Cria cuervos (1976)

I was totally enthralled by Victor Erice’s Spirit of the beehive. For reasons that are plentiful, while watching Cria cuervos, I imagined that it must be directed by Erice, too. But it is Carlos Saura who made it. Both films share a mysteriousness with which they approach the world of a child – a mysteriousness never even coming close to the cliché about children’s fairy-tale-like perception. Instead, the sense of mystery has to do with a world that, for the child, is barely comprehensible and is, in its lack of intelligibility, traumatic. These films delve in murky waters, attending to insecurity, eeriness and dissonance. And artistically, they have much in common as well, working with an almost painterly sense of composition of the image, where much of what is going on is half-hidden, half-obscured. A third link is the actress who plays the young main character of both movies, a puzzled outsider kid – the great Ana Torrent.

Ana grows up with her two sisters. After both her mom and dad have died, their aunt takes care of them in a gloomy house they also share with a housekeeper and a silent grandmother. The aunt treats the kids with a cold rigidity; she is stern, but somehow well-meaning, and strangely fragile. The sisters tend to each other, listening to music, just being. In several memorable scenes, we see Ana and her sisters listen to a proto-disco tune, a tune that is both catchy and strangely insistent. In another scene, we see them play dead, then coming back to life again, Ana being the person who commands and re-enacts traumatic scenes.

The death of the father is seen in the dramatic beginning of the film, when we see him having sex with some woman (that is not his wife) – and dying. Ana, an enigmatic child, feels guilt about the death of her mother. The film plays out as a dreamy tension between scenes that depict the mother, the sisters’ mundane life and Ana as a grown-up whose past is still present in her life as a menacing shadow (this is emphasized also by the fact that the adult Ana is played by the same actress who plays her mother). The perspective could be called ‘subjective’ – it is Ana’s experiences, her fantasies, her feelings we share. But at the same time the film treats the other characters as persons in their own right. The dynamic between the people in the film is never clarified – it is only shown in suggestive scenes, in which we can only guess at what is going on, and what it means. The same could be said about the sense of fear and guilt. The film is like a question: what was it all about? This question has a glimmer of hope in it, as a bewildered, staggering process of healing and recovery.

The film has often been read as a comment upon the last days on the Franco regime. These hints are obvious, especially with regard to the fact that Ana’s father is a general. There are plenty of ghosts that haunt this movie, and Franco is definitively one of ‘em. The film's paradoxical hopeful sense of foreboding is remarkable.

Rams (2015)

Two scraggy Icelandic brothers are involved in a bitter long-standing quarrel. This is the set-up of Rams, what one could call a pitch-black, tender comedy, directed by Grimur Hakonarson. Gummi and Kiddi haven't talked to each other for ages. They live in a small community in which the major event that everybody wait for is the early sheep-award. The film sticks to the brotherly feud that gets increasingly dangerous. Somewhere, the film loses touch with the story it tries to tell and some of the turns just feel like results of a writer that tries hard to make a dramatic movie about a small community. But somehow, regardless of its sweetness, there is no singular vision here, no urgency, and after a while, even the sweetness comes out a bit artificial. Which is a shame, because Rams has clear potential - not to speak of the grand landscape on display here.

Good men, good women (1995)

I've been quite impresed by the contemplative, slow-moving films I've seen by the Taiwanese director Hsiao-Hsien. Good men, good women was for some reason somewhat disappointing for me. Its part of a trilogoy that very much engages with the history of Taiwan, and at times I felt the stupid viewer who doesn't really get the subtleties of the depictions of change.  The film contains several layers, one of which is a story about a married couple in the forties who go to China to fight against the Japanese. After the war, they return to Taiwan, where they are politically active, but end up as victims of the political repression of the Chiang Kai Shek regime. The other level is about an actor living in an anonymous flat in present-day Taiwan, grieving her boyfriend & drinking booze. Mysteriously, she receives entries from her diary on her fax machine. The parts are related through the actor's preparation of a role where she plays the woman we see in the other story. For me, the two level weren't really satisfactorily intermingled and I tried to guess at the point of having them both. I remember the film for its neat scene composition that often gave very minute descriptions of a life situation by briefly presenting it - and successfully conjuring up not only political tensions but also strong emotions; the scenes capturing the lively atmosphere among intellectuals making a newspaper are especially memorable, and so are the scenes from the gruesome political prison. The film exudes a deep sadness about the traumatic history of Taiwan and the image we get of the present (the 90's) is a country stricken with corruption and commercialization.  

The secret in their eyes (2009)

Lots of films revolve around unsolved crimes that some eccentric is haunted by, perhaps taking one last shot at getting at the truth. The secret is in their eyes is a film that quickly draws the viewer into its own very tense and also very solemn universe. The main character is a legal cancellor who once almost had an affair with his superior. The attempt to solve an old case sparks old memories of their almost-affair, and they meet again. - - But beyond its tense atmosphere, I agree with the reviewer who compares it to a Law & Order episode with a few frames of nudity thrown in for good measure. The problem with the film is that the case is not that interesting, nor is really the tension that is still present between the retired law types. The cinematography is excellent, though. Some political dimensions of Argentina past & present are hinted at, but, sadly, they remain - for me at least - mere hints that aren't really developed into something to get hold of.

A remake has apparently been made of this movie, but I haven't seen it.

The Westerner (1940)

The Westerner is about the encounter between a drifter, Harden, accused of stealing a horse, and a somewhat morally corrupt judge Bean who hangs every man he convicts, on shady grounds, for crimes. The relation between them is not only defined by the drifter's supposed crime, but also by an English actress the drifter says he knows, and whom the judge is infatuated with. William Wyler's romantic western is also about the conflict between cattlemen and homesteaders, where the drifter acts as a kind of peacemaker, but the film never really rises to the level of penetrating analysis of cultural change. The good thing about this movie, if I were to say something in praise of it, is that one of the main characters switches back and forth between villain and good guy.

Our little sister (2015)

Hirokazu Kore-eda is a master of family drama and he shows that in the subdued, yet subtle, film Our little sister. I remember that I felt that the film he made before this contained a few misteps in the direction that submitted to formulaic storytelling. This film may also have touches of that, but it didn't bother me too much. Kore-eda's interest in interpersonal resolution rings true, does not feel contrived. But still, Our little sister wasn't completely satisfactory. The story is about three sisters who adopt their younger stepsister, who come to live with them. The younger sister seems worried in the beginning that they will not adopt her permanently. She also seems shy in their company, showing respect for sisters a few years older than her. This is basically the film - the gradual intimacy between them, and how that intimacy grows out of everyday activities, like preparing food or going for a walk. Kore-eda is good at evoking small nuances of personal relations, the worries and joys that are there without being expressed verbally. An interesting feature of this film, and other films by Kore-eda, is how warm they are - focusing on family not as a place of nightmarish claustrophobia (nor as a conservative utopia). The braveness of Our little sister consists in how dedicated to ordinary life and its sometimes overwhelming, but still small, joys, it really is - to the small changes that develop between people who know each other very well, or who are coming to know one another. I don't know why Our little sister didn't grab me in the same way as some of Kore-edas other films. Maybe I just had the wrong expectations - that I, perhaps unconsciously, hoped for some kinde of climaxtic turns of plot? This is for sure a film I would love to watch again!

