the darkness, and does it surprisingly well.

It's not me, I swear! (2008)

I don't know whether so many Canadian movies around 2008-9 were made about kids who are traumatized by the absent of a mother. Anyway, It's not me, I swear! (Philippe Falardeau) chronicles the story about Leon, a kid who stirs up trouble everywhere he goes. If he is not trying to kill himself he wreaks havoc in the evil neighbors' house. He befriends Léa who is also eager to make trouble. The film focuses on the tumultuous world of kids and adults and the role of imagination. The parents are fighting and mummy moves to Greece. The theme itself is far from remarkable but the film proved to be an unconventionally dark take on this tangle of subjects. The film is set in Quebec in 1968 and Falardeau skillfully mixes the dreamy with the realistic, the funny with the unsettling. Just don't expect the traditional drama about a kid who's having psychological problems and the quest for a happy solution. There's not much of that - and that speaks for the film.

Faust (2011)

Aleksandr Sokurov making his own version of Faust? I haven't heard of this film, but as I stumbled upon it, and as an admirer of Sokurov's, I was eager to watch it. It turned out Sokurov is perhaps just the right person to make the most of Goethe's winding and richly cross-referencing play (the film covers book one only). Instead of fooling around with a dry costume drama, Sokurov focuses on the madness, the hallucinatory and outrageous sides of Faust. Filters and image manipulations are employed to enhance the experience of dizziness. The story is a familiar one: a brooding scholar sells his soul to the devil. The devil is a scheming bastard, a moneylender in fact - and a jester - and the scholar falls in love with Gretchen. The overarching themes are power and the quest for knowledge and domination. I wish all adaptations of literary works would take as much liberty with the material as Sokurov does here. Digital skies (the cinematographer is said to be responsible for one of the Harry Potter movies!), gritty streets and eerie conversations - this is Sokurov's Faust. The film evokes smells and impressions, the life of the town along with the life of nature. Every impression is filtered through a sense of hectic dreaminess. The result is a strange oscillation between melancholy and a sort of propulsive drive.

Shadows in Paradise (1986)

Nikander drivers a garbage-truck. He's a lonely man. As it happens, Nikander meets Ilona, a supermarket clerk. One cannot exactly say that there is an instant spark because both of these people play it cool. They are afraid of each other, afraid of love, of closeness. The odds for their love affair are bad. However, Ilona is made redundant at the supermarket and as an act of revenge, she steals a box of money. She and Nikander run away...

This is Kaurismäki at his most minimalist - I mean, he always is, but this film is rather extreme - and it is also one of his funniest films. The humor lies in the sheer deadpan of everything: the lines, the acting, the events. Kaurismäki renders his characters with dignity and tenderness. He places them in opposition to the forces of the market and snooty representatives of the wealthier classes. The soundtrack includes blues, rock n' roll and Finnish schlager - the music sets a tone for the movie, its strange sense of hope. The locations drive home the point as well: the film takes us to bingo parlors, harbors and sleazy apartments. Kaurismäki's tenderness extends to these locations as well. Shadows in Paradise is a typical Kaurismäki-film in almost every sense. This didn't prevent me from being moved by it. The magic going on here is that in every single frame the downtrodden is approached from the point of view of: life can be better, it must. Kati Outinen and Matti Pellonpää are, of course, wonderful in their understated portrayal of shyness and resilience.

Hunger (2008)

12 Years a Slave turned out not to be as convincing as the celebratory reviews made it seem. I reacted rather strongly against Steve McQueen's handling of the material and his strange preoccupation with bodily suffering. In that respect, Hunger is more of the same - more of the same problems, that is. Also here, I found what I would call an almost sadistic fascination with gore and suffering. I could understand such a preoccupation if I would get an impression of a real concern, a desire to reveal a specific side of suffering (like in Dreyer's Jeanne D'arc, to take an obvious example). The setting of Hunger is 1982 North Ireland, a prison and a hunger strike started by IRA men. In itself, this is a promising start. It's just that I feel that McQueen, despite a lengthy conversational scene in which a prisoner and a priest talk to each other about the utility of hunger strikes, does not succeed in bringing out the political context. Or: the political context does not seem to be the main preoccupation here. Perhaps my own lack of background knowledge inhibits my understanding of the film, but I think there's more to it. It's more that I really for my life do not see what kind of pespective on the prisoner's physical torment the film offers. We see the gruesome details of it, but the film keeps an icy distance: it lets us see, but I am not at all sure how I should look. The camera follows Bobby Sands' ordeals, and ultimately, his death, and it is a relentless trail - it is almost as if the hard determination of the prisoner and the guards is mirrored by the camera: it looks and looks. But determination for what? The prisoners' protest, they act, they are represented as disgruntled and resentful. There are merits of the film and those mainly have to do with the form. McQueen pares down the medium of film into a very economic language of images, sounds and very sparse dialogue. The question is, again, to what use McQueen's artistic skills are put. One reviewer writes: "Personally, I was even more impressed with McQueen's ability to wield silence like a painter instinctively aware of which portions of the canvas to leave blank." What worries me is whether Hunger in the end lands in a form of aesthetization where the violence is stylized so much that the only thing left is an isolated reaction in the viewer. In one long scene, as economical as anything else in the film, we see a guard swooping urine down a hallway. The only sound we here is the swooshing and scraping and the only thing we see is the guard approaching us from down the hallway. The scene is painterly, austere almost, but what does it tell us? In what position does it place us?

