London River (2009)

I sat down on my sofa and grumpily expected to sit through a tedious and sentimental TV-drama about terrorism.
I was wrong!
London River, directed by Rachid Bouchareb, is a moving chronicle of a friendship between two people united by grief and worry. The storytelling is low-key, almost without melodrama, and plenty of space is given to exploring different parts of London. The film really excels in presenting a wobbly and extremely precarious relationship between two people.
The film follows the aftermath of the London suicide bombings. A man and a woman are worried about their children with whom they try to reach contact to check whether everything is OK. A widow from Guernsey comes to London to search for her daughter. She meets a man from Mali who is looking for his son and they end up investigating what has happened as a joint quest.
This film could have become a really schmaltzy affair about an encounter between 'cultures'.
But I am a bit ashamed for worrying so much about that. The film explores conceptions about cultures, it explores racism and stereotypes - in a subtle, humane and critical way. There is no preachy Message. London River examines how a tragic event disrupts people's life. That a tragedy may bring people together is here not a cliche, but rather a difficult realization that matures during the film as an insight for the characters.
The suicide bombings is treated as a human catastrophe with consequences for an entire city. But the tone of the film is not political - Bouchared sticks to the inter-personal. I find this less to be some sort of statement than a very fruitful dramatic point of view for exploring not only the evolving relationship between strangers from different backgrounds but also the relationship between parents and children. London River is a sad, but not gloomy, film that puts its hopes on the changes that new encounters present us with.
Superb acting from Brenda Blethyn (famous for her role in several Mike Leigh films) and Sotiguy Kouyaté.

Working girl (1988)

Working girl is, in some ways, Liberal feminism 101. Women should have the same right as men. They should have the same right to climb the career ladder. This means that the state of working life is pretty much taken for granted: if the presupposition is that women should obtain the same rights as men, the idea is still that competition is a natural environment; justice means that women should somehow get 'a fair chance' to survive in the rat race.
However, Working girl take an ambiguous position. It seems to advocate a blandly American version of feminism, basically glorifying business and corporations. But one can also read it as criticizing a world in which women are to compete with each other. From this point of view, Working girl may be said to tell a story about a girl from the working class whose problem is not only gender, but also class. Rule number one: in business, you have to un-learn everything about solidarity and friendship among women.
The point, in this movie, is that a woman in business must be respectable and that this creates a particular connection between gender and class, united in a sexist world.
The heroine is called Tess (Melanie Griffith) and she's the lowest of the low. She is a secretary at a fancy corporation on Wall street and her boss is a steely woman (played by Sigourney Weaver, hooray). Tess has ideas, she is good at selling stuff to customers. She knows the game and how to rule it. She is clever and brave, but her street-smart edge is not enough. Her boss is an asshole who likes to humiliate her female subordinate. The boss goes on holiday and Tess sees that she has stolen her secretary's idea. Tess response: she sneaks into the boardrooms by presenting herself as an exec.
Sadly, the film reels off into a stupid romantic side-plot that involves Tess and her boss' lover. This makes the film much more boring than it has to be. And much more predictable. It's more fun to watch Tess in her working-class hoods, talking to her friends and visiting tacky bars.
Mike Nichols makes the film engaging because it presents Tess as somebody who has a life and a background (Staten island!) - and Wall street is presented as a full-fleshed vampiristic environment where new money learns to talk to old money. Mergers & acquisitions.
But, as I said, the very core of Working girl remains unclear to me. Are we to think that Tess will, end the end, become just like her boss? Or are we rather lead to think that there are more ethical and fair people who will change the game?
 My fear is that the film remains very shallow, both in its critique of sexism and in its critique of class structures. Perhaps the film is just conjuring up the capitalist fairy-tale of romance and business as a harmony of passion and ambition.

River of no return (1954)

Cheesy but entertaining - River of no return offers some stunning locations, a mediocre story and some quite clunky acting. The reason why Otto Preminger's film is shown on Finnish television 50 years later is, no doubt, Marilyn Monroe. Marketed as an 'outdoor drama', this film seems more about showing of Monroe on a log raft or playing guitar in a saloon than the mountainous scenery and the glossy CinemaScope. Robert Mitchum is almost always clunky but charming and this is true also about this movie, in which he plays good-hearted loner. This is a movie in which Indians are portrayed as unnamed bad-ass people who pose a threat to decent Whites. Hm.

The Fall (2006)

Tarsem Singh made the colorful and imaginative but rather hollow The Cell. The style is instantaneously recognizable in The Fall. If you like films by Terry Gillian or perhaps Tim Burton, or films like Pan's Labyrinth, this is for you. If not - well.
Speaking for myself, I was strangely entertained by this film - I found myself sucked into its nonsensical world. The story is, on the face of it, very simple, like a fairy tale. A girl is hospitalized after having broken her arm. The setting: Los Angeles in the 1920's. She starts to talk to a stunt man. He tells her a story. The film shifts between the gritty reality of the hospital and the lush images of the stuntman's story.
It must be said that the audacious aesthetic of The Fall is rooted in music videos and commercials. It is a film of wild imagination of the sort that does not touch you deeply. Pan's labyrinth, with its story about children and war, is on another level in this sense, I think. However, I don't think The Fall is cheaply calculated - it is far too wild and crazy for that, its exercises in shared imagination (the girl and the stuntman's) too bold and winding.
So perhaps: the romantic, sweeping panoramas that Tarsem Sing conjures up don't really, for all their stunning effects and visual play, speak to me.
The Fall is also a very romantic elevation of the force of cinema. Not only does the silent movie stunt man become a romantic hero - the visual fantasy testaments to the limitlessness of movie-making (or at least I think that is Tarsem's own idea).

Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015)

Peter Greenaway is famous for his professed belief in an image-based cinematic language.
I am very sympathetic with this irritation with a devastatingly dominating mainstream of movie-making in which images are mere companions to words, words, words.
Sadly, Greenaway's latest film doesn't really live up to the promise of strong, overwhelming images, even though he tries hard - I mean HARD - much too hard, it seems. He tries hard to chock, to provoke, to shake us. Treating us with split screens, color changes and archive material does not make this movie come alive.
Not only is Eisenstein in Guanajuato overwrought (which could be ok) - Greenaway appears to be stuck in his ideas, re-using stuff, treating his own aesthetic palette as LEGO-blocks to play idly with.
The problem is not (not at all) that 'we don't get to know Eisenstein as he really was'. Films about existing people can be far-out and brilliant - think about Jarman's Wittgenstein. Historical accuracy - screw that, if you like.
The film simply fails to engage me as a viewer. My eyes follow the glossy tricks on display, but none of them move me.
The worst thing: Greenaway is severely stuck in his 'life consists in sex & death'-mantra. This film: sex and death - but in a detached way, as if both shrink to mere cinematic tricks.
As you might guess, this is a testament to Greenaway's adoration for Eisenstein's films. But this testament fails to do what it so passionately wants to: show the viewer a love for film, film as its own language. There are movies which have shaken my conceptions of what film is, what film can do, what film can do to you. Eisenstein in Guanjuato cannot be counted among these eye-opening films.

Half Nelson (2006)

The relation between teacher & student has been the subject of far, far, far too many moralistic Hollywood movies. Is Half Nelson (directed by Ryan Fleck) one of them? Yeah, at least partly, even though the film deviates from the formula in some ways - most importantly, here it is the teacher, not the student, who is to be 'saved'. But still, the sentimentality of the teacher-student-genre is all-present, despite or perhaps because of Half Nelson's indie 'ruggedness'. The film's teacher is a troubled addict (a scruffy-looking Ryan Gosling) who tries to survive at work, where he teaches his kids in a self-styled free-wheeling way, ignoring the instructions in the ring-binder. Of course, he's a history teacher. This kind of teacher-student film won't work, I guess, if the teacher teaches geography or biology (my hunch). The study of a fucked-up teacher builds upon his relation to one of the student, a girl whose father is worthless, whose mother works all the time and whose brother is in jail - a self-reliant, tough girl. Their dynamic: she tries to save him from drugs and he tries to save her from the world of drug dealing. This is what the director preserves from the inspirational school genre: the saving project. This is admittedly a bumpy project. The people in the film are lonely, self-conscious people who don't want to be saved. Half Nelson approaches its subject with some grimy cinematography and slow pace - still, I cannot resist feeling that it is a sentimental film that thinks of itself as a bold rule-breaker. It gestures towards questions about class and race, but all this remains gestures, self-conscious gestures.

Döden er et kjaertegn (1949)

Erik is a mechanic. His colleagues are constantly bullying him about girls. One day, a rich dame arrives at the gas station and flirts with him. She knows what she wants. And, after a bit of hesitation on the guy's side, she gets what she wants. Erik breaks up with his kind-hearted girlfriend and moves in with the dame. The film shows how their lives are torn apart: love transforms into misery and violence. An over the top melodrama, Döden er et kjaertegn is as infatuated and as crazy as its character. In other words: don't expect sober lessons on attraction and lust - expect a brutal, woozy story with a sordid end. Obsession all the way.

Edith Carlmar directed the film. She is rumored to be Norway's first female film director. Can this really be true? Anyway, Döden er et kjaertegn belongs to a sleazy noir tradition I cannot help but adore.

Lorna's Silence (2009)

I regard Luc and Jean-Pierre as two of the best directors of our times. Their films strike an ethical and social chord that never fail to engage me. This is the reason why my verdict of Lorna's Silence may be too harsh. I was disappointed, even though I was also aware of the many strengths of this film.

Lorna lives in an apartment with a heroin addict. She comes from Albania and now lives in Belgium on some sort of marriage-for-sale deal. She is dependent on gangsters. The transaction and the network of sinister-looking gangsters are only hinted at. We suspect there are shady things going on and that this is making the protagonist very scared. Soon, it gets clear that the drug addict is to be killed. Lorna knows about it, and she seems to think that she will marry another man, a Russian gangster get a passport and then get the possibility to be with her lover. She dreams of opening a café with her lover, leading a normal life. But soon enough she realizes what is about to happen - and the film follows her ethical response.