Away from her (2006)

Based on a short story by Alice Munro, Away from her is a gentle and, one could say, graceful, yet heartbreaking film directed by Sarah Polley. A marriage changes when the wife gets Alzheimer - but rather than predictable tearjerker, the film develops as an existential drama about what it means to see the person one loves slip away, become unreachable. And the film also choses not to lead us into a narrative that goes from health to sickness and deterioration. When the film starts, a dramatic change has already started. This is a bold move. Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent are both excellent as the married couple. Their roles exude frailty, but in radically different ways. One could say that Away from her focuses on the grieving husband, who is trying to cope with his wife's sickness and also with her attempt to 'spare him'. He feels left out. The film succeeds in making that pain very tangible - it does this in quiet scenes including car rides and trips to the nursing home, to which the wife has moved. Polley does not shy away from the ordinary life of alzheimer's, what living with a person who has it means in the context of ordinary life and routines. The visual style evokes wintry landscapes and harsh light. But, luckily, it does not indulge - I thought - in explicit symbolism. Most of the time, Sarah Polley focuses on sickness in a way that is intermingled with the strange tangle that life is - a tangle of disappointment, joy and grief. She focuses on complexity and relationality, rather than a fetischized attention to the deterioration a person goes through.

Carol (2015)

Todd Haynes moody take on Patricia Highsmith's bittersweet story about closeted love exudes a remarkable dedication to the characters and the story. The languid aesthetics conjures up chilly 50's atmospherics with a fascinated attention to the details of decor and clothing. The slightly grainy cinematography adds some much-needed edge and grit to the slinky dresses and alluring cigarettes.

I haven't really been a fan of Cate Blanchette before, but maybe I just haven't understood her strength. Here, as Carol, the depressed housewife who falls in love with a young shopgirl, here acting has a brave sense of fragility, not to mention a leathal, heavy elegance. The shopgirl, Therese, is subtly played by equally terrific Rooney Mara. We see her intimidated by the older woman, but we also see her acting, being independent, fierce, even. She is very much a young person trying to know herself. These two manage to make us re-consider what is going on in the film, makes us re-consider who these people are. One of Carol's strengths is that, despits its framing in classical melodrama (Sirk), builds upon very unconventional characters. Neither are 'typical' in any sense.

Carol and Therese get involved and from the get-go, the film shows their mutual desire in an extremely powerful way. That desire is, for both of them, intermingled with loneliness. Carol is in the middle of a process of getting divorced, and is scared of losing her daughter. Theresa hangs out with boyfriends, increasingly tired of their prattle and plans. However, Carol is not a film in which we see the lovers hesitate and doubt each other. Yet, they feel lonely and they are scared. The film shows their emotions both directly - focusing on yearning gazes and lines full of secret meaning - and indirectly, for example through how Carol talks to her ex/friend (a Beautifully crafted character, so full of life), or through Therese' bored interaction with her boyfriends.

Sure, there are a couple of one-dimensional characters here. All of them are male. But one might defend this lack of depth with the heart of the movie all the time being the relationship between Carol and Therese. The male characters mainly shed light on the intimacy between the two women.

Rio bravo (1959)

Rio bravo is full of western artificiality but it succeeds, somehow, in filling its limited (this is almost a 'chamber western', no great plains here) world with life and even, a bit surprisingly, sweetness. Sweetness is not perhaps the description one would usually assign to a western movie and here I was also taken aback by this peculiar character of the film. It does have its quota of macho bravura - this is, after all, a John Wayne move - but even Wayne is a bit peculiar in that his role as a sheriff is very physical in a quite unusual way. Physical in the sense not of showing the standard range of masculine posture, but rather in displaying how toughness is suddenly broken down by tenderness. Howard Hawks directed the film and he uses a long format to tell a rather banal story about people gathered in a prison: a drunk, an old guy and a kid gunslinger (bunch of misfits, basically) who all try to protect the town against outlaws that are trying to free a bad guy from jail. Then there is a female gambler for whom the sheriff falls, played by Angie Dickinson with a beautiful range of emotions: she is a woman who shows a resiliant desire for the man, and it is she who pursues him, not the other way around.

However, Rio bravo offers standard fare when it comes to ideology. John Wayne's character is the all-American authority figure protecting the community and above all its female members against external threats. He is brave and he is manly and he is solid - but at least he cannot act on his own, but needs help from figures who might seem weak, but are shown not to be that. This lends some much needed complexity to the story. He is the man who wants to be independent, but this is shown to be a weakness, not a sign of brave strength. The sweetness I talked about is present in the relation between the sheriff and his flawed friends.

The representative of the law, the sheriff is also an image of civilization and social mores. But as I said, the film also shatters the common images of the stone-faced man a bit, and that, perhaps, saves it. (Some moments of random crooning by Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson provide some good cheesiness.)

The quiet roar (2014)

A woman goes to a clinic to undergo a sort of meditative treatment - a sort of hypnosis. She remembers her life, her younger self, scenes of emotional tension. She is diagnozed with life-threatening cancer; she has three months to live. She has a need to reflect on what her life became. The quiet roar quickly established a slow, searching pace. Henrik Hellström has focused on existential matters also in previous films - Man tänker sitt - but here the film somehow never succeeds in inviting the viewer to a quiet place of reflection. The material never really becomes a coherent way of approaching the topic. I have no problem with a shift of tone and uses of different moods and techniques, but here, the effort seems strained. I never really feel involved in the main character's inner journey. However, the acting is often good. Evabritt Strandberg plays the woman who knows she will soon die with dignity and calmness. Hannah Schygulla is the therapist, most of all present through her authoritative voice.

Silent light (2007)

Silent light is not a romance film. It's take on infidelity is rooted in morality and religion. The film pays homage to the Danish director Carl T Dreyer and it also seems to aspire towards Dreyer's singular seriousness. Mostly, this seriousness appears not as a stylistic ploy but rather an attempt to come to terms with something. Johan and Marianne are among the least extravagant lovers I have seen on film. Their infidelity is not represented as an exciting adventure - their affair is simply inevitable, something they cannot resist. Johan's wife knows about the affair; she grievs, but she does not reject him. They are mennonites, and the religious dimension of their lives, of the small Dutch-speaking community in which they live (the story is set in Mexico), is an important aspect of the film. The film treats religion as a way of life, in which ordinary life and faith are intertwined - religion is here far from collectivity and stern rules: rather, confession is emphasized but where people also try to live with difficult things without really acknowledging that they are present. Peace is an ideal, and that ideal is shown in all its ambiguity - as a way of accepting, but also avoiding conflicts.

Nature almost overshadows the characters of the film. The rural landscapes are from the get-go a world in which we are encapsulated - it is no mere adornment. Often, the camera films the characters from far away. The impression is often austere and even sublime (yes, that's a tricky word). A sunriese, almost seen in real time, opens the film, and the experience of darkness/light and chirping birds is one that one will not forget easily.

All scenes do not strike the right chord, but most do. The tone of the film - contemplative wonder, grief - may not smash you with emotion, but it is gripping in a quiet, steady way to see Johan, Esther and Marianne's struggles and agony. Most of all, there is often a sense of waiting here, a sense that gets explicit and heavily loaded towards the end of the film.

Making a film about Mennonites could easily have become a silly obsession with 'people living in the past'. But the people in the films are not turned into caricatures, nor are they exoticized. Their way of life is not turned into a freak-show. Using non-professional actors was probably a good choice. Reygadas choses a stylized, deadpan style for them, rather than the messiness of real life. Mostly, this works quite well, and enhances a sense of waiting - of the agonies that are there, but never fully openly acknowledged. But that technique threatens to make the film lapse into the sort of exoticism it otherwise avoids. The artificiality it goes for is really double-edged.

