A screaming man (2010)

A screaming man is the only film I've seen by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. Even though the story was not always completely believable, the gist of it was deeply touching, and the same goes for Haroun's quiet and observing style. Adam is a former swimming star. Now he works as a swimming pool attendant at a luxurious hotel. His assistant is his son, Ahmed. Workers are laid off at the hotel and Adam is one of them. His son gets his job and being a man for whom the job means everything, this is a harsh blow. Adam's friend try to convince the father that the son should join the army. The son is more or less dragged away to war and the father gets his old job back. A screaming man is set within a country torn apart by war and the character of Adam, Haroun shows us how a person is entangled in the tragedy of war in a way that he has initially little grasp of. Yet, he is responsible, and this reaction is central to the emotional engagement of the film. Haroun skillfully reveals how a society is changed by war. What doesn't work as well is the plot line in which Adam sends his son off to war in order to get the job he loves back. We understand that there is a rigidness to Adam, an attachment to work that provides him with some kind of security. But this is not developed as clearly as it could be, and I was thus left a bit mystified by how the plot progressed. Stylistically, Haroun's composition of scenes and landscapes quickly establishes a cinematic universe that I as a viewer immediately start to care about. The tragedy and the familial relations Haroun describes are movingly portrayed.

Quod erat demonstrandum (2013)

Andrei Gruzsniczki is a new name for me. Quod erat demonstrandum is a restrained story about how political repression affects personal relations. It's the mid 1980's, Romania. Two academics struggle with their relation to the regime and the secret police. The film takes a deep look at the compromises and the fears elicited by a repressive police state. Shot in B&W and using a pared-down palette of settings, Quad erad demonstrandum mostly focuses on the close surroundings of the characters: dinners, job situations, blackouts. The main character, Sorin, is a mathematician who resists the normal procedures. Another colleague, Elena, is planning to join her husband abroad. She works with computers and it is clear that the secret police is poking their nose into her life. The third main character, Alecu, is an investigator from the secret police. The merit of the film is the care it takes to portray the implications of a system for personal relations. It delineates a logic of conquer and divide, a logic of paranoia and disloyalty. One could say that a major theme is how the system is held up and promoted by these emotions.

A Thousand Suns (2013)

Mati Diop's A Thousand Suns is the melancholy yet gritty story about the elderly actor, Magaye Niang, who thinks back on the girl he once fell in love with. She fled the country long ago, while Niang stayed. He is considering calling her. The actor was the star of Touki bouki. The director of A Thousand Suns is the niece of the director of Touki bouki (sadly, I haven't seen the latter film), Djibril  Diop Mambety. A Thousand Suns takes us to Dakar, where Niang herds cattle. The film opens with images of the choreography of the herding. It also takes us to a film screening, where the actor goes through the past with one of the other actors of the film. A Thousand Suns is alse set in a landscape of longings: as much as it points towards the past and Niang's decision to stay in the country, it points towards the future. The film's wistful feel is combined with rough images from Dakar. A Thousand Suns is a heartbreaking film.

Human resources (1999)

Class, work and dignity are the themes around which Laurent Cantet's Human Resources revolves. It is a brave political film and the politics are, I dare say, complex enough: Cantet's political angle crosses with existential questions about family relations, shame and resentment.

The story takes its departure from the return of a son, Frank, to his home town. He is employed in a management position in the human resources department in the factory where his father has toiled for many years. His father epitomizes the loyal worker, the worker who is proud to be reliable and efficient. He works by a machine and he is proud of his son who has "made something of himself". The father wants Frank to be integrated in the management class, to eat at the table at which the white collar workers eat. The son is an idealist who wants to make things better at the factory; he believes in his position, that he can change things in a positive way. Frank takes an initiative to make a survey about how the workers feel about a 35-hour week. For him, this is a good way to involve the workers, to make them feel committed, to create a more democratic workplace. For upper management, the questionnaire is an excuse for another drastic reform: scaling back the labor power. When Frank realizes what is going on, that his father is also one of the workers to be laid off, he joins the union and starts a strike together with them and their grizzled leader Danielle. His father is not happy about the strike. He continues to work. Frank reacts strongly to this. In a burst of anger, he announces that he is ashamed of his father.

