Zorba the Greek (1964)

Anthony Quinn plays a shy Englishman that goes to Greece and ends up in a business enterprise with a jovial Greek playboy. While the Englishman is pallid and timid, the Greek is a dancing whirlwind who has his way with the ladies. ... Already from this description, I hope you realize what kind of movie Zorba the Greek is. Greece is depicted as a very, very exotic country with almost zombie-like villagers, and then this Zorba, who supposedly is to embody the good spirit of Greece. Michael Cacoyannis directed the film and I suspect he had non-Greek audiences in mind when he made the film. Basically, the film revolves around Zorba and his unruly Life Force that cannot be tamed. The business he and the Englishman has together seems to be a mere plot device in the movie that is there as an excuse to show off the old man's courtship charm and dancing moves. Exuberance, exuberance, exuberance. The only thought in my head while watching Zorba the Greek (it's a mystery that I was actually able to finish this movie) was this: can you imagine a female Zorba? This unstoppable, unabashed life force of a person? Have you ever watched such a movie? There is a representation of female - what should we call it? - lust for life in the movie. She's an old 'coquett', an owner of an unkempt inn. She recalls the old adventures and the men that used to court her during the war. Stories of sex and romance. In all these stories, she is the recipient of male attention, and it is this role that is upkept through the film, in which Zorba of course does not hesitate to try out his charms on her. But when Zorba moves on to other female territories, the inn-keeper is shattered: without a man, she is nothing. It's not the same with how Zorba is shown in the movie. He's Zorba, and nothing can take his life energy from him.

Butterfly Kiss (1995)

Michael Winterbottom is an uneven director. Butterfly kiss is one of his better, stranger films. It's also his first one. A nihilistic tale about two people running amok. We are taken to some of the rawest landscapes of Britain: harsh winds, grayscales, motorways and filling stations. The people in the film fit the landscapes. It turns out Butterfly kiss is a grimmer, well - a lot grimmer - version of Thelma & Louise. Eunice is a tough 'un. She wanders from filling station to filling station, looking for a woman, a lover of old. She hooks up with Miriam, who runs away from home and basically dedicates her life to being loyal to Eunice, no matter what. The emphasis lies on 'no matter what'. Eunice turns out to be a killer. Miriam shakes off her nice-girl habitus and grows into Eunice's partner, which also means her partner in crime. Butterfly kiss is a troubling and troubled film about crazy love, love gone wrong. Miriam is insecure and clings to Eunice. Eunice is cruel and puts her to the test. Perhaps just for the fun of it.

Stylistically, the film offers a hash palette of colors and a merciless roadmovie among filling stations and diners. The characters speak with a heavy accent and what they say is not nice exactly. I didn't really warm to (ok warming to anything in this movie is maybe a misplaced description) the 'religious' theme: Eunice wants to be punished, but she goes on a killing spree without being punished. Butterfly kiss is a messy film but its rawness is convincing; the locations put you into a particular mood and the story of crazy adoration strikes a chord (even though I am not all too sure which one).

The Corridor (1995)

As much as I wanted to like Sharunas Bartas' The Corridor, I couldn't help feeling that this has all been done before, in a far better way, by Bela Tarr. It's interesting to note that Sátantango and The Corridor were made the same year, so at least Bartas cannot be accused of stealing Tarr's ideas. Like Tarr, Bartas works with an austere b&w cinematography and an approach to film-making that comes across more like a sort of cartography than as storytelling. The problem is that Bartas in this film lacks Tarr's eye for the sardonic, or the monumental. They share an interest in dishevelled landscapes and grizzled human beings. The Corridor has no dialogue. The camera moves from people's faces to their surroundings. Most of the film takes place in a run-down building. There is loneliness, but also lovers and even some dancing - the dancing is of course yet another similarity between this film and Satantango. Still, the tone is mostly lugubrious. I get the impression that Bartas tries to capture a state of in-between, limbo, a society that isn't going anywhere, a society of shock. Even though the Corridor contains a number of haunting images I never felt captivated by it as a movie. The images remained precisely that, images. In other words, the film did not, for me, have the power to introduce me to a world. Perhaps there are references and hints arcane to me that open up this film for other viewers.