When Night is Falling (1995)

Patricia Rozema's romantic drama When Night is Falling is a rather conventional take on love and secrets. A teacher at a Protestant college falls in love with a girl who works at a carnival passing through town. What makes this film rather predictable is the travelling-carnival-outsider-plot, but also the way in which religious themes are developed. The problem is that the film builds on a simplistic dichotomy: there are the religious zealots at the college (including the teacher that has a crash on the protagonist) versus the free-spirited bohémes at the carnival who seem to lead lives that contain nothing but love and adventure. Honestly, we've seen it before. And no, adding a bit of exciting hang-gliding doesn't bring in a deeper level of subtlety. On the other hand, there are some good moments here and somehow I found myself engaged by the characters, at least to some extent. But beyond that, the movie contains far too many embarrassing scenes - embarrassing in the wrong way - and far too many instances of clunky dialogue.

Imitation of life (1959)

Nobody cherishes the artificial like Douglas Sirk. Imitation of Life, a romantic drama, gets away with almost anything because of its undercurrents of subversive critique. Issues related to class, race, showbiz and gender are tackled through a cheesy drama about the aspiring actress, her maid and her romantic interest. As the film starts, Lora is a poor widow with a kid. On the beach, she meets Annie and her daughter Sarah Jane. The first question she asks about Sarah Jane makes it plain that the kid is assumed not to be her real daughter - she seems white. The two women become friends and Annie ends up living with Lora, who struggles to become an actress. Annie settles for the role of friend, extra-mother and maid as the other woman delves into her career and reflects on who is really Mr. Right. Lora quickly realizes that showbiz is not the glorious haven she thought it to be: she encounters greedy bosses who practically thinks of the actresses as prostitutes.

I think this story can be approached in two ways. One way would be to take issue with the racial and gendered stereotypes that it repeatedly reflects (there's the kind-hearted, almost saint-like confidant, a woman who settles with her fate as a maid, for example). Another interpretation is that Imitation of life uses the medium of the soap opera to dissect a number of roles created by a racist society, and that it thus looks at the kinds of conflicts - and the versions of self-deception - bred by that specific society. There's the saint-like maid, the striving white woman, the solid Man, the self-centered brat and the girl who wants nothing more than to pass as white. What the film would then be said to present is a rotten system, within which people's struggles and self-centered desires (or willingness to dedicate themselves to others) are formed. There are layers and layers of phoniness - remember that a major plot line revolves around the entertainment industry - but there is also life in the middle of that false consciousness. So, in this reading, Imitation of life circles around sacrifice, aspiration and shame as forms of racism and sexism. Perhaps this is an overly charitable understanding of the film, but I think one could make something of the conflicts in the film - and the things taken for granted as desirable - in that way. As a meticulous and gloomy study of societal wrongs, Imitation of life uses its lavish colors, its over-the-top acting and its overwrought story twists to make us look at the source from which these falsities stem.

Rakkaudella, Maire (1999)

I must confess that I don't watch Finnish movies that often. And sadly, I remembered why when I saw Rakkaudella, Maire (Veikko Aaltonen), a gloomy film about a middle-aged woman who is obsessed with a woman whose husband has been killed. The biggest flaw is perhaps the script: the story shifts from social drama to some kind of surreal, hallucinatory state but this transition is not convincing (actually, the progression of the film is a bit clumsy). The writing seems overwrought and all conflicts are too crudely played out so that in every scene one knows exactly what is going on and what is going to happen next (even though the beginning of the film was quite interesting and promising). The acting is ok, and Susanne Ringell's performance is so good that I start to wish that the writer would have focused on her character instead. That would have been an entirely different story, and an entirely different fim. 

The Age of Innocence (1993)

If I hadn't been so charmed by Edith Wharton's novel I would probably not have sat through The Age of Innocence (Scorsese). Famous actors abound but the acting is conventional. So is the approach to the story. What thrilled me about the book - its critique of societal mores and its take on several forms of adherence to a dominating set of ideals about how life should be led - is almost totally absent. This is revealed especially in the film's much more sympathetic rendering of the characters. In the book, all characters are complex, and the main character is a rather repulsive spineless man who lives his life in a half-hearted way. Unsurprisingly, the movie focuses one-dimensionally on the love story between the main character, a man who wants to do the right things even though his heart is not in it - and the woman who is a bit of a social pariah due to her adventures in Europe (the story takes place in the 1870's). The film, as the novel, deals with the cruelty in a society that requires that one is all the time to keep up certain standards of morality, that one is to give a certain appearance of oneself and one's willingness to play along. There is a dimension of submission that is hidden in that social web of relations, and the film largely takes its departure from that angle. But unlike Wharton's novel, the film never succeeds in making this tale about crushing respectability moving, nor does it capture the sense of fear I found in the book, how people fear themselves and their own reactions. It tries hard, but it is lost in its unimaginative choices (pretty landscapes, costumes, literary dialogue). I would have like a more risky approach, an approach that shows what matters in the story. As it is now, one easily reacts in this way: ok this is a society long gone: we don't live according to such social codes anymore; we are free to do whatever we want!