Like all of the Dardenne-movies, Lorna's silence introduces heavy and serious ethical questions, crystallized into hectic situations in which a person must act, must choose, must respond. The problem I had with this film is that the direction did not appear to be as tight as what I have experienced it to be in other movies of theirs. The world of the character is established meticulously, yes. But the focus of the film is sometimes a bit erratic, which makes my attention stray from the central existential concern: what does it mean to try not to care about another human being, to treat this person as just a means?

Lorna's silence is a claustrophobic movie. Many of the most important scenes take place in Lorna's small and shabby apartment - here, her relation with Claudy plays out. We see them, both trapped in their own lives. But there is also an external world which the film introduces: a seedy bar, the houses Lorna and her lover visit to scout for the perfect location for their café. These scenes come as a relief. This sense of relief is strengthened also in the very last couple of scenes, and here I think the Dardenne brothers really lose track of what they want to do. Without spoiling this ending, I found it ambiguous in a problematic way. The Dardennes, to me, are making movies that are clear, yet complicated. Lorna's silence, or at least its ending scene, is compromised by giving in to what to me appears as a rather desperate attempt to present something 'interesting' and 'mysterious'.

Dodsworth (1936)

William Wyler's Dodsworth works up an almost Henry Jamesian fascination with the difference between the 'continental' (European) and the 'American'. Or maybe we should blame Sinclair Lewis, who wrote the novel on which this film is based. Anyway: great film, great direction - great characters. We are introduced to Ruth Chatterton's Fran, a dame who speaks so quickly that we can hardly follow what she says. She dreams about Europe, good old Europe! Adventures! Her husband (Walter Huston!) is a wealthy businessman. He is uncomfortable with the idea, but tags along. He says he needs a break now that he's retired. The old chap reluctantly follows her every whim, just trying to make her happy. Early on, we gather there's something wrong with the way they interact. Their 'relaxing' little holiday in Europe turns into a clash between the spouses. The wife accuses the husband of lacking a sense of culture. But when we see them, it is sometimes he who is enjoying himself with simple tourist attractions, while his wife seem agonized, even agonized when flirting with other men (well, she is almost about to marry a baron!). The husband even finds a flirt of his own, a European beauty.

The film takes us to the American tour of Europe. We can see William Wyler's wry smile when he introduces us to the increasingly americanized places the tourists are herded to and find some comfort in. The idea of Europe mirrors ideas about the US. Europe is here represented through the bitchy wife: she is 35, but thinks she is still young (...). In other words: Europe is the past. Simultaneously, we see the husband's development as he starts to flirt: he is shown as youthful, practical, vigorous.

Dodsworth makes us care about its characters - even the nasty ones. It shows us self-deception without despising the ones who deceive themselves. The husband's and the wife's self-deception are seen in relation to each other. He is naive, afraid perhaps, and she uses his naivety for her self-centered purposes. This way of conveying the disintegration of a marriage is artful - instead of contempt, the perspective of the film is that of gentle humor and a quiet sense of devastation.

The Blue Gardenia (1953)

Fritz Lang made better movies than The Blue Gardenia, a stylish thrillers that has plenty of captivating moments. The leading lady of the film ends up in trouble after spending a drunk night out with a guy. The guy, an über-slimy douche, tries to rape her when she has got intoxicated in a fancy restaurant. The next day she is accused of having killed him. She leaves with two girlfriends and the film strays from the male-dominated thriller genre by focusing on these women's everyday lives and troubles with lousy jobs and lousy boyfriends. Throughout the film, we get to know the routines and bantering of these friends. This framework of everyday life makes the weaker part of the film, the murder, much more interesting. Because the focus is never on guessing who the killer really is. When the film is busy with a tale about a journalist (just as slimy as the guy who has just been killed) trying to catch the killer, only to be bombarded with false leads, the film, to me, loses its appeal. But throughout, the film preserves some tension by means of odd small choices the director makes. And Los Angeles looks drearier than in most other cities - a city of dull busyness. The theme of the film - false leads and doublings - conjure up a world in which it does not matter the least, from a particular point of view, if one human being is mixed up with another. They're all the same, anyway. What Lang sometimes makes us see is, however, the existential dreadfulness of this exchangeability.

Afsporet (1942)

Bodil Ipsen and Lau Laurizen directed Afsporet, a Danish thriller from the early forties. A woman from the middle class lead an unhappy life. She suffers from amnesia and the film starts when she has somehow derailed into the seedy criminal underworld of Copenhagen. Her daddy, a wealthy doctor, is worried and engages the whole town to find her. The film takes a woozy look at the characters of the crowd: drunks, pimps, artists. The nice girl falls in love with a thief and they move in together - but can they stay happy? Not much happens, but the drama remains tight. The dialogue is almost as snappy as in noir films made in Hollywood during the same years. I am not that impressed by what is called 'Nordic noir' - contemporary films about grumpy police officers with ulcers who drink coffee and think about murdered girls. Here you find the real deal.

My darling clementine (1946)

It starts with a shave & a beer.
Wyatt Earp (played not only coolly but also emotionally strikingly by Henry Fonda) goes into town with his brothers. The town: hoodlums and brawls, beer-drinkin' folks and music.
Earp becomes the new marshal. He's to take care of law&order. Plus: he has some revenge business. His kid brother was killed, and he thinks he knows by whom.
There will be a gunfight - there is a gunfight.
My darling clementine is classical western in the sense that it is about societal change. The old west is juxtaposed with the new west, the community, "society" - cultivation and even Enlightenment.
Doc Holliday, the troubled and tuberculosis-stricken doc-turned-gambler, is a figure of in-between here, who has a very interesting part in the film. There is a tension between him and Earp that builds tremendously and also has a surprising form of sad aspect to it. That has to do with a girl, also. Clementine comes to Tombstone to look for one Doctor Holliday. He has found himself a new woman, and wants to send this tidy girl home. She meets Earp, and some kind of relation strikes up quickly.
John Ford chooses to focus on the quieter material rather than the shootouts.
As a tale about change & civilization this film draws on many shady images. One of them: women civilize violent men. Clementine, in this film, is a figure of purity and decency (she becomes the village's next school teacher), and as Earp falls in love with her, his sense for justice seems to be enhanced. Well, basically Ford chronicles a heroic story in which white men and women come to the west with their own personal business in mind, but end up making the place a decent community.

Mr Nobody (2009)

You may or may not remember Jaco van Dormael for the irresistible Toto, Le Heros. I remember that film as hiding its dark secrets in lots of inventiveness and imaginative twists. Mr. Nobody offers more of the same in that sense. Sadly, this movie is eaten up by its own imagination: it ends up being a loony thought experiment. The basic concept is that of multiple worlds. The film throws us from one world to the next, from one possibility to the next. More concretely: we see this guy, Nemo, living his life in several parallell worlds, one in which he spent his youth with his mother, one in which he spent these years with his father - and has a cutesy on-off thing with a girl called Anna, who is something his step-sister, or falls in love with Elise.  I am not sure whether the film should be interpret as some sort of cosmic joke, a light-hearted exercise in metaphysics or as a simple yet very complex story about a boy and his mother. The problem with the film is that I never care enough to pose this as a serious question. For all its fascinating and head-spinning turns, Mr Nobody never succeeds in enchanting me and hardly even in entertaining me.

Rust and Bone (2012)

Rust and Bone is a rugged romance. The story could have been ridiculously cheesy. A man falls in love with a woman and when she goes through a serious accident and loses her legs, he loves her even more. Jacques Audiard made the no-nonsense Prophet and Rust and Bone follows suit in this respect. Both: brutal descriptions of life as its harshest. What makes a difference here is the way the two major roles are played. Both are played without big gestures. Ali, ex-bouncer, is living with his sister's family, re-connecting with his son. He's passionate about boxing. Tough fights. He meets Stephanie, an equally tough person, who works with marine shows. When she has her accident, he sticks to her, first, for sex. It turns out he is the one to support her when she feels alone and isolated. What's so strange about Rust and bone is how its brutal tone accommodates the idea of love as a miracle without any fuss at all. The brutality is never left behind so that the film would switch tone into some kind of sugary romanticism. Love itself is described with the same brutal, visceral approach. - - - By no means a perfect film, but interesting because of its unusual tone. One reason I liked it may be that there are no grandiose gestures here, despite the theme: love as miracle. Audiard does something right here, for sure.

Take this waltz (2011)

Can you bear with a hipster-leaning indie movie about a middle-class couple in some nice Toronto neighborhood? Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz surely has more than a few annoying sides : it's easy to be infuriated about respectable indie movies about respectable, rich white people who have respectable problems.

I guess this story could have been made anytime between 1850 and the present. It inhabits a particular modern problem, a problem of sticking to the safe haven of a nice and cozy wedding or trying out (or giving in to) one's spontaneous, unruly desires. Margot is married to Lou who has, to quote one reviewer, 'a shaggy likeability' . Lou is a cookbook writer, she is a writer. They share a beautiful home on a quiet street. One day she meets a guy she is instantaneously attracted to. The guy: the romantic, pensive kind - you guessed it: an artist. Turns out they are neighbors.

All of this seems predictable enough. What sets the film apart is perhaps its strangely old-fashioned tone. It is a tale of mores, really, in the sense that perhaps Henry James or Jane Austen would have had it. One can also say that Take this waltz plays out like a prolonged fantasy that nudges against reality. It's an elegant film: the depiction of Margot's rumination is sometimes cinematic in an interesting way, that plays with the ideas about 'respectability' and 'unruly desire'. But that is perhaps also the film's biggest problem: in playing with a classical scenario of adultery and choices, it is never quite resolved in what it wants to do. An example: it presents the new guy as a sensitive artist, the Erotic Female Dream but it also hints at him being a fucking unreliable asshole.