Cantet's film looks at what one might call "the work ethic". The father is not reduced to a parody of the working class man. It is easy enough to see his position. He is afraid, he wants to be loyal, and most of all, he wants a good future for his son, for whom he has sacrificed. He takes pride in his work and the film shows the complexity and the problematic sides of this sense of pride. Cantet seems to interpret this pride as at least partly an aspect of power relations. The father sees the core of his existence in his work, but at the same time he is ashamed and when talking to his son, he acts the role of a "mere" worker. What we see is a man whose life is governed by his work, while his home life seems to be a breathing hole. Cantet puts the son's shame and the father's shame side by side and he lets both of these reactions reveal something about class society. Ambivalence is present in them both, but in different ways. The boy is positioned as the white collar worker, but from early on, he is uncomfortable with the relation he is thereby entangled with, along with the things he is thereby alienated from (like his old buddies).

Ultimately, this is also a film about corporate cruelty and the structures that tries to keep it intact. "Human resources" is a word with positive connotation; here, the word is associated with clandestine manouvres and power tactics.

Human resources is a riveting film that takes issue with deep-going conflicts and troubling emotions. It is a film that has stuck in my mind ever since I watched it many years ago. For me, this is one of the best films about work: the primary virtue of this film is perhaps that it moves on so many levels and in doing this it reveals very conflictual attitudes towards work.

What makes this film even more likeable is the brilliant performances by the mostly non-professional actors. None of the characters end up as clichés. The strength of Cantet's vision is that he lets us care about many things all at once, he lets us see the ambivalence and the tensions of the situation.

Norte, The End of History (2013)

For a long time, I've been interested in seeing some of Lav Diaz' movies. Sadly, the distribution of his films have not been wide. For this reason, I was more than happy when there was a screening of Norte, The End of History in the midnight sun film festival in Sodankylä. After having seen the film, I am even more of the opinion that the films of Lav Diaz should be more accessible.

This film is loosely based on Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. In the beginning of the film, we follow a group of law students and their "intellectual" idle chatter about postmodernism and politics. Diaz seems to make a point of their use of English. They lead a comfortable life. One of these disaffected law students fall out from the group. His financial situation is not good and he tries to scramble together the rent money. Another protagonist is the father of a family. He has plans but they are shattered as he is injured. The fates of these men are crossed when the former law student kills a heartless moneylender. The other man is arrested and put in prison, unable to prove he didn't do it. His wife tries her best to eake out a living by selling vegetables from a cart. The film takes its time to observe, survey and listen to its characters. It follows the misery of the murderer, the hostile environment of the prison and the day-to-day life in a poor neighboorhood. Dostoyevsky's story looms in the background, and as the film progresses, we are thrown into the darkness of isolation and remorse.

The cinematography of Lauro Rene Mands brilliantly creates a space for both the drudgery of everyday life and moments of despair and even moments that take us away from the basic perspectives of the film. The films thus blends the mundane with an immense sense of strangeness. The latter moments may not appear often, but they are very important for the film as a whole: moments of disorientation, perhaps.

Instead of feeling that the 4 hours spent with this film are the mark of a pretentious film maker who tries to prove his own auteur-dom, I consider the strength of the film to be that this stretch of cinematic world enables Diaz to lead the viewer deeper into his world. He has time both for the characters and their environment. This is not to say that the film contains no excesses. I found some problems towards the end where I felt that Diaz is trying to shock to viewer. These were scenes in which "darkness" turned into a technique, an attempt to elicit strong reactions.

What makes the film special is how it moves on many levels. One can read it as a story about morality and despair, but one can also see it as commentary on the history of the Philippines. This aspect is strongly present in the beginning of the film, where the group of cosmopolitan law students are given plenty of time to express their cynicism (one gets a sense for their belonging to a small group severly separated from the goings on of other people in the country).

Corpo Celeste (2011)

It's hard to believe that Alice Rohrwacher's Corpo Celeste is her debut film. The medium of film is handled with self-assurance, ease and imagination. The story and the way of telling it avoids the well-trodden path but does not indulge in self-conscious provocation either. One could say that the focus of the film is a community, a community of people in a poor neighboorhood in an Italian city. Marta, a girl who grew up in Switzerland, is about to receive her confirmation. She is bullied by her sister and she takes comfort in the relation to her mother. The church is led by a priest who most of all is eager to collect votes for a politician who favors the church. A volunteer, a middle-aged woman, administrates the catechism classes for the kids. Rohrwacher sticks to Marta's story, but this story is closely knit to the community of which she is a part. Without a trace of cynicism, the film looks at the pretense, but also the care and the fear that these people are shaped by. Marta is seen as an outsider and towards the end of the film, she embraces this role.

