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!