Take this waltz could be seen as a symptom of a cultural pattern - then its aesthetic choices would be in a way more bearable. That would be my good reading. The other one, towards which I am equally disposed, is that this film merely wants to present 'the eternal problem of married life'. Many reviewers praise it for being both 'true and honest' - so.

Sarah Silverman as an alcoholic is great, though.

Junebug (2005)

Junebug captures the traumas of returning to one's home town. It also studies family life in a mature, reflective way. The pressure felt by the characters is rendered in a quietly suffocating way: Phil Morrison who directed the film is a perceptive interpreter of what really hurts us in our everyday lives. Because that's what the film is about - everyday life. There is no big-big drama here, just the situations that turn life upside down. The film starts with a newly-wed couple arriving in the small town where the husband's family lives. The wife, Madeline,  is an art dealer, and they're there because she wants to check out a local eccentric. She hasn't met the husband's, George's, family before, and the awkwardness that arises between them is enormous. They are afraid of this big-city creature. Madeline is afraid of making the wrong impression on George's family: she is afraid of being seen as aloof.

It is this awkwardness that occupies the center of the movie. Madeline is trying to be friendly, to be accommodating, while George is initially embarrassed, only to grow into his old habits later on. The patriarch is a withdrawn loner and his wife is hostile towards the new family member. Their son Johnny also lives in the house with his ebullient high school sweetheart, now pregnant. She is the one who takes the edge of the tension in the family with her sweet laugh. She treats Madeline as a new sister. Or does she - would it be more correct to say that her innocent ways heightens the tension?

Morrison approaches this tricky family situation with an almost Leigh-ian inclination to see hope even in a constellation that appears locked or hostile. If this was set in Britain, Junebug could most definitively be taken for one of Mike Leighs class-sensitive films about the tensions of everyday life.

Junebug works with unspoken emotions. Madeline puts on a smiley face - and the question remains: is that a fair description of her? Is she really putting on a face, acting a brave, mature part? George is equally hard to read. We see his silent disappointments, and at least I am all the time waiting for some major eruption of emotion. Then there's his brother, Johnny, who seems to spend all of his time buried in angry silence - he seems to grow into the type of person his father already is. The film delves into all of these people's feelings so that we gradually learn more about their relationships and their attitudes. This is a film in which almost everyone look at themselves as outsiders, as misfits. We get a strange perspective on these familial tensions as the artist whom Madeline comes to check out is also presented as a full-blown character. He is a lonely man, and the well-behaved art dealer tries to make up her mind whether he is a lunatic or whether he an outsider that can be understood by commercial art circles. In this way, the topic is embellished with yet another take on the feeling of not fitting in.

One of the things Junebug has in common with the films of Mike Leigh is that we are constantly encouraged to re-evaluate our understanding of the characters. What is the matter with George's dad? Is Johnny's girlfriend a dumb bimbo? Does Madeline think she is better than everybody else?

In other words: the focus lies not just on the drama that evolves between these people, but also how you as a viewer respond to the changes that the film deals with. Why do I see this person as so repulsive? What would be a fair description of her? Junebug is a quiet and also - I rather hesitate to say it because it sounds so boring - sober film. Sober in the best sense: it calls us to look at ourselves.

Midnight Run (1988)

On paper, Midnight Run is a film I should stay away from. Comic thriller? DeNiro playing an ex-cop, bounty hunter chased by the mafia and chasing some accountant blamed of having stolen 15 million dollars? Sounds very, VERY terrible. But somehow, I just let go and let myself be entertained by this trashy tale about ... well, forget about it. The film is driven by a sort of energetic madness that just won't stop. Basically, what we have here is an endless row of scenes of two guys being chased or chasing each other (if they are chased by mobsters of the CIA makes very little difference in this universe). At heart, this is a good-natured - even cute - film film about the relationship between two renegade guys who love each other even though they don't know it most of the time. (And yeah, I am deeply embarrassed that I like a movie by the same guy, Martin Brest, who made Beverly Hills Cops.)

The World (2004)

A theme park in Beijing is the central location of The World, Jia Zhangke's playful and sad story about - well, let's see - loneliness and a sense of placelessness. The theme park contains miniatures of famous symbols for different parts of the world. There's a big ben, an eifel tower, a taj mahal, a st. peter's cathedral. The location is at once cheesy and mesmerizing. The film seems to track relations situated in a globalized world where people long to be somewhere else, with somebody else. Globalization, and the dream of endless possibilities, is contrasted with a feeling of being trapped. The theme park may be too obvious a symbol for dislocalized or disoriented desires, but the film makes all of this work because it induces the place itself, the shabby theme park, with an eerie shabbiness. The theme park represents dreams (dreams about going to France, for example) but is also a very concrete place immersed in gritty working conditions and seedy human drama.

The leading characters are a couple who both work in the theme park. He is a security guard. She is a performer in a voluptuous musical group. The performer's ex comes to visit and the relationship grows increasingly hollow. The security guard tries to help migrants from his home province. The two drift apart from each other, get involved with new people, start to lead new kinds of lives - and start to nurse new dreams and new hopes. We are introduced to the dress-maker whose husband migrate to Europe and a Russian woman who seems to have been forced into prostitution. All this lends the theme park - THE WORLD - where they work with a claustrophobic atmosphere. There they are, surrounded by the world, desiring to be some place else. The world: a surrogate, a cruel joke, a miserable job. A depressing, yet still yearning, simulation.

Jia Zhangke made the very fine and dynamic Still life. He is a bold director who does not seem to fear cinematic leaps: he can go from lush romantic scenes to brutal documentary-style images in a minutes. And these leaps do not feel like cheap effect. He succeeds in telling us multi-layered stories about where we are, about our disconcerting and beautiful world. Zhangke's films - the two that I've seen - are here & now in a way that I find impressing: they are not seeking to hunt for emblematic images for our times as much as they are trying to excavate several ways of interpreting the present. The World is a slow and elusive film - I recommend it!

Platoon (1986)

I re-watched Oliver Stone's Platoon an was not overwhelmingly impressed with it - I have a vague memory of having thought it to be a rather good movie (I saw it as a teenager. Of course, the merit of Platoon is its anti-war point of view. This anti-war perspective is introduced via a young volunteer, played by Charlie Sheen. He's in a platoon close to the Cambodian border. The war is seen through his eyes - they are outsider eyes, we learn rather quickly. He is treated as somebody who shouldn't be in the war, a college kid who drops out of college to volunteer - how crazy isn't that? Later he comes to have regrets. The war is all (viscerally conveyed) dirt, exhaustion, bugs and injuries. The volunteer is hospitalized, but is soon released again. Many of the characters feel like the standard gallery of Vientam war film types: there is the grizzled sergeant and the guy who does lots of drugs to numb the pain. The most successful role is perhaps that of Bunny, a kid who is very, very scared. He is not reduced to a coward. Instead, the senselessness of war comes across through his vulnerability and fear. Platoon is a tactile movie: the combats are chaotic, dirty and the film does not seduce us into a neat, disengaged eagle-eye perspective. The film has been praised - partly, rightly so - for sticking to the gritty level of the infantrymen. And yes: fear and fatigue are treated as primary emotional responses. Amid this fear and fatigue, the enemy is enemy, gunfire from the depth of woods. One weakness - or is it a weakness? - is that this "enemy" is very rarely seen, and when they are, the film does not stray from film formulae about how to present "elusive" Vietnamese people. Who is the enemy? When I watch Platoon there is something about Stone's kill/get killed-point of view that strikes me as somehow, for all the anti-war attitude, disconcerting in its US-centric presentation of the war. That it becomes so, so self-evident who are subjects with existentially resonating emotions in the war. As I said, Platoon is in many ways not a typical war movie. But, still, it chooses the most literary, contemplative guy - the guy who takes the role of observer - as its main character. His voice is used as a voice-over that describes the horror of war in letters to his grandma.

Some moments stand out. In one scene, we see the platoon entering a village. There is confrontation, and murders. The soldiers do as they are told, out of loyalty, even though they act in shock, and are horrified at what they are about to do. A women is raped. The atrocity of this is evident. What bothers me (I'm trying to articulate it): this kind of immense horror is put into a general framework whose main emphasis lies on "the outsider", the innocent guy who knows nothing about war, but who then comes to learn about killed/being killed. Is there a risk that films like Platoon end up  embracing a tragic view according to which we as human being are thrown into a nihilistic world in which there may be kind people, and where the only task left is to fight for a small patch of decent values? The central conflict of the film is that between two sergeants. One is good-willed, humane. The other one represents brutality and "sheer survival". What kind of moral conflict is this really, and is it really as anti-war as it mostly appears? The humane is placed against the brutal - the leading character survives as the mature man who has reached some kind of adulthood without being brutalized by war. The good point is that war changes people in very different ways, and that it is impossible to know about this change beforehand. Stone's film certainly evokes a very strong sense of moral ambiguity. My hunch is, however, that there is something strange going on in how he evokes the central moral conflict and how he choses to present the main character's transformation.

Love Crime (2010)

Business is business. There are some very good films about the cruelty of competition, the monsters people can become when they turn themselves (or are turned into) competitors. Sadly, Love crime is not one of these, even though it offers a few moments of sleazy entertainment. Alain Corneu goes for the excessive, the violent and the ... well, sleazy. The acting is not exactly top-notch and many of the twists and turns are overwrought. The story examines the relation between a senior exec and a junior exec. Manipulation turns into revenge. Skullduggery at the office, competition between women. Schemes: everywhere. There are erotic bonds, some of which are quite obvious, while some are harder to get one's head around (the relation between the two women). One of the trite plot solutions is to introduce a man to whom both are attracted. And then there's the murder, executed together with a score of schmaltzy dinner jazz.