The spirit of the Dardenne brothers haunt Corpo celeste. The camera energetically tracks the movements of the main character and there is a subtle assemblage of an urban world with its characteristic sounds and paths. This is by no means a bad thing and I never get the feeling that Rohrwacher is emulating their style. She has her own angle. The transitory and disrupting character of adolescence is treated freshly, without few recourses to reductive images of girlhood or sexuality (but yes, the addition of a scene about Marta getting her period for the first time borders on a problematic hang-up). One could say that Rohrwacher's perceptive images present the complexity of Marta's situation. We get a glimpse of her world when we see what she sees. In a stunning scene, Marta stands on a roof, looking at a group of elderly ladies practicing a song. The rumble of the city surrounds their singing and gives it an eerie shape.

Corpo celeste's rendering of religion remains open-ended. It focuses on the corruption of the church, the frailty of some of its servants along with a surprising take on faith in an urban setting. The church tries to maximize its membership and its appeal: but rather than letting this remain a sign of institutional decline, Rohrwacher portrays very different representatives of the church: the world-weary priest, the crouching volunteer, the powerful bishop and the aging priest who has saved his own unorthodox faith.

Some of the images and ideas of Corpo celeste may be a bit heavy-handed and clunky, but this did not bother me much.  One can complain about the use of religious imagery towards the end of the film (how a person-size crucifix appears in the story as a symbol of the corruption of the church) but these more allegorical elements are integrated in a visual language full of life and ideas.

The Quispe Girls (2013)

I hope Sebastián Sepúlveda's The Quispe Girls will be widely seen as it is a stunningly beautiful, well-directed and subtly political film with an important topic. The film chronicles the daily life of the three Quispe sisters who live in the mountains, far from neighbors and villages. They toil, they rest, they talk and sometimes they tell stories. The wind howls and the dust swirls: an endless, desolate world, a color scale of grays and blacks and browns. A salesman comes by with news from the world. People are abandoning their homes, selling off their animals. We understand that this is related to Pinochet's military regime.

Daily life is the core of the film. The sisters herd goat and collect charcoal. Sometimes we just see them work. Conversations are stripped to the bare, but all lines are very expressive, but without seeming overly so. The lines exchanged bear witness of lives spent together, shared experiences only hinted at in the film (there was a fourth sister). The oldest sister takes the lead, sometimes sternly bossing the other two around. A fugitive asks the sister for advice about how to pass the country border. His character grounds the story in the historical events, but all of this is kept low-key. At some point, I was worried that the introduction of this man had the sole purpose of pointing to the sexual yearnings of one of the sister, but my worries were at least partly unfounded. Sepúlveda lets nature play a big part. The settings are majestic, but there is still a roughness to the images that prevents them from ending up as National Geographic-like eye candy. And well - there's nothing in the story that would invite an escapist fantasy about the purity of nature. This is gruff, harsh material; the sisters have always led an isolated life but their existence becomes unbearable. There are no people left to buy their cheese. The film has an almost apocalyptic feel. Indeed, it is a world that we see ending and there is no trace of sentimentality or curious sensationalism in how the harsh fate of the Quispe siblings is rendered. The Quispe Girls is, one could say, a film both passionate and restrained.

The Outlaw and his Wife (1918)

At the Sodankylä Midnight sun film festival Victor Sjöström's The Outlaw and his Wife (Berg-Eyvind och hans hustru) was screened with a live performance by Matti Bye's ensemble. I must say that the music really enhanced the experience and Matti Bye's melancholy score was on the spot. Some chose to see Sjöström's film as an early forerunner of what later grows into a formidable tradition of outlaw movies. And sure, outlaws abound; the tale is drawn from Iceland and the big, revolutionary message is that love is greater than society and societal bonds. Eyvind is the guy who stole from others to survive and who runs away from the people who want to punish him; he takes on a new identity and hides in the ranch of a widow, Hella. The two fall in love but soon enough, Eyvind's identity is disclosed. They run away to the mountains where they are joined by another outlaw. The scenery is brilliant and majestic (it's pretty funny to think about the process of dragging very heavy camera equipment up those hills...). The moemtns of suspense root in your gut and it's hard to know one which level these moments feel so riveting: the good thing is perhaps that there are a multitude of levels but the landscape is never reduced to a mere psychological metaphor or a romantic-sublime backdrop for the romance. Berg-Eyvind is a heart-wrenching film about love in a harsh world. During the screening, I was mystified (and a bit annoyed) by many people's inclination to laugh at the hardships shown in the film. To me, there was very little overwrought melodrama or camp in the film and I wonder what it was the people reacted to (did they come there with a steadfast conviction that all silent movies contain funny gags?). So is calling this film an outlaw movie correct? Yes, maybe, but one needs to acknowledge that Sjöström does not romanticize the world of the outlaw; he shows how the vastness of the mountains  for these two people is at the same time synonymous with a shrinking of world, as they are expelled from communities.