Vagabond (1985)

Most films about drifters are about men or boys who look for an escape, or who want to find a more free way to live. Agnes Varda's Vagabond is also about an outsider who does not want to settle down, who wants to be independent and free. But in contrast to the tradition of men who seeks to carve out a life in which they settle the conditions, Varda's film is far, far bleaker. The main character is a young woman - one of the harders characters I've seen on film. 'Hard' in a sense I cannot really decide on myself - is she world-weary, is she tough, has she hardened herself? She seems stubborn, but also fragile. Varda leaves all of this quite open, I think; the drifter remains something of a mystery. It is difficult to see what kind of person she is.

It is a simple film, consisting of several encounters between the main character, the drifter, and the people she meets on the road. The film's own harshness (including its wintry, rural landscapes) sometimes makes me think of Bresson. The film plays out as a quest to understand the young woman, and what happened to her. But there is no resolution here, no safe psychological explanations. There are just a few tableux, and we have to connect them and interpret them ourselves. The only thing we know is that she used to work in an office, but now she begs for money, or works on farms for food and shelter. We see her through the eyes of those who meet her. The documentary-like style, however, creates no false pretense at 'real story' (even the voice-over does not do that, the effect is rather the opposite, somehow). Thinking again of Bresson, what 'reality' is here must be defined in other, more existential, terms.

The encounters between the drifters and the people she meets are often a bit disturbing. There are the kind farmers that give her a trailer and some food - but she refuses to participate in their chores. This brings me back to the hardness. There is an air of refusal in her, of resisting something, of detaching. We see her with a professor who takes an interest in her. There is perhaps some erotic tension there. But she moves on, and as the film progresses, her life moves from carefree to miserable. She slides from a state that I would already call detached to a coma-like existence. Varda follows this downfall without sentimentality; we are all the time drawn into the drifter's world, but not directly, rather from the outside, from the perspective of those who meet her. We see her through people's anger, repulsion, attraction. People project their own needs onto her, and she is mostly a blank surface - sometimes playing along, sometimes being silent, stubborn. People feel rejected by her, but also tantalized by her absence-presence, her strange defiance.

Sandrine Bonnaire is marvellous as the mysterious drifter.

Unforgiven (1992)

Unforgiven inhabits classical territory: the story is about revenge. Clint Eastwood - who also directed the film - plays the dangerous killer who has now settled down, trying to lead a quiet life. He has a daughter. He grew up in another era, an era of cowboys and criminals. The world has changed, and he is now an old man. A rider comes by and asks him whether he is interested in making a little money by doing some bounty hunting. The man - he is called William Munny - resists the offer, but then gives in to it. We see that this is no easy decision. Munny has tried to live another kind of life, and all that is now threatened. Typically, the settled-down, quiet life is most of all associated with femininity; Munny's devotion to his new life is a devotion to the women in his life, the dead wife and the daughter. The reason he gives in is also apparently a defense of women: the men who killed a prostitute is to be hunted down. The guy who tries to convince him, Kid, is a mess of a man: he seems to be settled on being a tough killer, despite being blind and clumsy. Munny is old and a bit fragile. This is perhaps what sets the film apart - its emphasis on masculine fragility. This is not something we see often in Westerns, even though there is the ever-present threat of 'weakness'. But here it is not so clear that strength is good and weakness is bad.  We see a transformation of Munnu, but it is not settled whether it is a positive one. He settles in his old ways, his old grimness and lust for vengeance. One could also say that his inner demons are let loose as he is confronted with corruption (he meets a power-hungre sheriff) and is tempted by violence. Beyond the story of a brooding man Unforgiven focuses on the life of the town in which the prostitute was killed. We are presented with journalists, gunslingers, pulp writers and prostitutes. It's a time were legends are already legends - the life of the west is also a life to brag about and try to conjure up. So, much of the film is about people trying to be something, and often failing. It's about inhabiting a world of ambiguity. To the film's defence, one could say that for this reason (the ambiguity) the story does not completely conform with the usual glorification of revenge. Even though there are traces of that. Eastwood's performance is great, and so is also the rest of the crew, especially Morgan Freeman as his partner.

Anatomy of a murder (1959)

A three-hour court drama lingering on sexual mores in an American small-town community, Anatomy of a murder is a captivating, at times even mesmerizing film in which James Stewart is a solitary Bachelor-lawyer called Biegler who dedicates his life to fishing and, more secondarily, it first seems, to his profession. And drinking booze with his alcoholic ex-lawyer pal McCarthy. Otto Preminger’s rendition of life in the courtroom is mostly somber, at times quietly humorous, but rarely melodramatic. It’s a film in which you are allowed to see two men huddling over books in contemplative research. Those scenes set the mood, and renders the film with a throbbing heart – the dynamic between the two lawyers. The bigger drama is that of the one unfolding in court, but the structure of the film is provided by this intimate relationship. And even in court, there is very little of the standard fare, even though there is some battling of the minds, a few ornamental speeches and a hostile prosecution lawyer. But even here, the film shows due patience, letting the audience understand a little of what kind of process a legal process really is – the time it takes, both inside and outside the courtroom. The court is presided by the charming judge, who is presented as a small-town wise man, but without there being anything condescending in that role. The fondness for the rural setting is also enhanced by the character of a big-city state prosecutor, who despises the oddness of the Michigan folk.

The story takes place in a small town in Michigan. A young man is accused of having murdered a bartender. It turns out the bartender might have raped the young man’s wife. The thrill of the story does not in the least reside in the viewer’s puzzle over who committed the crime. What we see is rather people arguing for a case, for and against, guilty or not-guilty – including several remarks and unspoken reactions that are about the personal character of a witness, in this case the wife who seems to have been raped. In this process of justification, a point of view, a range of attitudes towards sexuality and gender are presented. Instead of going with the traditional film convention of unexpected facts appearing that solve the case, Preminger focuses on how events are framed and interpreted in relation to contexts of meaning. The young man is claimed to have been momentarily crazy, and what follows is a long discussion about what it means to lose one’s ability to act thoughtfully and the implications for responsibility that this might. 

The film does all of this calmly, letting the characters speak and react. The film, and many of its character, exudes a respect for the legal system. There is even some tenderness in that approach, which might be a little surprising, given that the theme of the film is sex crimes.

The jazzy score adds some flavor the otherwise rather talky film. James Stewart’s attorney is a jazz fan, and the sometimes jarring and dissonant music lends some sense of restlessness to the crisp images. The music can be heard only outside the court, but it is also an important theme in its own right – the love of jazz reveals something about the solitary attorney and his life.

Another refreshing element of the movie is the rather small, but still important part played with dry wit by Eve Arden. She plays Biegler’s secretary. Her toughness, but also her attention to practicalities like a messy refrigerator and unpaid bills grounds the story even more in ordinary life. This is one of the ways in which Anatomy of a murder never escapes to the glossy spheres of the conventional court drama, where most of what we see is sleek offices and teary or sulking courtroom people.