All that glitters (2010)

If you want, you can say that All that glitters is a film about the conquer&divide-mentality of patriarchy. Patriarchy as male and class-based. The two main characters, Lila & Ely, live in the suburbs. They are bored. They want to try something new. One of them comes from a working-class district, while the other is a little bit more well off. The nightlife of Paris introduces them to a few upper-class types. Their friendship is under threat. What matters: to blend in, to act the part of saucy, attractive female. Lila hooks up with a rich boy, while Ely starts babysitting for an equally wealthy lesbian couple. All that glitters (directed by Geraldine Makache & Herve Mimram) is not an earth-shaking film, but its portrayal of deceit and friendship is energetic and evocative. Daniel Cohen is good as the cab-driving, kind-hearted father.

Insomnia (1997)

I have no clue what the point of the American version of Insomnia was. The Norwegian original is far superior in every sense. The starkly penetrating, white light of the far north makes the film truly memorable. Stellan Skarsgård acts the part of the sleepless cop who is placed in a small town up north where the sun never sets. He's there to solve a murder case: a 17-year old girl has been killed. The suspect is a shy author. The sleepless cop tries to hook up with the concierge at the hotel. Erik Skjoldbjaerg directs with a steady hand. Even though the film takes us to the familiar territory of grizzled cop who is haunted by inner demons the result still manages to add a new touch to the genre that explore the darkness of men who are bogged down in trouble. The location plays a conclusive role. This version of Northern Norways is far from cute postcards. This is dirty backstreets and dangerous-looking nature.

Paisan (1946)

I have mixed feelings about Roberto Rossellini. He has produced some of the most shattering images of post-war trauma in the history of film (Germany Year Zero), but he can also be a sentimental director enamored with convetional storytelling and film archetypes. Paisan is also a movie about war. The film has a rushed style and I get the sense that the material is assembled in a sort of panic. This might seem a clear weakness, but there is also the historical aspect of this. The film was made in 1946, one year after the war. The events of the war were still part of the present in many ways. Paisan comes out as a restless, frenzied document, a form of testimony. Instead of a neat narrative with a start and a resolution, this film delves into six different incidents. They are connected by one theme: people's lives are torn apart during the events of WWII. All incidents are set in Italy, but some of the characters are soldiers from the US. Many of the stories chronicle cruel and incomprehensible encounters between soldiers and civilians. In one of these, an American black soldier meets a small boy. The boy steals the soldier's shoes, and later on, the meet again. The tragedies on display are not heroic; the many killings we see in the film are rendered with a sense of hopelessness and even absurdity. The last segment of the film is bloody and merciless. The pictures are raw and no diversions are offered: we are forced to watch. Even though this film can seem cluttered and disorganized, its chaos can be said to have a purpose: it teaches us something about different aspects of war without taking a recourse to familiar plots about heroes or villains. The effect of these incidents: war is portrayed without a hint of glorification or romanticism.

Still life (2013)

John is a civial servants whose job it is to track down the relatives of recently deceased people. In his job, he learns about loneliness. People who have been so lonely that there are nobody who attend their funerals. John - played gracefully by Eddie Marsan - is a lonely guy himself. He has no family, no friends. His bosses thinks that he is doing an unnecessary job, but he is engaged in what he does, in finding family members of the dead. His way of going about his often rather dreary and sad business exudes a sense of vocation. John is made redundant, and is allowed to solve one last case. He goes on a journey which is dangerously close to drowning the film in sugarcoated resolutions. But these clichés are warded off. Uberto Pasolini's Still life may not be a masterpiece, but is is a haunting portrait of loneliness and unexpected encounters between people. The pure, unhurried style of the film serves the material well. It turns out that Pasolini also directed The Full Monty. Rugged realism may connect the two films, but in every other way, they are miles apart.

Metropolitan (1990)

It would make very little difference if the story of Metropolitan would take place in 1880, rather than 1980. This is Edith Wharton territory: the life of the 'aristocrats', their boredom and their social, claustrophobic circles in which slander and back-stabbing abound. And - debutante balls! Whit Stillman's film is wittily engrossing. Rather than being driven by plot, the film ambles through a specific social milieu. The central characters are all membors of a New York clique. They are young, terribly rich and well, quite repulsive types. Then there's one guy from a not-so-wealthy background who is drawn into their world of partying and plotting. They are kids who seem to occupy a juvenile universe of there own, largely abandoned by the older folks.  They seem to be extremely far from the rest of society as well. These kids, dressed in tuxedos and evening dresses, sit in parlors gossiping about the lastest scandals and the much-told legends about naughty boys and troubled girls. For this reason, the outsider, a guy who talks about French socialists and does not live on Park Avenue, offers some fresh blood. Like in a Wharton book, its all about the value system and who is socially recognized as complying with the rules. Part F Scott Fitzgerald, part Brett Easton Ellis, Metropolitan is a study of juvenile cruelty and a ghost-like class system.

In the name of (2013)

Despite some terrible clichés, In the name of is an engaging film about being closeted. The cliché: the main character is a tormented priest. He's gay and he lives in a rural community where he works with delinquent kids. He falls in love with a boy and their relationship must remain secret. The cliché: sexual temptation and self-destructive behavior. For all this, Malgoska Szymowska is a good storyteller in the sense that she builds a tight world around the priest - a world of macho performance among the teenagers he is assigned to tend to. Most of all, In the name of is a film about self-denial. The relation between religious rumination and suffering, a quest for selflessness, is of course no less clichéd, but at least at times, Szymowska makes us believe in the character and his anxiety. Some of the scenes depicting the priests' unhappiness turn into grim comedy: we see the priest in a severely intoxicated state, alone in his barren apartment, taking a waltz with a portait of pope Benedict. I have mixed feelings about this film: the portrayal of self-loathing gays tends to become an easy path to make a film about Misery, World-weariness and Decay in general. When directors walk this path, the representation of sexuality is often reduced to a pattern of bodily temptations, so that the logic of the film is a subject and then there is an object of desire, a manifestation of this "temptation". In this film: taciturn guy with Jesus-looks. In most cases, this pattern is both boring and repulsive (a miserabilist distortion) and gives rise to many suspect images of homosexuality. However, the film has some strength in how it conjures up the closed world inhabited by the priest.  

Barbara (2012)

What was it like to live in the DDR? Christian Petzold's Barbara successfully brings home the existential dread among the citizens. Barbara (a very restrained Nina Hoss) has been incarcerated and now she tries to create a new life for herself. She is a doctor and works in a provincial town. Nobody knows her. Most of the colleagues find her repulsively aloof. She distrusts everybody. She knows perfectly well that she is being watched. Andre, a friendly type, is also working in the hospital. He also works for Stasi, but his true allegiance lies elsewhere. At her job, Barbara treats a girl with whom she develops a warm friendship. With this girl. we see her otherwise chilly appearance fall off. Barbara's lover lives in West Germany and sometimes she gets to meet her in secret places. We quickly learn that Barbara has other plans than to settle for a quiet rural life. The film skillfully examines the world of surveillance: most of all, it shows what bearing it has on people's ordinary social life. Petzold shows how a sense of distrust distorts almost everything. Barbara, with her steely face, is not a very likeable character (which is not a bad thing): she is distant, she has learnt how to hide all emotions - she has learnt self-control. Barbara is not a thriller, even though it has such an element. Its story about escape is told quietly, elegantly - the emphasis lies on a harrowing form of suspense that is felt also in the everyday scenes. In the more intense moments, every small detail has a terrible weight: the crunch of gravel, a wrong turn with the bicycle. In other words: this is a film where suspense is built into the social world itself, as a constant fear of imminent or more vaguely felt threats, rather than being a cheap cinematic effect. A merit of the film is that the dealings of the secret police are seen in their being embedded in a world in which people go about doing their everyday business: this makes the film truly frightening. I also admire the sudden moments of quiet beauty. In one scene, Barbary is biking on a craggy gravel road. The only thing we hear is the howling wind. The leaves are rustling and the birds are screaming.

Jauja (2014)

I was completely mesmerized by Lisandro Alonso's quiet tale about a man who goes back to visit the village where his mother lives - Liverpool. That film: mysterious and captivating. Jauja is equally mysterious - perhaps even more so. It's a bold film, perhaps one that is easy to mock. I mean, in a certain sense, this is a completely outrageous and ridiculous film. What we have: a grim-looking Viggo Mortensen, dressed in 19th century gentleman's clothing, ambling along looking for his daughter. The cinematography (by Timo Salminen, famous for his work with Aki Kaurismäki): 4:3 ratio - enhancing a cramped, claustrophobic feel -, wandering shots that endow the sea and the wind with fierce power, surreal lush colors. Mortensen plays a captain posted in Patagonia; his mission is to kill aboriginal people. His teenage daughter has run away with a handsome soldier and now he sets out to bring her back. The film's locations - barren plains and rocks - end up becoming some sort of spiritual (liminal) landscape. This is a tale of longing and desperation and perhaps also futility. However, this is not a psychologically rich portrait of a father's quest for an authentic relation to his daughter - not at all. It's not only the opacity of the main character. Something else is going on, something beyond psychology. Something rooted in the plains, under the stars, in the turquoise sky. Think of the quiet moments of a Herzog film and you get the idea of this kind of journey. Most importantly, reality itself is displaced throughout the movie: the characters wander from one eerie dimension to another. A tale about colonialism, the heart of the unknown within what we thought we knew (dignity, purity, 'civilization'). - This is a film in which everything looks unreal or, rather, hyper-real - one reviewer talks about warped naturalism which makes perfect sense.