The Ape (2009)

The Ape is one of the most unsettling movies I've seen in a long time. This is not because of the explicit violence that the film features, but that it is so unclear what is really going on. The churning machinery takes us to a hellish place. The film takes me places but I'm not sure where. From the get-go I learn that something is deeply wrong with the main character, a weary-looking guy called Krister. He's a driving instructor and we sense that this guy is going to explode, or is what we see some kind of gruesome aftermath to events we haven't seen? Gruesome things follow and the film follows them, well, quietly. I end up feeling shellshocked, unable to take it all in. The film works as a dream, and so images are so startling that now, thinking back, I cannot really recall them other than as a fuzzy memory, like the memory of a dream. As with regard to dreams, I can't piece things together. I remember an atmosphere, a car. What makes Jesper Ganslandt's The Ape such a strange viewing experience is that somehow places me in a zombie-like mode where I witness really violent stuff as if in a state of half-sleep. All the time, when I watch the man's harried and scared face, I can't make myself ask the relevant psychological questions (what the hell, why the hell, etc.). I just watch. Or: the film does not elicit watching, it elicits squinting, a sort of horror that is expressed in glimpses, rather than a full-blown disclosure or revelation.

Jane Eyre (2011)

Cary Joji Fukunaga's adaptation of Jane Eyre is sombre, entertaining and sticks close to the material in the book. (I mean, in comparison with Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights this way of making film pales.) It's an adaptation that doesn't take risks: it does what we expect it to. There are the moors, the repressed feelings, the crazy lady in the attic and the strange love btw Jane Eyre and Rochester. What I really appreciated, however, was the casting. Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender and Judi Dench are simply great choices for the roles of the three leading characters.

Mr. Turner (2014)

Making a film about an artist's work is a risky venture. The transformation of one form of art into another is a challenging task that requires distancing from clichés about what the making of art is like. Mr Turner, Mike Leigh's film about William Turner, does not manage to dodge these difficulties altogether. It sometimes falls into the trap of emulating Turner's paintings - and that emulation is bound to fail. Beyond that, Timothy Spall embodies the role of Turner in a nuanced and complex way that makes us look away from the usual representations of the travail of the genius. Yes, there are a couple of scenes that capture Turner as the 'misunderstood artist' but many more sides of his person are explored as well, fortunately. What I will remember from this movie is not so much the scenes of the film - even though Mike Leigh's improvisational techique works as well here as elsewhere - as the bodily presence Timothy Spall conjures up. My own hunch is that it is very uncommon for male actors or male roles to have this kind of presence - and this of course is very revealing of our culture. (My counter-example would be Harvey Keitel who has had many untypical roles.) Spall's Turner grunts, shuffles around the room and gestures to signal his dissatisfaction. This bodily presence characterizes the role of art as well. Instead of art becoming a strange emanation from the genius's head, it is rendered into bodily exertion - daily craft, the embodied gaze, the ageing hand. The transcendent immenseness of Turner's painting is thus placed in a framework of human bodily frailty. This is what I mainly appreciated about Mr. Turner as a film.

The River (1997)

Tsai Ming-Liang makes movies about loneliness, about people occupying the same space without interacting. These films reveal the pain of loneliness as much through an investigation of lived space as the characters' trembling attempts at human closeness. The River opens with a bunch of seemingly disconnected scenes of three different people. Gradually, we learn that they are son, father, mother. The son is afflicted by a mysterious pain in his neck. The father tries to solicit partners at a bathing house. The mother is taking home leftovers and meets a lover in an anonymous room. We see them inhabit spaces of their own. Even when it dawns on us that they are related to each other, their isolation stands out even more. The routines and slow events of ordinary life is the core of this, and other films by Tsai Ming Liang. In a number of scenes, the father tries to collect the dripping water from a hole in the roof. The variations of this minimalist theme have the effect of a melancholy chord. As The River progresses, the young man's neck pain takes on an almost metaphorical meaning. It's a pain that has no clear explanation and no cure seems to help. The son is taken to various doctors and healers and even participates in a ritual, but nothing helps.

