Saturday, June 27, 2015

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!

Friday, June 19, 2015

Germany Year Zero (1948)

Unflinching is the word that best describes Rossellini's Germany Year Zero. It might have taken me two screenings to realize how great this film really is, but when I think back on it now I am impressed not only by its famous depiction of a war-stricken city, but also by the deadpan acting by the very young protagonist, whose presence on screen betrays no hint of sentimentality. For me, this film is very different from Rome, Open City which had a much more conventional emotional and narrative structure.

The protagonist's family struggles with poverty. Dad is sick and the sister may be a prostitute. Edmund hustles goods and tries to look for a job, but he is too young. He drifts through the traumatized city, trying to make a buck. We get the immediate sense that his fate is shared by many, many others. The camera pans on the streets on Berlin. Rubble and starving people. Bombed buildings and desperation.

Germany Year Zero has no character development, no story to talk about. It follows Edmund's wanderings through the city and registers his encounters with young criminals, children his own age and a former teacher who has a dubious interest in kids. The only consolation the film offers is the purity of its testimony. It might seem strange to talk about testimony given that this is a fictional narrative, but the approach of the film elicits that concept - testimony. The concept of testimony shows the moral urgency at hand. To talk about testimony is also perhaps to say that these images are connected with a specific responsibility with regard to how something is said, or revealed. I am not sure what status one should lend to the fact that Rossellini used non-professional actors who have lived in the same kind of environment. What matters the most is, I think, the emotional rawness of the film, the way it takes one to the end of the world, so the speak, a world in which there is no hope, no future, no possibilities. I think I have seen no other film in which grief resonates so ravagingly. I wouldn't judge this film from the perspective of technicalities ('innovations' of the neo-realist traditions and how they have fared today) but rather in what way the perspective still rings true.

Adaptation (2002)

I re-watched Spike Jonze's Adaptation and was surprised about how touching it was, in spite of, or perhaps because of all the goofy and looney twists and turns. Perhaps it was my writer's block that did the emotional work. It's hard to say what the film is about, in the end. Obsession, obviously, and the hard labor of imagination - yes. The line between fiction and reality - that too. It's the story about a desperate screenwriter (and his unscrupulous twin!) and his attempt to render Susan Orlean's book about a ... orchid thug ... into a decent film. He worries about his creative independence while at the same time trying to pacify his producer. Adaptation throws us right into the abyss of imagination, its worming paths and overheated outbursts. Rare flowers in the middle of nowhere are paired with the rare flash of inspiration in the middle of the mind's desert. Exploitation is shown to the other side of fascination, and fascination is damn close to ... really dangerous stuff.

Ah yeah, and then there's the love story, stories, or whatever. The writer has developed a crush on Orlean - we sense disaster right at the beginning. And Orlean - she sort of falls in love with the hickey orchid thug about whom she writes the book. Hold on, there's a crime somewhere, as well - of course. Somehow, Jonze succeeds in balancing all this craziness into a watchable and surprisingly moving film. For me, the part as the screenwriter is one of Nicolas Cage's best performances. He fills it with wit, sadness and a dose of agony. It works. Don't forget Cage also plays the screenwriter's twin and that, too, is brilliant. Adaptation never gets pretentious. It toys with the ideas about fiction without the brow being too wrinkled. It fucks with us and we go along with it to New York apartments and weird swamps - and why not? The best thing about the film is perhaps how it, like other Kaufman/Jonze movies grows and grows and grows until it contains what comes to feel like the entire universe in one single film - while also in a way shrinking to the content of a specific person's mind. This process of ridiculous expansion and ridiculous shrinking is what kept me on board.

La Promesse (1996)

La Promesse is one of the early feature films by the Belgian Dardenne brothers. Even so, their distinctive approach to cinema is here fully developed: their meticulous attention to locations and their emphasis on moral ambivalence is strongly present. The existential problems of the main characters are vividly evoked by describing their lived situation. Like few other directors (there is Bresson, of course), the Dardennes' sense of reality is primarily moral - and morality is not reduced to thin concepts of good/evil, right/wrong, but, rather, a plethora of perspectives of deceit, truth, friendship, trust, family and many others.

The protagonist, Igor is a teenager working for his father in a construction business, but he dreams of becoming a mechanic. The people his dad hires are illegal immigrants who live in a house nearby. Roger, the father, is described as a man who tries to earn money from this business, and he does not hesitate to demand high rents from the immigrants. Still, he is not depicted as greedy. We get the sense that he, too, belongs to the working class and tries to make ends meet. But this does not take the edge of his cruelty. One day, there is an accident. A man is killed on the construction site and governmental inspectors of the place are about to arrive. Before the man dies, he talks to Igor and makes him promise to look after his wife & kid. Father and son buries the man in cement, and keep quiet.

The 'promise' is the moral center of the film. What do we do when we promise? What kind of action is it, what makes a promise a promise? The kid continues to work for his father, who places many demands on him, but Igor also tries to help the wife of the dead man. I don't think it would be right to describe the boy as being torn between, for example, two principles or rules. It makes more sense to describe the relations between him and his father, along with the way he is haunted by his conscience. The father manipulates and exploits the workers, and his son longs for his affection, while also being abhorred by his cruelty. Igor simply cannot resist helping the woman. It makes a difference in what spirit the boy is doing this. It makes a difference for what we take the promise to be. We see him vacillate, and even try to send the wife away. He has not been able to tell her about the death of her husband, and is consequently complicit in lies about what has happened. Even when we see him and his father doing very horrible things, we look at this from the point of view of moral struggle. The confrontation between father and son is a climax of emotions and actions that, even though they might seem extra-ordinary, are rooted in familiar desperation.