Mortensen's captain walks and walks - the camera silently follows. Watching his trek is both hilarious and sad - that Alonso pulls of this weird mix of response is rather skillful. The same thing can be said about the astonishing and baffling ending of the film, that takes you to an altogether different place - I won't spoil it, but for me, this way of bringing the taciturn and desolate story to an end was simply marvelous. Such bold solutions should be tried out more often (for some reason, I sometimes thought about the film Innocence). The great thing about it all is perhaps also its leading actor. Mortensen's role is bold in a peculiar way. It's a wonderfully serious AND silly act to work with, and he succeeds, I think, in not seeming to fear the silliness. He goes from moments of grief to moments of sheer craziness in a remarkably dignified-undignified manner - without vanity, somebody pointed out. At the moment, when I try to recall similar roles, it's more of the Herzog-stuff that comes to mind: Klaus Kinski embodies this kind of boldness, but Viggo Mortensen is a very different actor.

This is a film where you, dear viewer, has to endure a very high level of openness. The takes are often long, but sometimes the cut is drastic and takes you by surprise. I get the feeling that I don't have any idea about what will happen next, even though the whole thing is very focused on Mortensen's eerie journey. Liverpool had that openness as well, even though Jauja feels like a more elaborated cinematic expression. Alsonso is one of the directors that demonstrates what film can be, that it can be far more than you think.

Århus by night (1989)

A motley crew of kids are making a movie. 1970's Århus: free (?) love and dingy bars. The director is a young man who still lives with his parents. The making of the movie is a messy affair: friendship is threatened by jealousy and the big question seems to be who gets to sleep with whom. Nils Malmros, if I have understood it correctly, has built his career around making deeply biographical movies. Thinking about the biographical element of Århus by night is mostly, for me, thinking about what kind of perspective it gives expression to. The director (who is clearly supposed to be Malmros himself) is presented as a shy guy to whom all the girls are drawn. The film zones in on his inhibitions, his shyness - he is the talented film-maker whose kindness is exploited by his rambunctious pals. What ensues: a rather conventional, male-focused film about sexual awakening. The women in the film mostly serve as props for male attention, desire and jealousy. This conventional story about the kid's artistic and spiritual development mostly takes its departure from the idea that the world revolves around men whose ego are dependent on women who desire them and men who admire them. And then there is the mother: the young man has a special relationship with his mom and the film dwells on the rocky road from mommy's arms to another girls'. // Århus by night is not an awful film. Its locations - a Danish small-town - is gorgeously filmed and some scenes about the travails of making the film end up being quite funny. At times, the usage of memories that haunt the adult works pretty nicely. But much too often, this film falls into the trap of a very, very tiresome image of what it is to Be a Man.

High hopes (1988)

What does it mean to 'do something'? High hopes is one of the most heart-wrenching takes on political consciousness I have ever seen. Political consciousness? How can that be hear-wrenching at all? Well, in Mike Leigh's hands, this tale about class society and its psychological tensions is rendered into a soul-searching odyssey. What is more: Leigh's film manages to be existentially penetrating and damn funny at the same time. I have a difficulty in putting into words how much this film moved me: something about its perspective on the two leading characters - a rather lazy thirty-something couple - trying to come to terms with their lives and society just hit a chord.

Cyril and Shirley: two people trying to figure things out. Should they have a child? But most acutely: what to do with Cyril's old, apathetic mother? This couple live in a dingy flat. They clearly love each other - the tenderness between them is moving (how unusual such tenderness is in films!). He's a motorcycle messenger. His sister, however, lives in a posh part of town with a bratty husband (he sells cars and has sleazy affairs). The two couples are very different, of course, and High hopes gears into high comedy when their realities clash. Cyril and Shirley are rather dreamy types who enjoy a cozy life at home. But then - the mother. She lives in a council flat and well, there's her neighbors, an outrageous yuppie couple. These neighbors are surely caricatures in the film, but in some way, that really works fine: the serious and reflective tone of some of the scenes nudge against a much loonier, crazier tone that brings out the absurdity of the seemingly ordinary and mundane.

The question being asked is often: how can we live in this society? Cyril and Shirley are people who are feeling a bit bad for not doing enough, not being active enough. Cyril makes fun of their friend's feminist-socialist speeches. She angrily retorts: so what do you do? He quietly blurt out: I sit on my arse [as a matter of fact, even thinking about this scene brings tears to my eyes]. In another scene - a sweet moment - we see Cyril bemoaning the state of the country standing before Karl Marx' grave. Then a group of buoyant Japanese tourists enter the scene and the serene spell is broken. What makes this film so good is that it is not pessimistic. Leigh does not set out to scorn a class of bohemian leftists who are too lazy to really care, nor does he set out to scorn the naivety of the well-to-do people who care more about creating the perfect flat than they care about society. The film focuses on lots and lots of dissonance and despair - but it also deals with people who care about each other and who cannot help caring, even though they perhaps would not like to. It also takes a look at people who like not to care - the posh people living next door to the mother - but who end up confronting these horrible poor people anyway.

This theme - confrontation as encounters - is brought to the fore from the very start. A young and inexperienced country boy arrives in London. He bumps into Cyril and Shirley. They try to help him finding his way, and end up taking him in for the night. They are hesitant about inviting the youngster to stay, but somehow that's the only thing they can do.

High hopes is not only good because of its dialogue and its acting. Let's not forget the way Leigh fills gray London with life: the shabby row houses and the dreary window-views are mediated with a loving eye. Then there's the satirical edge that works magic also with clothing and interior design. Simply: Mike Leigh also gets the details right for the mood of the film.

Theeb (2014)

While watching Theeb, I couldn't help thinking of Lawrence of Arabia: the gleaming and dizzying images of the endlessness of the desert. Visually, Naji Abu Nowar's Theeb is a remarkable film. As for the story - I wasn't entirely convinced by this coming-of-age story about a Bedouin boy during WWI who goes out on a risky adventure in the desert. The central tension of the story is the young kid's enchantment with a British man who visits the camp he and his family live in. But this tension is soon lost: the film lapses into a rather conventional action mode where the viewer's attention is grabbed by an insistent will-he-survive. While the first few scenes of the film worked very well (establishing a form of life) the middle part about a boy growing into manhood crept forward rather predictably. However, one thing it did very well was to convey historical upheavals indirectly. There is the fall of the Ottoman empire, technical revolution and globalization, all of which figures in the film through the child's eyes. Even though Theeb has an interesting undercurrent - a pacifistic one even? - somehow, its presentation of innocence and struggle failed to engage me at depth. "The strong eat the weak" is delivered as a universal truth about what human life essentially is.

From What is Before (2014)

Static camera. Rustling leaves. The wind. Grass. The sky. The roaring sea. Lav Diaz' From What is Before is a film that sticks close to nature. During the 338 (!) minutes of the film I am entirely surrounded by these images and these sounds. Being a political film at heart, Diaz chooses an interesting path in making the viewing experience so sensual. The setting is an isolated village in Philippines in the seventies. Horrible things start to happen and the villagers' lives are torn apart. There is an almost apocalyptic feeling in how Diaz approaches the terror of the regime - a sense of apocalypse conjured up by an almost-static camera an sometimes extremely lengthy takes (Béla Tarr comes to mind for several different reasons). The 5+ hours of the movie makes us acquainted with the village and the routines of its dwellers. We see neighbors visiting one another's houses. A young woman takes care of her daughter who drifts from a coma-like state to a state of distress. A small boy believes he lives with his uncle because his parents are in quarantine due to leprosy. A lonely winemaker exploits the disabled girl sexually.  A female merchant arrives to the village. She tries to sell goods to the villagers in a rather aggressive way (this character adds a comic aspect to this otherwise pitch-black story). A priest warns the locals about practicing the traditional rites. Worrying things happen. Cows are found slaughtered. Huts are burnt. A bleeding man appears. These events seem to intensify an already existing unease or anxiety that shape the villagers' lives. Paranoia among the villagers and as the villagers witness a suicide, we also learn about the many lies that are kept up.

The film is shot in black and white and from very early on, even the beautiful images of nature instills a sense of dread. Several scenes are set on a shore. A woman, the thundering sea, a rock. Later on, this sense of dread becomes more concrete as the army is entering the village: these are events of invasion. Martial law is introduced and some sections of the film deal with the hierarchy among the soldiers sent out to take charge of the village. The army men try to soothe the villagers - in a very bureaucratic way - by telling them that this is just an act of precaution, a way of rooting out communist rebels.

Diaz' use of long takes does not come out as an attempt to play with the viewer or as an attempt to appear 'contemplative'. His static camera gives you time to grow into a specific location. Some have talked about an anti-colonial method: time allows you to see a place, to be lulled into a specific rhythm.

Often, humans appear from within a natural setting as ant-like figures. A person appears from a distance, perhaps partly hid by deep foliage. This enhances the overall impression I got of the story. Here, there might be some open questions with regard to Diaz' perspective. Does he set out to depict how people are reduced to pawns in a cosmic game - the perspective being that whatever people do will remain futile. Or is he rather showing a historical situation - a situation of anxiety and terror in which people's sense of activity is radically reduced? In any case, the vulnerability of human life is strikingly underscored by means of this cinematographic technique. It is important to remember that the entire film is framed as an attempt to remember. Diaz seems to deal with national trauma through individual lives. There are extremely violent and horrible scenes in this movie that evoke a sense of acute trauma. These scenes have absolutely no trace of sensationalism or exoticism. Often, the horrible things done are seen only indirectly but for all that, they are shocking and heavy to watch.

Under the Skin (2013)

Elusive. This is the description that best fits Jonathan Glazer's stunningly beautiful, at the same time stunningly ugly, Under the skin. A dry explication of the story would make most people squirm. The magic does certainly not happen in the story (that the film is loosely based on a novel is interesting, but a novel need not glow because of its story, either). This is a film entirely structured according to the associative logic of images. Scarlett Johansen's alien predator patrols the streets of Glasgow (is it Glasgow?); she's hunting for guys to ... well .... drag into a pitch-black romm - an eating-machine! Johansen, using her body as bait, lures them with her with her anonymous, steely gaze. They go with her in her van, sometimes reluctantly. An unknown figure seems to be stalking her on a bicycle.