The cinematography creates a woozy, yet austere atmosphere. Bright colors and spare locations with next to no human action. What are we to look at? The River is a difficult film as it directs its attention to a puzzling symptom. The viewer is offered several elements and the task is not to piece these together in a neat assemblage. The challenge is to understand the kind of isolation Tsai Ming Liang depicts. What is it that afflicts these people? How is the silence of the film to be understood? An example: two guys ogle each other in a neon-lit arcade from which we see a McDonald's restaurant. Nothing happens in the scene, except this silent watching, their restless presence. The camera observes them, framing them from a distance, swallowed up by the neon-lit commercial environment but without losing the focus on the strange, silent communication.

Two Days, One Night (2014)

The Dardenne brothers make movies that register a moral urgency. Their films tell stories that are a matter of life and death and this existential depth is rendered in a style that manages to be cinematic and 'realistic', realism never being degraded into a flawed or programmatic ideas about what social reality is like. Their film attend to what is real in a moral sense. The moral always has a primary position in their films. What characterizes their work and what Two Days, One Night really substantiates is a care for the characters expressed in the Dardennes' singular prowess of hinting at the complexity of a lived life.

The film starts with a dilemma. Sandra, who works in a solar cell plant, learns that her colleagues have voted about whether they are to give up the yearly bonus of € 1000, or whether they are to accept the bonus which would mean that Sandra is to be made redundant. The colleagues voted in favor of the bonus. Sandra's colleague urges their boss to re-arrange the voting next Monday, as the employees were given some information that biased their votes. The colleague encourages Sandra to contact the others who are to vote, and ask them not to vote in favor of the bonus. A journey of hope and humiliation ensues, as Sandra is visiting her colleagues, trying to convince them that she really needs to keep her job, even though she of course understands that they would like to keep the bonus. The Dardennes skillfully capture the variety of responses Sandra gets. The camera sticks close to Sandra, whose bodily presence is made painfully vivid. We see her nervousness, her tics and her oscillation between hope and despair. We learn that she has suffered from depression for some time, and now her husband is trying to stand by her side and to go through with visiting the colleagues.

The strain of the situation for everybody involved is perhaps what I found most engaging in this movie. The structural aspects of having a job and making a living is presented through the myriad of life situations people inhabit, with all it may implicate: having a loan to pay off, having a family to support, saving money for the kids' college education. But the structural is interspersed with the existential. Sandra encounters greed and people who are so ashamed of their clining to the bonus that they are not willing to talk to her. Sheepishly or rudely, they recoil. She also meets people who understand her and who make sacrifices so that Sandra can keep her position at the plant.

The cinematic brilliance of all this is that the viewer never knows beforehand what kind of response she will get. We follow her from door to door and every encounter reveals one human possibility, and the next one reveals another one. The emotional tensions within Sandra are coupled with the tensions of the encounter, and as we reach the end, one could say that the film celebrates the openness of such encounters. The structural tensions are not resolved, but they are actively dealt with and questioned by people who care about each other.

Certified Copy (2010)

Many films benefit from allowing a level of ambiguity, allowing inexplicable lacunae or resisting trying to add things up into a neat interpretation. Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy is an example. For me, it's impossible to fit this film into a neat narrative - 'this is what was going on' - and if one would venture into such an attempt at explanation, I think one would impoverish what was good in Certified copy, a movie which is as a matter of fact not only attests to the difficulty of digging out a firm level of understanding but also thematizes that very impossibility. On a grumpier day I would perhaps have grumbled about the overworked themes of the film: the relation between the original and the copy. Perhaps, one could say, the film is too engaged in a certain theoretical puzzle. However, when I saw it, I was not only engaged by this puzzle, but was also dazzled by the way this puzzle was presented by a strange progression of events, and in the middle of it all, a sort of rapture that shook me out of many things I thought I knew about the people in the film.