Stagecoach (1939)

John Wayne did his first role with John Ford playing a wanted murderer trapped inside a Stagecoach with a bunch of eccentric people: a prostitute (with a golden heart - - ), a dandy, an alcoholic and a pregnant lady. The killer and the prostitute fall in love and Dream of escaping the entrapment of society to get a place of their own. Ford mixes action scenes with wistful romance - Stagecoach is in this sense what would become classic western. As in Rio bravo (which I saw a while back) the action is interspered between quieter moments, for example a saloon lady crooning a song. Wayne does the part of the manly man who knows how to charm the womenfolk, while still looking a little bit dangerous. He also knows how to handle dangerous situations, like being chased by indians while riding a stagecoach with a motley crew. The indians are portrayed as brutes riding around to get bloody retaliation. We never see them as persons, only as a hazardous band of savages posing a threat the the White man and, even more so, White woman. The film gets its grandour from the location-shot images of the prarie.

Tears of the sun (2003)

There are not many films that I count among 'worst films I have ever watched'. But Tears of the sun (Antoine Fucua) definitively belongs to them. It is a sentimental and morally corrupt film that uses women and racialized people as ploys in a conventional Rambo type of story. The ending does its very utmost to show the white man rescuing both the white, beautiful woman and the racialized women - from the racialized, brutish men, of course. The poorly written story is about a bunch of yankees, a group of doctors, who are to be saved from a war-stricken African country (the country conjures up the image 'any country') by the US Navy Seal. Bruce Willis plays the grizzled military guy who has seen too much and has hardened himself, but who in his saving mission is changing. The love of and for a woman changes him. She worked at the hospital and she won't leave. So he bribes her by letting in to one of her demands: that the people at the hospital are to come with them. Etc., etc. The war is reduced to a backdrop that is supposed to make us sympathize with an American man and woman. The natives become nothing but Suffering Creatures, without voices or agency of their own. Or - they are shown as brute killers, beyond the human. The entire movie is outrageously self-gratulating. It's trying hard to come out as a humane, sensitive portrait of war and human suffering. Instead: a glossy set of images that are soaked in excessive, exploitative violence and suffering that is a mere prop for a very calculated goal: to jerk out some tears. I was so angry after seeing this movie, that I could barely find words to describe my impression of it.  

The Hateful Eight (2015)

Tarantino leashes out on American history in The Hateful Eight. But I rarely feel that this is a truly combative film that induces important thoughts about the dark history of the united states. It is, at times, a fun, violent film and Jennifer Jason Leigh is stunning (and grim) all the way as the prisoner of a bounty hunter. These two share the stagecoach with a sheriff and a war veteran. Trouble begins when they stop to rest at Minnie's Haberdashery. A storm roars outside, and inside the barn-like place, lies and deception abound and all characters go through a process of pain, suffering and accusation. The film seems to be about a foolish and dangerous process of truth-seeking - the pursuit of truth is hardly heroic.

But often I feel that Tarantino is re-using old tricks, that he knows too well what he is doing - as a technique, that is. But the references rarely come alive, the genre-playing does not rise beyond the sniggeringly self-conscious, i.e. does not quite spark a sense of new understanding. Even though I come to think of how much I love wintry western movies like Track of the cat and McCabe & Mrs Miller.

What lasts in my memory is the cinematography - wide-angled wintry plaines along with a claustrophobic cabin and the paranoia these pictures set off. The chemistry between the actors make an at times rather tiresome story effective.

Black widow (1987)

I can't resist the uber-trashy noir movies from the 80's and early 90's. Black widow (Bob Rafelson) is, however, not even that charming an example of this sleazy genre. Mostly, it is just a badly told story that doesn't really succeed in building the kind of tensions it desperately seeks. On the plus side, there's Debra Winger's dame - a federal investigator, it turns out. The case she is on: a millioner marries people who ends up ... dead. There's another dame in this movie, and she is the millioner. The investigator chases the millioner through the country, tracking down her love affairs and her sinister plots. This is thus not a whodunit kind of story. Rather - the tension lies between the two women. An erotic tension. But Black widow loses that track, and that's what gets lost - an attempt, perhaps, to cater to the heterosexual contract of what a film should be.

THX 1138 (1971)

In his early days, George Lucas craftet the dystopian THX 1138, a film that is nice to watch because of how it (inadvertantly) reflects the time of its making, the free-wheelin' late sixties. Lucas' film may at times be silly - with its religious symbols and fear of  robots and tv:s - but what is more striking is the world it builds with a rather effective visual style that strips the story down in a way that lets the viewer understand how trapped the characters are in the totalitarian society in which they live. What we see bathes in a strange, white light. All environments are anonymous, stripped of everything human - what is revealed to be a sort of void. The place they live is an underground city. As in many of these sci-fi stories, everything 'personal' is forbidden. The regime tries to convert people into mechanical responses. Then there is of course the guy who tries to break free and of course there is also a love story that makes manifest that these creatures are real people, not a bundle of responses. Lucas is successful also when he toys with sounds. The dialogue is only half-heard, as if we hear everything through a thick befuddlement.

Blue valentine (2010)

Dean is a high-school dropout who makes a living as a painter. Cindy is a nurse with ambitions. They are married, and have a young daughter who was born just after they married. Derek Cianfrance crafts a grown-up drama about the agonies of adulthood - life becoming different than what would have dreamed it to be. Blue valentine is a raw film about people who fall in love and grow apart, who fail to take responsibility and seem to perceive no possibilities of where to go in life. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams play the leading roles and they are both excellent. The way these people grow apart is painful to watch - the words that are intended to hurt, the crushing silences and the sorrowful kid. One day, the daughter's dog goes missing, and the parents accuse one another of it happening. Most of the important stuff that happens is not expressed in dramatic lines; the dramatic thing here is a slow change that is hard to pin down; when did it go wrong?

What sets the film apart from most of the movies in this field - the grown-up, realistic dramas about adult relationships - is its class setting. Where most other movies are set in glossy city centers or leafy suburbia, Blue valentine's couple is working-class, barely getting by, hardly working any flashy dream jobs (they are not lawyers or shrinks). We see Dean slowly drifting into a state of alcoholism, while his wife resents his lack of ambition. She seems to mourn the possibilities that were unfulfilled in her own life, how she ended up with this guy who most of all likes to sit at home. The film uses flashbacks to illustrate how their life together was always full of problems. Flashbacks are mostly OK in this movie, but sometimes I feel they are used indulgently. But like for example Revolutionary Road, this is a serious drama about tensions between people who view life differently and who fail to understand how much they hurt one another. There are a couple of scene that works less well than others, but mostly, the rawness hits hard.

Honey (2010)

Honey is the third film in Semih Kaplanöglu's brilliant childhood trilogy that starts with a middle aged poet and ends with a curious little boy. Visually, this is a stunning effort; the camera instantaneously not only establishes glorious-looking rural landscapes - a fictional world is quickly established - a sensually heightened world at that: the birds are chirping, the wind is breezing in the trees. It's strange how the film balances a contemplatively dreamy tone with ordinariness. With regards to the dreaminess, I come to think of the Spanish directors Carlo Saura and Victor Erice - they share the attention to the child's perception and exploration of the world s/he has at hand, a world that is often disconcerting. The resemblance to these Spanish directors is hard to forget when I watch the camera saunter around in the family house, a dimly lit place, a place of shadows and light.