The strangeness is enhanced by extremely absurd and stylized scenes being interwoven with ultra-gritty shots of rain-soaked streets and brightly lit malls. There is no safe distance between these two styles, the dreamy and otherworldly & the social-realist grit: everything is seamlessly sucked into the film's wandering gaze. (Many have talked about a Hollywood star plopped into the humdrum settings of pedestrian people. I am not too interested in that angle.)

I watched Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth a few weeks before Under the Skin. The two films share a number of thematic and visual features. Both films' take on alienation works with humor in a way that makes the underlying sadness all the more present. Why sadness? Both Bowie and Johansen are detached from human emotions. They observe, and react according to some mechanical pattern. In a scene that drops all the satire and humor, we see Johansen's alien by the shore. She watches an accident. Or does she watch? What would watching mean for this creature?

An extremely weighty dimension of this film is the sound. The music (by Mica Levi): a throbbing, pulse-like score. Worrying dissonance, threatening tones.

Under the skin: in no other film has sex looked so abstract, a boring-beyond-boring activity to trudge through.

Late Spring (1949)

Ozu's Late Spring is perhaps the most striking film I have ever seen about the relation between father and daughter: Ozu focuses on the quiet tenderness between the two. How often do films capture that particular closeness between members of a family? I mean: closeness that bears no hint of neurotic claustrophobia. There is also another unusual thing that sets Ozu's films apart. Rather than delivering a bleak, pessimistic image of modernization, his films show people dealing with rapid changes; even though he shows the lack of understanding that may occur between generations, he never seems to be inclined to force upon us a verdict on "the modern life".  

Noriko is in her mid 20's and her widowed, professor father worries about her. She should get married, it's about time, he thinks. His scheming sister is also eager to marry her off. But the father also appreciates the life he has with his daughter. Both of them seem to thrive in their present situation. Many scenes chronicle their routines, their feeling at ease in their home. But there is this obligation, this social expectation. As a way of talking her into marrying, he tells a lie: he announces that he will re-marry. Through an encounter with a family friend in a bar, we learn that Noriko is extremely opposed to the idea. But why is she so disgusted? Is the disgust a rationalization of her grief? -  Some has interpreted the film in psychosexual terms, so that an undercurrent of the tensions would revolve around repulsion and sex, but I don't know. A suitor, the professor's assistant, is presented to Noriko. They seem to enjoy one another's company (we see them on an American-looking bicycle ride), but Noriko does not marry him (the circumstances remain open-ended). A new suitor appears. He is said to look a bit like Gary Cooper. Like in Early Summer, we never get to see this suitor (very successful move).

Setsuko Hara, who plays in several Ozu film as a woman named Noriko, is brilliant. In one of the films, she goes to see a noh play with her father. The camera lingers on the play, the audience. Suddenly, Noriko notices something, the woman her father is supposed to marry. We see the sadness in her face; anger, perhaps, as well. That's a stunning scene.

Many of the central feelings in the film are only alluded to, shown in their indirect expression. The loneliness they both experience when their living situation changes remains a private thing: they cannot show it to the other. They put up a brave, smiling face and go through with what they see as the things to be done. So what is the film about? It seems wrong to say that it is about two people who do something they do not want because they want to comply with a set of socially accepted standards. The film seems to explore different meanings of 'family', what it means to take care of one's parents and that there might be a point in one's life at which there are certain things one has to let go of. Rather than working with dichotomies (traditional/western) Ozu gives us a nuanced pattern of emotions, decisions and perhaps also confusions. This makes it, I think, wrong-headed to label the film as a story about what somebody wants or does not want.

King Kong (1933)

King Kong, the version from 1933, features some faltering special affects (dated to the extent that they appear to me as cute) and a dose of some kind of civilization/media critique. It remains an impressive film for all its - or because of - technical clumsiness. The acting is terrible, but the film takes the viewer to a world of terrible spectable that is laughable (stop motion effects!) and somehow moving at the same time. King Kong offers you a frantic film director, a (racist-tinged and colonialist) journey into unknown, foggy land which culminates in the film crew being chased by Kong and ... some dinosaurs. There's of course a love story (between whom?) and the climactic end that switches the colonial gaze: it is now New York that is exoticized, marvelled at. Kong roams around in chains and the idea is that the beast is to provide innocent moments of diversion to the bored but curious city-dweller. It is almost as if we see the diminuitive-looking city from his point of view. Maybe it is too much to think of King Kong as an anti-colonialist film, but - well, traces of that is certainly present.

Shame (2011)

In Steve McQueen's films, suffering, human tormenting, is perceived from a clinical point of view - the clinical not preventing the films from working their way through graphical details. - - From this description, it is probably quite clear that I find McQueens cinematic approach deeply problematic, and perhaps even morally shady. One coud perhaps say that his films evoke a neutralized concept of empathy, empathy being reduced to a dissective process of understanding and observing other people's minds - rather than understanding having moral connotations, and being enmeshed in complicated questions about responsibility: what does it mean to see/look/catch sight of something? It is as if such worries are sidestepped by McQueen's clinical camera. The point of the films I have seen seem to be a project of revelation: the dark patches of the human soul are to be penetrated. The ideal appears to be not to flinch, to stare directly at the suffering at hand.

A pair of siblings are the two major characters in Shame. The sister is a nerve-wreck of a person. She crashes in her brother's bachelor's pad - which he hates. He is addicted to sex and trying to hid his addiction. The films tracks his obsessions, along with his quest for normalcy, by focusing on his stormy and sexually tense relation with his sister. And well, then there's his sleazeball boss who is just as bad as he is - just as sociopathic. Along the way, we do indeed see these characters react to each other's difficulties and problems, but all of these reactions are fuelled with shame, humiliation or rancour. As a viewer I, too, react with shame and an uncomfortable feeling that I have seen something I shouldn't have - a feeling that, I assume, is precisely what McQueen is aiming for. To make the viewer complicit in the characters' humiliation. Even though the perspective of this film, what it is trying to do to you, is problematic, it must be admitted that McQueen knows how to compose detached, steely images. Michael Fassbender - who else - is the perfect match for the scary leading role.

The big problem with Shame is that it goes nowhere. It stares - blindly at the misery it has reduced the world to. 

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

I recently watched both The Man Who Fell to Earth, a cult movie by the eccentric director Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, Don't Look Now) and Jonathan Glazer's hyped - and weird - Under the Skin. Without being derivative, the latter film unashamedly draws on Roeg's (infamous?) classic. Roeg is a master of composition: his images often have a painterly quality and there is often something very unnerving about them, even though you may not always be able to put your finger on what is so unsettling.

If you hear a summary of what happens in the film, you might be put off. An alien - David Bowie is the obvious choice! - comes to earth to get water for his desert-like planet and gets kind of stuck in the human form of life, the corporate world - and a relationship with a human. Hmmm, indeed. For all its silliness, and there is truly plenty of it, The Man Who Fell to Earth excesses in cinematically glorious eerie moments; Bowie's icily detached face is the perfect center of the film's strangeness. Bowie IS an alien. Roeg looks at the world, as he often does, from the point of view of alienation. Bowie's alien wanders around, makes business deals, hooks up - but nothing seem to matter much. After a while on planet earth, he slides into depression, drinking GT's and watching TV. The earth, of course, is represented as a spiritual desert. Roeg throws in a few references to ecological desaster and corporate corruption - the earth does not seem a particularly friendly place. The point, basically, seems to be that nobody is truly at home. Perhaps Roeg would not have neeeded extraterrestial excursions to bring home that message, but then again, this film's idiosyncratic use of 'aliens' sets up a peculiar mood. Pretty much everything of what's going on is shrouded in big mystery. This feeling of mystery is enhanced by Roeg's approach to images. These are not 'perspicuous representations', you know, the kind of broad presentations that traditionally takes you by the hand in a movie to make you familiar with the setting of the film. Here, instead, time and space are broken, ruptured by the use of fragments and cross-cutting. There are conspiracies and plotting - but the essential theme is the alien's alienated state, which illustrated through imagery left elusive enough to haunt one's imagination for a long time. 

Nightcrawler (2014)

Dan Gilroy's Nightcrawler works like an anti-establishment version of neo-noir films like Drive. Caustic, quite funny, atmospheric - and even quite realistic, Nightcrawler sets out to explore the rotten heart of media and, perhaps, work. On the nocturnal streets of LA, a guy called Lou prowls in a car. He looks for - material. He goes to the location of some gruesome crime scene or accident scene to take photos that he sells to a media company. By tuning into the police radio, he learns where the evening's action is. He tries to get as much money as he can for these images, while the media company obviously tries to haggle with him. L.A is all night, neon and grit. Lou is a shadowy figure with the most harried face you've ever seen in a movie. He looks half-dead. He's on the streets to earn his buck and starts to exploit a younger kid as an 'assistent'. The point, of course, is to extract as much value as possible out of the poor youngster who's dersperate for money. The kid cannot say no to this "internship", as Lou calls it. Scruples? Not a hint. Again, there is the thing about bargaining positions. Dog eat dog - and while at eating the other dog, entrepreneurial pride is not lacking: "I work for myself". Be your own boss, be on top of the game. The media company for its part is living on gruesome images that the audience 'wants', so there's demand, for sure. "I want something the audience can't turn their eyes away from." Demand = the ratings, the ratings. The ideal images: where the truly gritty stuff is happening, here and now. And the here and now, the sense of true crime or bloody stuff going on, can be manipulated - invented, or produced. Nightcrawler engages in a critique of sensationalist images, but also the network of forces that keep up such a yearning for sensations happening in real time, how such sensationalism is engineered and upheld. The critique sometimes veers into simplistic preaching, but I am not too bothered, because Nightcrawler keeps up its strange, nocturnal atmosphere throughout in a way that is almost tactile. Disquieting stuff all the way. - - - This week, I've been reading in the newspaper about a new trend. Instead of rushing to help when people witness an accident, they snap photos. Just as in Nightcrawler...