Suddenly (1954)

The President of the United States passes through a small town and a band of gangsters, covering as FBI agents, plots to murder him, using a local home as a hiding place and set-up for the assassination. The local family consists of a mother and her son and grandpa who served in the war. The mother is courted by a police officer but his advances have not been welcomed. Frank Sinatra plays the leading gangster, a psychopath with no particular aims in mind, and I guess his part saves this film, which otherwise does not have much speaking for it. It tries to build up tension as the story is mostly limited to the four walls of the family home under siege by the gangsters but neither the plot nor the acting pulls it off. One theme in the film developed early on is the mother's reluctance to let her small kid handle a gun. In the last scene, we see the mother herself firing a rifle and killing a man. I'm not sure what the intended message is supposed to be: guns are good when used as self-protection, and self-protection is sometimes unavoidable?

Home (2008)

Even though there are points of reference to other movies (some of Michael Haneke's early work, for example) in Ursula Meier's Home, it stands its own ground, it establishes a world of its own: a world which at the same time feels completely familiar and like it could have taken place on a distant galaxy. This is, I think, one reason why you should watch this movie. There are others as well.

A family lives next to a multi-lane freeway which is about to be opened. There are vast fields and throughout the film, the camera never strays from the close environment of the family (with one crucial exception). This makes for a very tight film about some very tightly knit people. They play together, dad goes to work, the teenager sunbathes under a gray sky and the two younger kids go to school. Their yard extends to the freeway and all kinds of belongings are scattered there. But the threat of the freeway looms over them. It begins with the asphalt, the workers. And then one day, cars speeds past their house (as the local radio celebrates the opening of the freeway) and the noise starts to get exceedingly intolerable. Home is one part sociological drama and one part horror movie. Like Todd Haynes' Safe, it places its complex of ideas within how people experience their surrounding world; the malaise they feel is placed within that experience. It may seem like a silly statement, but I think movies very rarely pay this close attention to experience (even though this is by no means a "realistic" movie) in the way Meier does. I mean, the entire subject of the movie is the main characters' relation to their lived environment (and that relation is intertwined with their relation to each other). This relation is captured in seemingly ordinary scenes (two kids running across a heavy trafficked freeway) and scenes that leave the ordinary, but still holds on to the level of experienced (it never transcends the family members' own perspective). The result is claustrophobic in an almost tactile sense; you can almost smell the asphalt and the traffic and your ears react to the noise. The basic question dealt with here is, of course: what is a home? Even though I have probably seen a hundred movies about people alienated from their home, people returning home, or people struggling for their homes, Meier approaches the theme from a rather unfamiliar angle, and her attempt is, I think, successful: she has made a movie about society, but also about where society comes to an end - in some ways, Home has the feel of a movie about the apocalypse.

The strength of the film is that Meier is not interested in explaining. Lots of things remain unclear. The focus is the tension within the family and how that tension is intertwined with the opening of the freeway. This tension is rendered in a geographical rather than psychological way. The film takes a look at places of solace, non-places, places that provide a sense of escape. All the time, the concept of place remains open-ended and fluid. This also ultimately means that the concept of 'home' takes on new meanings as the film progresses (and as the nightmare deepens).

To me, this film is an important reminder of what cinema can be, and how it can work with ordinary experiences through emotions that are elusive yet completely intelligible.

Agnès Godard, perhaps the best cinematographer working today, shot the movie and the images perfectly reflect the strange in-between land that we are invited into: a place where the fields stretch on forever and the landscapes are dressed in drab grays only to break into glimmering sunshine. The sparse choice of music is also excellent.