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.