In this case, the six-year old child is worried about his father, a beekeeper, who has disappeared. We see the boy's close, tender relationship with his father; they share a way of talking, a way of being silent, a way of putting shoes on. It is startling and rare to see this kind of quiet intimacy. He is angry with his mother, who tries to comfort him. He walks alone in the woods. At school, he wants to be the boy who earns the Star for excellent performance in reading. But he is not very good. The kid stammers, and through his stammering presence, the grief is almost too much too see. Kaplanöglu works with scenes and rhythm, rather than narrative. His films - the trilogy which I have seen - have a placid pacing which also sometimes harbors ruptures and abrupt cuts. But the feel of the images come first; the progression from one thing to another is poetic, rather than conventionally 'rational'. He is not, I think, a director who seeks to impress his viewer, suffocating us in stunning beauty. The aesthetics of Honey is starkly rooted in everyday life. For this reason, the way he focuses on nature never gets clichéd; the film sticks closely to the kid's perspective, his exploration, his fears. One example of this is when the kid sneaks out on a nightly walk to look at the rain. These are, for me, completely engrossing scenes.

I'd like to watch this film again - I am sure I will be able to make out new dimensions and appreciate new things in the rich images if I watch it a second time.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1964)

Tony Richardson made the brilliant A taste of honey, one of the best films about growing up I know of. It’s head-spinning in its bitter-sweet depiction of family tensions and rejection of stupid social mores. The Distance of a Long Distance Runner is almost equally good and in a similar way, it is a splendid film about being young, about not ‘maturing’ in a conventional sense – the main character resists the tiredness and facileness of adult life. Basically, this is about creating one’s own space, a space of freedom.

Colin (chilly acting by Tom Courtenay) ends up in a reform school after having robbed a bakery. He is from a working-class family, and his father has just died. His mother is a cold woman, but also a sad, fumbling creature. The reform school does its utmost to live up to the ideas of the Empire; the boys are to become docile, hard-working, healthy men. Some of the teachers are bullies. The teacher of physical education has decided that Colin is a promising long-distance runner and sets out to make him a star runner who wins the important race with another school. Colin is skeptical, but it turns out that long-distance running is a space of freedom, so he seems to submit to that suggested path. He meets some friends in the school, and also with these friends, he finds a loophole. They go out to town, and meet girls. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is for the most part a bleak film about adult alienation from joy and a sense of being alive. But Colin's running bears the promise of another life, close to nature, where he does not need to succumb to the shady ideals of the British Empire. The small circle of friends and its youthful play is filmed with a similar ease; the characters are allowed a small break, and all of them are well aware that it is only a very limited space of freedom. This mini-zone is starkly contrasted by the school's order and joyless routines - in one prominent scene, we see dutiful and not so dutiful boys howling 'Jerusalem'. A problem with the film is that it never settles where it seeks to be in the territory in which realism borders parody. Nonetheless, Richardson does a good job in describing a person who does not want to fit in, or win, for that matter. One could say that this film is about class hatred. The school system it depicts seems to be about creating perfectly obedient citizens and workers. The future looms ahead full of worry and angst. The answer seems to be a little private sphere that one can save for oneself, untouched by a society of dignity and hard work.

Not only does this film have some good acting and lots of good lines (it is based on short story) - the cinematography marks the shift from the drably modernist school to the lonesome runner's contact with nature.

Mask (1985)

I was a child when I first watched Peter Bogdanovich’s Mask. In fact, it was one of those films that I watched over and over again, its sadness never failing to touch me. As a grown-up, I was a bit surprised that I still found myself moved by the story, but perhaps in a little different way when I saw it as a kid. The sugary parts didn’t bother me as much as I would have thought and most of all I liked how Bogdanovich conjures up a small world of mother, child and – a friendly motorcycle gang, friends of the family. The kid with the disfigured skull is a sympathetic character and it is hard not to be charmed by Eric Stoltz’ a bit sentimental acting. But the best thing about Mask is actually Cher – she plays the tough mother who scares the shit out of a school principle. She does lots of drugs and hangs out with motorcycle guys – and she seems to be a lovely mother. Mask is basically a story about their relationship. A coming-of-age romance is thrown in, but that is perhaps what strikes me as embarrassing about the film when I watch it today - even though it is fun to watch a young Laura Dern do her version of a girl next door.

A Perfect Day (2014)

The war in Yugoslavia is ending and a group of aid workers find themselves stuck in bureaucratic structures that renders them unable to help. Their mission is to drag a dead person out from a well, so that the corpse won’t spoil the water. This is the set-up of Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s A Perfect Day, a film that tries to be rowdy comedy and social document all at once. Benicio del Toro and Tim Robbins play the tough guys who have grown cynically world-weary - they act like some kind of rock stars. As the well business lapses into a farce, it is his character that delivers the bitter lines about organizational fuck-up. Mélanie Tierry plays the newbie, the one with a working conscience. So, does it work? A perfect day is crass, but not always successful in its attempt to deliver a harshly comical image of aid work. The result is sometimes simply rather insensitive towards what it is in fact trying to do – the war that it chronicles is at times transformed into a mere background for slapstick and action - not to speak of blasting Marilyn Manson and Gogol Bordello tunes. The film's juxtaposition of the idealistic girl and the gnarly cynical male is tiresome and goes by the book in a cheap kind of way. Indeed, the cynical male cracks jokes to impress the sweet idealist girl - he laughs about getting laid and seeing his first corpse. Of course one could say that these things might exist in real life too, and that real people can be clichés and crack stupid and tasteless jokes. But the problem with A Perfect Day is that it does little to show what this reveals about aid work, bureacracy within organization or the psychological pressure of working in a war setting.

Shoeshine (1946)

De Sica's Shoeshine is a rough-hewn, sometimes a bit shaky, film about two kids trying to fulfill their dream - buying a horse - in post-war Italy. Despite its mannerisms and technical flaws (strange cuts and so on) this story about youngsters trying to get by tugs at your heart. Things start going bad when the two boys are commissioned by a calculating brother to sell blankets. They visit a fortune teller and sell a blanket to her. With that money, they are finally able to buy the horse they have been dreaming of. In gloriously joyous scenes, we see the kids riding outside the city on their horse. But the cops are after them. They are accused of having stolen money from the fortune teller, and are sent to a juvenile detention center. The rest of the film is a harsh study of the conditions in the juvenile detention center. The kids are separated. The police try to force them to admit their guilt or to reveal who stole the money. After one of the kids thinks that his friend is beaten, he reveals the truth. The kids have their hearing and are sentenced to several years in prison. One of the kids try and escape with another friend. There is a prison riot and one youngster dies. The kid who is left behind is angry and seeks revenge.... Shoeshine is not a pretty film. The acting is not perfect, but the roughness in these actors make it all work. The brutality goes all the way from lines to settings - the story starts with a Dream, and ends with - you guessed it. Even if this is far from de Sica's best film, Shoeshine is worth watching because of its fearless attempt to shed lights on the outsiders of society and the cruelness they are met with. The disintegration of the boys' friendship is linked to the authoritarian prison system. The kids' former bond is broken and the kids start to act like the calculating brother - each thinking of his own interest. De Sica simply confronts us with this brutal set of social conditions that transform people into scheming behavior, never falsely relying on sentimental tricks. Here, its all about dog eat dog.