If I would read the script for La Promesse I would perhaps find it overwrought, its story too constructed. The same thing can be said about many of the Dardennes' films, I suspect. Somehow, I never get this reaction when I watch their movies. They make me see the urgency in a specific moral situation, its different temporal stretches: we see the characters wrestling with choices and we also see in which way this is grounded in the past and in which ways it has implications for the open-ended future. The Dardennes situate their story in a socio-economic context but it should be said that this is no mere 'context'. Their reflections on class, poverty and exploitation is interwoven with the moral quandries. This is what I think make their films truly great: there is no division between 'characters' and 'surroundings' - these are organically linked in the moral universe of the film.

Howl (2010)

A far-out movie about the far-out poet Allen Ginsberg? Howl tries hard to transform the energy of beat poetry into images. It uses spaced-out cartoons to spice the whole thing up, but the result is not enchanting in the least. The entire movie chronicles the life of young Ginsberg, a shy guy in horn-rimmed glasses and ill-fitting clothes. My memory of the film is mostly James Franco reading Ginsberg's poems in an embarrassingly phony way while a hipcat audience in the hipcat coffeehouse cheers on and while not doing that, he is serenading a rather icy Jack Kerouac. Avoid this film! If you have a desire to look at beatniks, go watch the Coen brothers' Inside Llewelyn Davies instead. Much better film, and manages to actually be quite far-out.

Waiting... (2005)

OK so maybe I had the wrong expectations about Waiting..., a quite conventional drama/comedy. Rather than a sociological account of the insecure working conditions of the precariat, we get a film focusing on young people and their immature jargon. Almost: American Pie in a McJob setting. Still, there are some interesting things about this film and it is that it actually takes an interest in work. We meet a group of kids working in a diner. They are aware that their friends who have other jobs look down on them, and most of them try to convince themselves that this thing is just temporary. The film clearly tries to show the boredom of dead-end jobs, but instead of really looking at that existence, the film gets lost in an extravagant plot and stale jokes.

Thursday, June 18, 2015

Force Majeure (2015)

Ruben Östlund has a scathing eye for social tensions. His films tend to scrutinize the moments before conflicts are about to erupt, and they let us follow the ways people try to handle these kinds of often understated eruptions. Force Majeure contains a dose of Östlund's rather grim sense of humor, along with a scenary that is a perfect frame for middle-class crisis: the holiday resort in the Alps.

The drama is centered around a family eating lunch when an avalance breaks out. Tomas grabs his mobile phone and runs away from the restaurant. His wife Ebba understands this as an expression of selfishness and even neglect. The ensuing drama zooms in on marital difficulties. How does Tomas understand the situation? His immediate reaction is to play the whole thing down. He doesn't see why Ebba is shocked - as he sees it, 'upset' - and tries to evade the subject. This makes Ebba feel even more hurt: she thinks that her husband is unwilling to face the truth of what the situation is really like. During all this, there kids are left to themselves. Östlund expertly captures the childrens' sadness and confusion with regard to the parents' conflict.

Force Majeure is a drama laced with caustic comedy. While some have interpreted the film as a film about masculinity, I would tend to view it as more relational. Gender is an important aspect, and Östlund studies the way the spouses' reactions are mutually aggravated in a process of ressentment, silence and outbursts. The wife's anger is coupled with the husband's silence and, later, outbursts - we get to see how destructive emotions are rolled into a complex situation of mutual distrust. At times, the film might lean towards cheap psychologizing and perhaps it can also be said to end up confirming many cinematic clichés about the hollowness of the seemingly ideal middle class life, but mostly, I found the excavation of uncomfortable revelation rather penetrating, given that I take the film to be a satire. 

Stylistically, Östlund borrows a lot from Haneke's clinical frames and sense of sparse location. The hotel is an impersonal space of corridors and balconies. Nature appears as a frightening setting of danger, but also as landscape domesticized by the tourist industry. The snow, the avalanches and the slopes are all seen as factors to be handled and controlled. And the whole thing is punctuated with a few bursts of music - by Vivaldi.

The flaws of the film can be derived from the director's attempt to add some dramatic frills to the basic outline. A few extra characters are thrown into the story, along with an extra catastrophy and an end that leaves one with rather counter-productive questions.

Wall Street (1987)

Re-watching Wall street made me reflect not so much on greed as on desperation and insecurity. Gordon Gekko is of course what this movie is famous for but what grabbed my attention was the young broker, trying to make it in the world of stock gambling. For me, what was moving about the film is the relation between the increasingly successful and increasingly rich broker and his working-class dad, an aircraft mechanic and a union man. The film digs into the self-deception involved in much social mobility and even though it hardly does so subtly, there is some real tension between these characters that I found much more interesting than the steely mannerisms of Michael Douglas. I come to think of Laurent Cantet's marvellous class struggle movie Resources Humaine and the way the hurt  of class differences is brought out there. The focus of Wall street may lie elsewhere (profit-hunting gamblers on the stock market) than on class analysis, but that aspect is still there.