I am love (2009)

On paper, I am love (Luca Guadagnino) does not seem to add up to much more than a conventional romance set in the most conventional (I guess) of cinematic contexts: the bourgeois family. The reason I wanted to watch this film is - Tilda Swinton. Even in the crappiest movies, her luminous performance makes a viewing endurable. Swinton plays the Russian-born wife of a wealthy Milanese textile factory owner. She is the perfect wife, the perfect host, the perfect supervisor of the orchestration of upper-class events: she perfects the institutional role assigned to her. Guadagnino presents a family eager to live up to this institutional function. There are dinners where everybody tactfully plays along in the expected way. In the beginning of the film, the fate of the dynasty is revealed: the patriarch announces that Emma's husband, and her son, are to inherit the business. Emma is an outsider, even though she acts her part. It is hard to know what kind of person she is. Something starts to change when she meets her son's friend, who is a chef. There are mutual erotic feelings, and from there. - - This, of course, sounds like the usual, run-of-the-mill depiction of a monied family, its neuroses and also its escapes. What's special here? Emma is a distant, almost icy person. Swinton is naturally in her element her: elusive, as always (but how she manages to be elusive in so many different ways), but Swinton also interprets her characters lust, her imagination, with an unusual presence. But it's not only Swinton. There's a dizzying sense of overwhelming emotions that the director - and the cinematographer (some reviewer calls the visual style 'baroque', which, I think, hits the mark) - evokes in a, well, surging, way (which borders on the phony - as someone has remarked: there is something of Douglas Sirk in here). Even so, there are quite a few unnecessary dramatic turns and half-hearted subplots that the audience could well do without - this film does not not need them. But, in any case, I was surprised by how well some segments of I am love worked.

The Simple-Minded Murderer (1982)

With The Simple-Minded Murderer Hasse Alfredsson showed that his abilities reach far beyond comedy. This is a frightening movie, in several ways. Stylistically, the film proved to be far more diverse than I expected it to be. Alfredsson boldly tries out different styles - to capture different atmospheres - realism of a fairly traditional vein is intermingled with the supernatural (along with operatic music!). What works so greatly is that there is no tired distinction between fantasy/reality, but, rather, the supernatural is also, in its own way, real. The film also draws parallels between historical situation in a way that to some may feel strange, but I appreciated his ways of explicating a theme in the movie by suddenly bringing in a completely different time. Somebody has compared the film with Derek Jarman's work (!) and that makes complete sense to me: here you have a similar break with traditional forms.

Sven (good performance by Stellan Skarsgård) is seen as retarded because of a speech defect. He is exploited by some kind of industrialist. He sleeps in a barn and is forced to work hard. As he befriends Anna, who is dependent on her wheelchair, he gets to work for and live with Anna's family. But the industrialist does not like this new arrangement and sets out to revenge. The story is told in bits and pieces, with flashbacks. Somehow, this seems to be a fruitful approach to the material, and heightens the sense we often get of different levels of reality.

One could say that The Simple-minded murderer is about the nature of evil. Without shying away from melodrama (which is both good and bad), the film is built like a morality tale. The industrialist symbolizes an almost absolute sense of evil. He is evil not because of some petty interest he seeks to further, but rather, the evil things he does has no specific purpose. Admittedly, Alfredsson sometimes reverts to all too familiar clichés about evil: we see the industrialist gorging himself together with his pals, engaging in all kinds of debauchery (which, however, is depicted not as exotic and titillating but as very, very boring) - I mean, this association of debauchery and evil does not help us understand anything.

Leviathan (2014)

The barren, arctic sea-shore of a small town in Siberia transforms Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan into something more than a film about corruption - corruption in the human sense and in the sense of institutional corruption. Cosmic might be the word to capture the feel of it. The choice for the viewer is what level one should focus on. A theme that drives the overarching mythic tone is suffering. There are references to Job: why should I suffer? How can God allow this to happen? When I watched this movie, my friends and I disagreed to which extent these references are to be taken as direct questions borrowed straight from the Biblical story, or whether they have a more context-dependent and, thus, more ambivalent role. I haven't really settled my mind: is this film suffocatingly blunt, beating you on the head with a certain 'message', or is it more open-ended than what a cursory interpretation might suggest?

Kolja and his family live by the sea. Their home is threatened when the local - very crooked, very Yeltsin-lookalike - mayor makes claims on the property. Kolja's friend, a lawyear from Moscow, arrives to help his mate with his problems. There are dirty deals and also matrimonial infedelity. Kolja's life starts to break apart. Zvyagintsev takes a look at the vodka-fuelled structures of this small town, in which the mayor - constantly drunk - goes to see the priest every now and then, and is given a pragmatic piece of godly-worldy advice.

An essential theme of the film is what it means to stand behind one's words. In the beginning of the film, we see Kolja at the court. The scene plays out as tragic comedy: the jury reads the negative verdict in a furious-paced bureaucratic quasi-lingo: the voice of the woman reading it is completely mechanic. In the very end of the film, the priest delivers a sermon. There are bombastic formulations about the state and the church. The priest - who is he, what does it mean when he stands there before the bored/drunk parish, speaking those words?

Again: the overwhelming landscapes, underlining the vulnerability of the characters' lives. The mood of the film is established and kept up with repeated images of desolate cliffs, gray, restless sea and craggy whale skeletons. The cinematography is audacious, but not overly so. The music by Philip Glass is, however, too much - the film would have been better without it. Zvyagintsev's sense for immaculate composition is in absolutely no need of being doubled by Glass' fluttering score. (I am no fan of Glass.)

Out of the past (1947)

Jacques Tourneur is the guy who made Cat people, some kind of horror movie I watched many years ago but that has stuck in my mind; I vaguely remember a strange, thrilling and rather elusive build-up of the plot. Out of the Past belongs to another genre - noir - but it also has that strange thrilling propulsion. The details of the story make my head spin. Double-double-crossing. Tangles of events and relations and temporal levels and a heap of thugs. But the basic framework is pretty standard stuff of the genre: guy wants to free himself from his shoddy past. Settle down, lead a peaceful life, find a girl. BUT past stuff comes to haunt. There's the woman. And the small town. And crime! The hero is the unlucky, slightly gullible/self-destructive guy whose fate is finally sealed. This guy who seem to unconsciously love trouble is Robert Mitchum's seemingly honest citizen who sets out to start a new life in a small town. But turns out the man has a past as a private eye, and then he gets involved with old stuff - a femme fatale robbing a gangster, his former love life and the catastrophic acts that love life lead him into committing - and, you know, one thing leads to another. He just can't stay away from that gangster woman who once brought him into trouble. The dizzyingly plentiful details may not be interesting. The film is driven by its elusive pulse, its evocative locations and its ridiculously hard-boiled lines.

The gender politics of Out of the past is suspect, to say the least. The impossibly icy and evil urban femme fatale is compared with the kind-hearted, innocent rural girl. Mitchum's ex-private eye is of course erotically involved with both. And it doesn't take much thinking to see which woman the film itself sides with. But you, dear movie-lover, will fall for Jane Greer's tough-girl style. The look on her face when she points that gun - !

A Star Is Born (1937)

William A Wellman's A star is born could almsot have been written by Tennesse Williams. Cruel human relations, self-loathing characters, plenty of self-searching on the screen. And then there's the bloody (in several ways) world of entertainment: a world of business, rising stars and has-beens. The film, almost a chamber drama, delivers a raw image of a corrupt industry and conjures up an equally jaded image of the human sacrifices and humiliation within that branch of business. The drama takes off with the encounter of the struggling young woman who has travelled from her small town family to Hollywood and who nurses big dreams of becoming an actress, and the movie star that eventually takes her under his wing - and marries her. The girl becomes famous, while the husband is torn apart by doubt and by more than a few drinks. Janet Gaynor as the actress - at first insecure, then growing into being the big star, the modern woman with a career - is excellent, luminous even. But what I remember most of all from this movie is its sympathetic rendition of the flaws of the two protagonists. They are troubled people, but the film shows their struggles with their lives and with business to be a complex and emotionally ambivalent affair. The film addresses tough questions about what it means to experience oneself as a burden. It mostly does so without sentimentality. The husband's career is not looking bright, he is drinking and the wife considers giving up her own acting for him. The husband misses his work, and feels depressed. This couple's problems is not rendered as a power struggle, or a clear-cut man/woman conflict. They both acknowledge one another's point of view, but dealing with the factual situation, taking responsibility and living on is difficult for both.b  I must say that in quite a few ways, it is hard to believe that this film is from 1937.

Frost/Nixon (2008)

Powerful corrupt president talks to journo about scandals - can that really be an interesting movie? I was pretty sure Frost/Nixon (dir. Ron Howard) would not be for me, but somehow, I found myself engaged in the heated communication between the two protagonists. Even though there are a few bad, sentimental parts, the acting of Michael Sheen & Frank Langella - the tension between them! - was top notch, and this is the true strength of the movie.