Blue is the warmest color (2015)

Is Blue is the warmest color (Abdellatif Kechiche) a harrowing description of the rush of falling in love (and the pains of falling out of it) or is it rather an exploitative sexualization of lesbians aimed at a male, straight audience? Controversies around this film abound, and it is difficult not to take them seriously. But what about the film (is there such a thing as 'the film itself' - I'm not sure, that type of distinction are valid at times.) The film does capture what it means to grow up in a way that does not quite fall into the usual traps (a cynical attitude towards what is perceived as 'innocence'), even though it certainly focuses on a process of maturation. The high-school kid we see in the beginning, who falls in love with the older art student, changes into a grown-up who has to decide what is important in her life. Blue is the warmest color is a story told from her perspective - it is her awakened and head-spinning love and also the isolation she later comes to feel in the relationship that the audience gets to know. Her partner is always the more experienced, better educated, and they both know it. Later on, the distance that grows between them is portrayed with regard to their different attitudes to the dying romance. This is where the film succeeds - it focuses on the rancor, the insecurity and the desire to reconnect felt by the ex-lovers.

An aspect that hasn't really been brought out in relation to this movie (when so much attention is paid to its sex scenes...) is its preoccupation with class. Adele and Emma are from different social backgrounds, and this is an aspect both of how their affair develops and how it fades out. One comes from a sophisticated family where you eat oysters and talk about art, while the other's family eat spaghetti and trying to act normal. Emma is an aspiring artist, and early on in the film, I worried that the movie would fall prey to the plentiful clichés about beautiful, romantic young artists who love to sketch their amour in a leafy park. But by and by, the image of the art world changed - the viewer notices that we see Adele's changed relation to Emma also from the point of view of the role art and the art crowd has in their lives. In one of the best scenes, a garden party is arranged in their garden. Emma has invited her artsy friends. Adele has prepared to food, and is trying to act the part of the easygoing hostess. The sadness and the insecurity she feels in the setting is forcefully conveyed.

What sets the film apart is how Kechiche never treats young love as an immature stage which you are suddenly over, so that you are now prepared to see what life is really about. The relationship between the two is treated as an encounter and a connection between two specific people, not a 'preparation' where the lover is just a sort of anonymous role. Kechiche, one could say, takes the lives and emotions of young people seriously - they are not reduced to, for example, cynical or plaintive ideas about What It Is Like To Be Young. This is revealed in how much of the film pays attention to nuances in how young people talk and act (and act in different settings). That said, I think the accusation of exoticizing sexualization of lesbians is not entirely unfounded - there are clumsy (yet sophisticated) scenes in which the audience is simply invited to ogle young folks' bodies; I simply don't agree with the people who argue that also these scenes in a precise way show the character of the relation. Instead, I felt that they were orchestrated in accordance with cinematic traditions about how to deal with sex 'without shying away'. There are also other, quite many, tacky details where the film leaves its perceptive route and chooses cheap symbols or references instead (the color blue...).

They were expendable (1945)

When I watch They were expendable, John Ford's reputation as an all-american director really gets clear to me. I mean, this is the same director that made The Grapes of Wrath, but one could say that the images of "the nation" (or whatever you want to call it) are from two different world. Where the latter emphasizes antagonism and conflict in a time of turmoil, the former presents a nation that must stick together in difficult times. They were expendable is a war movie made when the war was still roaring. It does not seem exaggerated to call it a propaganda movie. The story centers on the flotilla retreating from the Philippines in 1941-2. Here we have the gloriously brave & super-masculine navy men who made the Nation proud. Amid the torpedo-boat action some tear-jerking moments bring forth the gallantry and women-loving character of these men. Heroic battles and slow-burning love scenes: John Ford not only wants to make a movie about war but also about how the soldiers are ordinary people as well. Too bad that he is so involved in the quest for patriotic storytelling and that the film, as a result, contains almost no tension whatsoever. The thrill of the battle scene feels dusty and the sections that take us to the harbor or the war hospital drip with sentimental American pride.The film is said to be good because it realistically shows people committed to doing their job. This description hints at the perspective on war here: war is a project to simply go through with, as a man, with dignity and courage. John Wayne & Robert Montgomery play the heroes. The tragedy is that of the doomed battle, and at times there are moments where the fear of the soldiers shines through. These are the best parts of They were expendable - when the film diverts from its patriotic framework. It does this in focusing on the failures of the central characters - rather than being acknowledged as war heroes, they are dethroned. What can be said for this film is also that it never demonizes Japanese soldiers - they are simply never shown.

Ludwig (1972)

Finnish state television made a bold move by broadcasting a rather unconventional movie on Christmas Eve - Visconti's Ludwig is not your standard chrimstmassy Capra fare but rather a zany, bombastic (in a good way) movie about Ludgwig II, king of Bavaria, who became king in 1864 . The film has not always gained positive reviews. Ebert calls it "lethargic". But for me, it was the wonderfully gloomy lethargy that drove this film to its conclusion, and doing it in unfaltering style. One may complain about Visconti's strange obsession with decadence (as in others of his movies from this period) - there are some scenes in which you are not sure whether you are watching this movie or The Damned. But here what he does conjures up a culture, what that culture creates.

Ludwig the king is a melancholy fellow who is friends with Wagner. This friendship is rendered in an odd way - we see the two huddle in Wagner's rooms, accompanied by the composer's big and fluffy dog. Wagner is acted with a sort of understatement - he is a workaholic and a supremely self-centered man. The film follows Ludwig's progression, or digression/depression) from shy young man to the king who built crazy castles and tried to rule the world from his bed. But we know very little about the world outside Ludwig's bedroom. We get the sense that Ludwig has very little insight into the world around him. His being king is a heavy burden he cannot handle.

Instead of relying on the traditional biography movie pattern - creating historical panoramas, as it were - Visconti opts for a much more enigmatic and, well, personal path. Which makes Ludwig much more interesting than most films about historical figures. Idiosyncratic, yes, hard to follow at times, yes, tedious moments, yes. But all in all - the weirdness and the brooding, heavy atmosphere (not to mention the sets) saves this movie. The shadows loom depressingly over rotten civilization while the hollow-eyed characters sleep-walk through ridiculously ornamental hallways. Ludwig may be a shallow film that doesn't teach you a lot about Germany in the 19th century, but what it loses in seriousness it wins in decadent splendor.

Taxi Teheran (2015)

A taxi driver who does not know the city (Teheran) very well talks to a bunch of people who, for different reasons, ride with him in his car. The idea of Taxi is a very simple one, but for all that, an entire world seems to seep into this apparent simplicity. Jafar Panahi often toys with the distinction between reality and fiction, and here he does that as well, in a tender and extremely unpretentious way. Or at least that was how it seemed to me. Some of the customers recognize Panahi as the prominent director. Movie-making is also the topic of some of the conversation between "Jafar" and his precocious niece, who is engaged in a film project at school. The charm of the film lies in the vivid portrait of various people it manages to paint. It has the gentle flow of life itself, with a variety of people from different walks of life. The camera is always placed on the front panel of the car, but even so, the perspective we are given never feels static. Plenty of things are going on, despite the very limited framework. Taxi Teheran is a light-hearted film that takes on its sometimes controversial (in Iran) subjects - among them censorship and punishment) with gentle humor and warm humanity. It is impressive that a director who has been banned in his own country (a 20 year ban on making films!) is able to keep up this kind of complete lack of resentment or bitterness.