Certified copy begins on a seemingly rather ordinary, realistic note. An art historian gives a lecture on the concept of the original: why is the original considered finer and more authentic than the reproduction in art? Afterwards, he hooks up with a woman in the audience. It turns out she owns an antique store. The story is set in Tuscany, Italy. The two head out on a drive, and the film contains some of Kiarostami's signature car motif: people sitting in a car, next to each other - interpersonal drama in a limited space. The art historian is snotty, and we see tension building up between the two. They talk about art and forgery, they flirt and they have their disagreements. When they enter into a cafe to have something to eat the owner assumes they are a married couple. Suddenly, something shifts. The two starts to act as if they were married. Or are they only pretending? Is it something we have assumed that we shouldn't have? I tried to maintain the openness of the scenes. The couple could be said to act 'as if', but perhaps, given another framework, they could be said to engage in the tired roles, the scathing nagging, a married life can contain, the 'certified copies' of what married life is? Kiarostami clearly sets out to tantalize the viewer with a lack of resolution. In other words, the relation between original/reproduction/copy is worked through on several different levels and ends up in a labyrinth of unresolved questions about art, human relations and the nature of the events of the film. (I suppose there is also a dose of self-reflection in the movie: what is it to make a film, a film with a 'story' that is supposed to 'engage' the viewer? What kind of response do we think movies elicit?)

The force this shift had on me would not have worked were it not for the excellent acting and the convincing ordinariness of the first part of the film. I was lulled into a scene and suddenly the way I had been viewing things was questioned. For me, this not only had the function of a fashionable philosophical little game: the effect was an emotional one, a sort of dizziness one can also experience in real life. The questions it raises about the difference between authenticity and 'the copy' are so well integrated in the flow of the movie that it didn't end up an academic teaser.

Hamlet Goes Business (1987)

Even though I consider myself a fan of Aki Kaurismäki's movies, I must admit Hamlet Goes Business cannot be counted among his better work. Our Hamlet this time around is a yuppie with money and murder on his mind. Daddy was the director of a company and Hamlet wants to do some real business now daddy's gone. Kaurismäki seizes the opportunity and throws in a few scenes about the new regime of business: factories are to be closed and big bucks are to be made - his uncles plans on selling the assets and investing in .... rubberducks that are to flood the worldwide markets. Hamlet acts like a first-class asshole: he does whatever it takes to get what he wants. So don't expect too much heady stuff. Kaurismäki crafts a work of pulp: b&w sleazy cinematography along with wonderfully wooden acting. Pirkka-Pekka Petelius & Kati Outinen are very good. Beyond that - not much to write home about.

Summer Hours (2008)

I must confess I have had a rather prejudiced (non-)relation to the films of Olivier Assayas. Bourgeois prattling about love in a setting of some idyllic French countryside estate. Even though Summer Hours may correspond to that image to some extent (yes, it takes place in a gorgeous French summerhouse and yes the people in the film are all unabashedly upper-middle class), I was also a bit enchanted by it, regardless of my previous preconceptions. At best, the film resembles the best work of Rohmer, films in which every human encounter may have something unexpected in store and where human relations are seen both under the aspect of the history they carry with them and the way people constantly related to their pasts by relating to the present. Summer hours opens with a party. Helene turns 75 and her children and grandchildren have come to her house in the countryside to celebrate. She wants to settle the business of the estate and how it is to be managed when she is dead. The house contains numberless things and one of the finest aspect of the film is how it delves into diverse attitudes to possessions. The house once belonged to a fairly famous painter. We learn that there are things there that are valuable because they have a market value. Other things, knick-knacks, vases and such, have a personal history, and the family members are attached to these belongings. The mother dies, and now the grown children, some of which live abroad, have to sort out how all of these things, including the house, are to be disposed of.

The film ends beautifully with a sudden shift of attention. The grandchildren are having a party one last time in the house. We now see the house and the things that the different generations have collected, valued or neglected, from a fresh point of view. Surprisingly, this new entry into the history of the house does not take away the feeling of nostalgia, that was not always there before in this languidly told story that most of all carried an atmosphere of matter-of-factness, but rather brings it to the fore but showing that also these young folks have an attachment of their own, different from their parents', to the house and its stories.