Les bonnes femmes (1960)

I am not a great fan of the French new wave. Even though some of the films associated with that wave are interesting enough, I am often put off by the sexism and the 'cool' vibes. Claude Chabrol might not be as famous as the Godards and the Truffauts, but Les bonnes femmes definitively has the hip, sometimes experimental and definitively über-cynical qualities of that era. The film sets out to demolish all kinds of romantic hopes about love and partnerships - and at the same time it focuses on the dreams and hopes of romance, only to see them crushed, of course. However, what sets this film apart, and what made me appreciate it, rather than being annoyed by its lofty coolness, is the phenomenal flow on display here. Les bonnes femmes takes us from one everyday scene to the next, from one crowd of people to another, without us knowing much anything about where it is all going to end. The main characters work in some kind of shop. The boss is an asshole, and they are bored, just waiting for life to begin - somewhere else. One of the salesgirls loves to party, while another engages in dreamy fantasies about meeting Mr. Right. A third girl defies this talk about romance. She leads a secretive life and sneaks off at night to sing in a club. A fourth girl has a relationship with a guy who is ashamed of her working-class style. In an awkward scene, we see his reactions during a dinner with his parents. Chabrol zooms in on the tragic-comic nature of the assemblage of emotions and repressive patterns.

Some of the most quietly thrilling scenes take place within the crazy-looking shop, amidst these shop-girls' dreams and longings. The film explores the disappointments and attachments connected with these longings. In one haunting scene, we see a group of young people, some of which are flirting with one another, in a parisian zoo. The place looks appaling, and the way the camera pans from one gruesome animal cage to another reveals an almost horror movie-like atmosphere. The last, rather erratic part, takes us to an unsettling rendezvuous between one of the shopgirls and an evil-looking motorcycle guy who has been following her around for a long time. There are some unnecessarily confusing scenes in this last segment, but all in all - a surprisingly evocative film.

While the structure of many nouvelle vague-film boils down to the idea of an eternal and frivolous struggle between (the so-called) sexes, Chabrol's film takes a slightly different turn, and can even be said to develop a feminist angle. The film starts with a scene in which two older men pick up two girls, and do everything they can to take them home. Chabrol focuses on the scheming of the men, and a destructive pattern of heterosexual play that has a strong violent theme built into it. This theme runs through the entire movie. In one scene in a swimming pool, the same two men we saw in the beginning catch sight of the two girls from the earlier occasion. The ensuing 'playful' chase-scene is uncompromisingly clear-sighted in its depiction of desperate male insecurity and normalized violence. The end of the movie brings home the point in the ultimate, sinister way.

Biblioteka (2014)

A library somewhere in a small town in Georgia. The documentary follows the librarians' attempts to keep themselves busy in a library that seems to have almost no visitors. The librarians, a motley crew, don't seem to get on so well. There are small eruptions of irritation, but also moments of forgiveness. We learn that the situation is not good. Ana Tsimintia's Biblioteka adopts a successful fly-on-the-wall tecnique. The odd thing about the film is the juxtaposition of dusty, deserted rooms and books on the one hand, and the heightened relations and fierce conflicts among the librarians, on the other hand. Even though this documentary has no plot - the only thing we see and hear is a group of women talking and moving about in the shabby library - watching it was a captivating experience.

A pigeon sat on a branch reflecting on existence (2014)

Nobody assembles stylized tableux like Roy Andersson - tableux that in one sense seem to be stripped down to the bare bones, but, one the other hand, open up a multitude of existential levels. He inhabits his own cinematic universe, of course; a film is instantaneously recognizable as a Roy Andersson production. There are the run-down locations that conjure up a vague feeling of the Swedish Welfare state in the fifties, mixed with some contemporary details, all built with interior locations so that the end results becomes intentionally artificial. There are the scruffy, sad-eyed characters played in a style that - well - is deadpan in the best sense, in a way that fits these movies.

The problem with A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is that it feels like Andersson is repeating himself, using old ideas, employing a technique he knows so well. For me, some of the scenes felt a bit stale and lifeless and Andersson's quirks stood out much too obviously. On the other hand, there is plenty to enjoy - there is a heap of scenes that capture Andersson's personal blend of sadness and humor. So what is it about? Jonatan and Sam are salesmen. Not very good ones, but they try, you know, with the leading ambition that they just want to help people have fun. They sell novelty items. Not very funny ones, but still. The film revolves around these two, and other creatures of this world. The basic mood the film delivers is that something is deeply wrong in our lives, and that we try to gloss this over with lines like 'I'm glad you're doing fine'. One of the striking things about Andersson's rendition of such existential forgetfulness or hopelessness (haplessness also) is that it is not cynical. In this, and other movies he takes a look at clichés from a point of view where they exude both human warmth and a kind of existential horror. Warmth and horror? How is that possible? Somehow, in Andersson's apocalyptic-humanist approach, it is. His films are full of contradictions molded into a perfected style, and perhaps that is why it works so well when there is more to the vignettes than Andersson's own favorite themes.

The best, and truly elusive, scenes involve .... the Swedish war king Karl XII. It is hard to put into words in which way these scenes dodge silliness, and instead end up being both moving and scary.

I am Cuba (1964)

No doubt about it - Soy Cuba is a propaganda film about the revolution. It is marred with the weaknesses of propaganda, and also its deceit. This is a narrative that asks you to look at some people as the glorious revolutionaries, others as half-hearted pseudo-rebels and others still as traitors and people that simply have to be extinguished in the brutal path towards true socialism. For this reason, it is hard not to be intimidated by Soy Cuba. But when I watched it, I couldn't resist some moments of stunning beauty or strangenesss that the film also contains. The beginning of the film features a lengthy, very dreamy, scene in a bar. The combination of jazz, drunken camerawork and zombie-like acting in terrible English makes for a surreal and haunting scene. There are several examples of Kalatozov's sense for the floating camera and a scene that moves effortlessly (and strangely) from one thing to another. But this strands in quaint contradiction to the didactic and heavy-handed outlook of most of the film. The 'story' (a rather loose one where people are representatives of classes, rather than human beings) takes us from pre-revolutionary times in which yankees loll around on the streets, to the heated moments that paves the way for the revolution, and then the war itself, and the glorious central characters of it. Even though Soy Cuba is by no means a great film, there are still a number of things that speak for it as an artistically original piece.

Bakhmaro heisst Paradies (2011)

Finland is lucky to still have the state-funded TV channel that broadcasts odd documentaries and films from all over the world. Bakhmaro heisst Paradies (dir. Salomé Jashi) is about a restaurant in Chockatauri, Georgia. The restaurant, situated in a dilapidated brick building, is up and running every day, ready to welcome fancy guests, but there are no customers. The camera pans across the strangely painted room, a room that has become a sort of desolate non-place. The owners talk about the future, or what, to them, seem to be the lack of one. This was a surprisingly moving documentary that managed to show huge existential worries in an everyday setting of the small, unsuccessful, business. One day, there is a visit from the Party. The restaurant workers complain about the situation, and the party members shrug: what can they do? Besides that, there is waiting, waiting - for something, for nothing. The film approaches its subject with almost tender, barely visible humor. You can watch the film here.

White god (2014)

Kornél Mundruzcó's White god works best if you allow it to move from level to level. Parable, horror movie, drama - the film moves boldly from genre to genre and doesn't shy away from trying to say big things with a story that may strike some as bizarre. If you accept this restless plunging into several different cinematic expressions, this is for you.

The story starts in a very simple way. A girl moves in with her father. Reluctantly, very reluctantly, the father allows her to take the dear dog along with her. But the dog is too much trouble, he thinks, and drives out to the outskirts of Budapest, where he sends the dog to look after itself. The rather original way of telling the ensuing story is that we follow both the dog and the girl who goes to look for her pet.

The image of what people do to animals is not exactly flattering. I dare say that the film takes us on a spiritual journey from a dog's point of view. The dog encounters other dogs and humans who exploit, capture and hunt. The city of Budapest is seen from the perspective of the animal living in a precarious existence, hunted by humans who want to take advantage of it. It is easy to read this - there are also more or less explicit references - as a story about neo-fascism, about the emergence of race-thinking and a class of people living in fear. One could also interpret the film as a scary image of the kind of people bred by a situation of being outcasts in society. The eventual rage the film depicts towards the end is very, very hard to forget. But here the problems begin: isn't this kind of fantasy about the roaring, violent underclass actually often an expression of an extremely shady idea? What kind of fantasy is it, how is it meant to unsettle us? What kind of revenge does the ending signal? The film ends on an ambiguous note that suddenly seems inclined to pander to our longing for fairy tales with a happy resolution. I suspect that if I would re-watch the film, I would have a much less generous verdict - there are, one might say, traces of an exploitative approach here, where the dogs are reduced to mere symbols.

I find no fault with the element of allegory. It works rather well, even though the way of delivering the message is not exactly subtle (the father works in a slaugtherhouse...). But why settle for the subtle? Mundruczó skillfully conjures up fear by using a frantically pulsating camera that tracks the movements of the dog (dogs) and the girl who sets out to find it. The problem with the film - for me - was the music. The use of a bombastic action film score reduced some of the suspense. After all, this was not a Bruce Willis movie.

The Farwell (1981)

Overloaded with Bergmanite claustrophobia. Overwrought/confused script and silly dialogue. This would be a fair verdict of The Farwell, but still, there are other dimensions of Tuija-Maija Niskanen's rendition of Vivica Bandler's story about family bonds and the process of coming out that stand out. I don't think it is belittling to say of a film (or a book) that it was brave given its times. The Farwell treats same-sex desire in an interesting way and places homophobia within a patriarchal setting of male power and suffocating familial relations. Despite its many overheated scenes, the film captures what it is to long for another life, to long for a different path than the expected one. The style of the film reminds me of Victor Erice's poetic and gloomy cinematic world. Here, too, the world of the child is the point of departure. The camera pans around the aristocratic family apartment and its heavy furniture and dark colors. These images lets us into the world of Valerie, the main character, her secret longings and fears. Sometimes these images are too much, too obvious symbolism, but the cinematographer manages to create what seems to be an eerily closed space, the universe of the wealthy family in which secrets are to be kept by means of silent agreements. What makes the perspective quite unusual is that it is the young girl's rage which sets its mark upon the denouement. Not sadness or resignation - rage!