What perhaps makes this film so good is that its improvisational feel works very well here. The conversations drift here and there, and always succeeds in keeping me focused and interested. The references to Panahi's celebrity at no point feels like an act of self-glorification; the Panahi we see here as a fiction character is a humble guy who often embarrasses himself and whose celebrity always has a very ambiguous role. In one of the most funny sections, some kind of under-the-table-video-store guy rolls into the car and starts to chat with Panahi. He rents out banned movies - a perfect moment to make some good business! There is also the niece for whom Panahi is a bumbling old-timer who never does the right thing. She establishes her own perspective by directing her camera at Panahi. The two talk about what can and cannot be shown on film. The girl's teacher has instructed the pupils sternly, and now she is already trying to revolt a little - by filming a boy who is taking money which isn't his and then demanding the boy to give the money back because otherwise she would be breaking the rules of film-making! The film also has sad moments, as when Panahi meets an acquaintance he hasn't meet for a long time, and there is an uncanny awkwardness between them. For all this, Taxi Teheran is in a most curious way a hopeful and quietly defiant film about people who are living in difficult surroundings.

Time stood still (1959)

Ermanno Olmi is the director of one of my favorite movies, the gloomy coming-of-age story Il posto in which an office boy is introduced to the drudgery of work. But to me, his films seem very under-appreciated. I very rarely hear people talk about them or write about them.

That's why I haven't heard anything about one of his early films, Time stood still, a small gem of a movie about two people, a middle-aged man and a boy, who have to endure one another's company. These two guys are caretakers of an isolated working site in the Italian Alps. It's winter, and the conditions are harsh. The boy is a newcomer, replacing another guy who is having a vacatin. Time stood still explores the tension between the two using quiet humor and unhurried takes. We see them in their hut, huddling over books (the boy is trying to prepare for an exam) or preparing food. The boy marvels at the older man's habits and the simplicity of this life in the Alps. He likes to play his rock n' roll records and have a merry time. One day there is a storm, and their quiet habits are disturbed. The story could easily have become cartoonish: the boy with his youth culture and the grumpy oldtimer. But youth culture is not derided, nor is the robust ways of the mountainside romanticized. Olmi breaks down the clichés and lets us see the small nuances of human interaction. A twitch of the mouth, a displeased gesture, a rebellious swag - all of these everyday elements matter. One could say that the mastery he shows in doing this bears a similarity to a movie from a different time and place, Nuri Ceylan's Uzak. The last segment of the film shifts its tone a bit, introducing what might be called a religious dimension. These scenes take place in a church, and even the church is imbued with the same earthy qualities as the rest of the film.

Atlantic city (1980)

Atlantic city was made in 1980, just before American movies started to be more about glitz and stocks than about seedy streets and dingy bars. Louis Malle makes Atlantic city look not only seedy but also, well, human; a city full of casinos and gambling and corrupt types looks like it is inhabited by real human beings, living on real streets. We get the sense that the city is changing quickly, the old is destroyed and brutally exchanged with the new. One of the central location is a shabby apartment house, a slab of concrete about to be demolished in which human dramas play out. The film makes us care about its equally seedy characters, an elderly gangster, Lou - great, great Burt Lancaster! - and woman, Sally (Susan Sarandon), who works in an ugly-looking oyster place. Lou who used to be a gangster but is now a numbers runner - when he is not taking care of an old widow - he is bossed around, submissively doing his chores. At some point, Sally and Lou meet and some sort of friendship/romantic affair arises between them. Atlantic city is wistful film where the olden days hover as a hazy memory about crime and perhaps a bit of romance - Lou wants to revive the old times when he (supposedly) was a big and important crook. A complicating factor is  Sally's ex-husband who comes into town with his new gf, Sally's sister. He is a drug dealer and it turns out that all sorts of criminals are after him and there's hell to pay. There's a tangle of drug money, violence and erotic liasions. Malle as I said emphasizes the wistful and the decayed in what I see as a rather good movie that really makes its characters come alive - not to speak of the city itself, which is the main character. Burt Lancaster's stunning performance as the aging man who dreams of his youth is a reason alone to watch it.

Louis Malle's American production is a varied set. I liked his take on Chechov, Vanya on 42 street, but was not overwhelmed by the philosophical My dinner with Andre. Atlantic city was a surprising viewing experience for me because I had no expectations. It is by no means a great film but a small gem when it comes to the type of movies that was made in the 70's in the USA.

The Martian (2015)

I consider The Martian to be an utmost offence to humanity as a whole. The plot is so, so, so indulgent that I feel embarrassed to be an earthling. This is the deal: an astronaut called Mark, all-American guy, goes on a mannet mission to the red planet. Shit happens and the rest of the crew dies. The NASA folks back home assumes Mark is dead, too. SO: he must reach out to the home base and tell them that he is alive .... so that he can go home somehow. THEN when it finally dawns on the NASA crew that the guy is actually alive they collect a GIGANTIC mission to fetch the kid back through space to our planet. Mark himself is a master of inventiveness. He shows that all problems can be solved with a strong-willed "let's science the shit outtta this". He is the survivor-type, who doggedly goes to Work, that is, when he is not musing about Life and Science in his video diary. The Martian is of course little more than a fairy tale for adults that uses space travelling and science as ploys. The message is that you can do whatever if you just put your mind to it. So, shame on you, Ridley Scott, this film is in the worst possible league of individualist celebration of the very white, very male do-it-yourself-American. Poor Matt Damon tries to act the part, but well, I don't think anyone could save this kind of bad story.
The ONLY kind word I have to offer here is that terrible, terrible music from the 70's is used in a way that is simply brilliant and actually a bit moving at times.
Compared to The Martian, I realize why a film like Gravity shines forth as a far superior rendition of space-stuff. The latter film makes space seem, well, scary. The former film makes Mars seem as boring as a shopping mall on Friday night.

The Fisher King (1991)

I have never really fallen in love with Terry Gilliam's cinematic worlds. Even though his films in some way epitomize what "imagination" is, they have still never spoken to me as imaginative in the sense where imagination is something beyond mere playfulness. Brazil and Life of Brian are classics of course, but to me, it never caught me in the way for example Jacques Tati's movies move me. The Fisher king belongs to these imaginative and eccentric feats as well: a mundane world of stressed-out New Yorkers is intermingled with ... knights! And loonies. I can't quite make up my mind whether the film is just a plodding mish-mash of elements or whether there is a core of the film that bears an emotional resonance. The story turns on the encounter between Jeff Bridge's world-weary radio host and a homeless guy overplayed by Robin Williams. Perhaps its not so much Gilliam's eccentric leanings that disappoint me but rather Williams' terrible acting. Or a combination of eccentric stuff that just don't work and sloppy acting. Still, there are a few funny moments in here that involves drunken looting and gritty New York, so the film is not a complete disaster.

La bete humaine (1938)

The whirling and thundering train ride in the first images of Renoir's La bete humaine (based on a novel by Zola) a stunning introduction to an interesting, yet at times rather questionable, movie. These images of the speeding train are so vivid (nice tracking shots) that I am tempted to use the expression of "feeling as if you were there". The roaring sound and the almost sea-sick cinematography conveys a sense of a dangerous path. This is also what the film is about, a dangerous path. It is not strange that La bete humaine, with its doomsridden story, is considered to be a sort of noir-before-noir .

Jean Gabin plays a train engineer, Lantier. He loves his trains, he loves his work. When he meets the beautiful Severine something is awoken within him - something dangerous. It turns out that he is driven by dark impulses - rendered as veritable forces - that he cannot handle (these impulses are coupled with some shady ideas about hereditory character traits; his father was an alcoholic). Severine is married to a stationmaster. The husband is jealous because of an affair Severine is supposed to have had with her uncle many years ago. Much plotting takes place, some of it murderous. The stationmaster kills Severine's uncle and Severine tries to make Lantier kill the stationmaster.

La bete humaine chronicles a series of events where men are driven to violence against women, or driven to violence because of their jealousy. In one scene, we see the stationwagon talking to his wife about her uncle. It's a frightening scene that portays psychological violence. But La bete humaine treats its subject in an extremely problematic way. Violence is here almost an expression of a fatalist path; the violence we see is an expression of uncontrollable powers. Lantier is described as a man whose relation to women is necessarily violent. In an early scene, we see him together with a young girl. A romantic moment by the train tracks is suddenly transformed into a murder attempt - the women's scream is droned out by the sound of a roaring train. When Lantier meets Severine, we have the feeling that this will not be a cozy little affair. But strangely, Renoir still tries to infuse their relation with a bit of glossy and even melodramatic romance. The effect is very strange when this glossy romance turns into - well, something else entirely. This mix of the romantic/the foreboding is encapusated in a scene taking place in a dance hall. The music pounds, we see Lantier, increasingly strange-looking. Something weird is happening with the cinematography - the haze Lantier is in is magnificently conjured up.

La bete humaine is rewarding as a film precisely because of its strange perspective. Renoir seems to have been on a roll in his career; a year earlier he made the war movie The Grand Illusion and the year after he made the excellent The Rules of the Game.

Milk (2008)

Milk is the second part of Semih Kaplanoglu's autobiographical trilogy. The films are loosely related, and a ideosyncratic aspect of the trilogy is that the story is told backwards - the first film is about a grown man, the second about a teenager, the third about a child. The main character, Yusuf, we saw in Egg is here an aspiring poet. He lives in a small child with his mum and as he did not make it in the entrance exam for the university he has to settle for another kind of life. This is not easy. He makes a little money selling milk. He's in love with a girl who is also having an affair with another man. The film deals with the young person's ordeals in trying to get clear about the future. A political dimension of the film appears when it is evident that Yusuf is supposed to do his military service. Yusuf seems to loathe the idea of joining - this is not the life he wants. Anyway, he is not forced to go because he is an epileptic. He is a dreamer, a loner. But somehow, the film manages to dodge almost all clichés about dreamy young men - Kaplanoglu offers us a gentle, yearning perspective that perceptively captures what it is like to worry about the big choices one has to do in life. One of the central relationships here is the one between Yusuf and his mother, whom he adores - he even writes poems about her. Oedipal drama? Well, not in the way you expect it, I think. The boy is eager to be the good son, the worthy son - and seems to fear that he is failing also in this respect. The mother has met a new man, an official - this changes their relationship and we see some kind of resentment in the son. The son feels rejected, perhaps humiliated.

The visual style of Milk is stunningly beautiful, but not in an overwrought way. Kaplanoglu's film is at times so striking that it is difficult to watch. The first scene is so eerie that one is almost jumping out of one's chair - I will not say more about it here. I know nothing about rural Turkey so I cannot say anything about that, but it is the surroundings that stand out. One segment that is hard to forget is a visit that Yusuf pays at his friends job. The friend work in a mine. But also he is a poet. The two talk. It's a scene full of sadness - crushed dreams, longings, fears.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

The Maltese Falcon is of course a classic noir film and as usual with these films, the story itself is secondary - the most important thing is how the characters view what is going on, how they perceive a very complex chain of events, how they are dragged into something, lead into something or are investing themselves. The concrete plot (based on some novel by Dashiell Hammett) is about a private detective who is immersed in the search for a statuette. A dame (Mary Astor!) with some phoney tale is, of course, the reason why he ended up in the mess. In this film, the main character is not the usual anti-hero in the sense that Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade seems to have far more insight into what is going on compared to most of the manically driven noir types. Then again, this movie was made in 1941 and there was barely such a thing as film noir. But Spade is otherwise the sort of weary-looking guy that hundreds of noir films rely on: the tough, sometimes violent, man who talks in muscular idiom.

John Huston focuses on the cravings, the hostility and the lust - and perhaps also a sense of "honor", code of morals: a sense of what one has to do, despite one's personal feelings about it - a very interesting form of conventional morality where the question arises: what does Spade really care about? Obviously, it is not the murdered partner. The Maltese Falcon is thus a violent film, even though it does not show that much explicit violence. There is more an air of violence that never leaves. There is for example a brilliantly filmed conversation between Sam Spade and a shady crook called Gutman. The camera swirls, Gutman offers Spade a drink, they talk, Spade drinks - and passes out. There are many scenes like this, vigorosly built, where tough talk and tough dealings make one thing lead to another, double-crossings and triple-crossings.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)

Even though I am no connoisseur of Dario Argento's films (having seen only one or two, many years ago), I highly enjoyed the utterly stylish and stylized horror sleaze of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. The standard fare story involves a bystander in a labyrinthine quest - its unclear what this quest is, but at first he sets out to find a murderer, then he is accused of the murder himself, and then he is chased by the murderer. The images evoke a world of cat-eating weirdos, stuttering pimps and dark alleys. Cheap tricks are used to great effect. The main character, the American bystander, has the sort of innocent mania that is propulsive in this kind of context. During the first dramatic part of the film, we see him witnessing a horrifying scene in an art gallery, where a man is trying to kill a woman. The American enters the gallery by breaking the window, but is then trapped. The images immediately create a splash; colorful, kitschy and evocative. Argento knows his craft and plays on the viewer's worry about what will happen the next second. Some argue that The Bird with the Crystal Plumage hints at broader social topics and that it contains several references to patterns of social domination. I must admit I did not pay much attention to such undercurrents. I just noticed that cages were an important image (birds kept in a cage, a lunatic artist keeping cats in cages, the apartment that becomes a leathal cage), and is also mentioned in the title. The ending scene shows a boxy television and on the screen we see a cheesy studio, in which a murder is transformed into sensationalism - a sort of entertainment cage.

Color me Kubrick (2005)

A film about bad impersonaters of famous directors sounds like a lousy meta-movie. Color me Kubrick is intentionally lousy, a farcical film about a guy who says he is Stanley Kubrik, the director of 2001, A Clockwork Orange and Judgement at Nurenberg. John Malcovich is of course a good choice for this kind of role - Malkovich is good at dry, dead-serious people with blank faces. Color me Kubrick is absolutely no cinematic masterpiece, but it is quite funny to watch how the rather drab story about a guy who tries to fool people gradually turns into a carnival of, well, very, very bad acting. Malkovich's con artist is savvy and outlandish and tries to impress everyone from tough guys to big shots in the entertainment business. It is this savviness that rescues this otherwise quite, quite shaky affair.

Her (2013)

A guy in love, the classical storyline. A guy in love with a silky-voiced operative system - a not so likely plot for a romance movie. Or maybe Her is not a romance, more a leathally funny dystopia of what we might become. Spike Jonze created a beatifully crafted and restrained movie that uses its crazy but still eerily recognizable story as a leverage for social critique. But the basic level of the tensions developed is the deep loneliness felt by the shy main character, a drab newly divorced office worker, Theodore, brilliantly played by Joaquin Phoenix. His job consists in writing emails for other people who cannot express their emotions. Theodore acquires a new operative system, a kind of electronic assistant. Voice and all. The assistant develops from mecanic task manager to ... well - every description depends on Theodore's attachment. So basically this operative system bears a resemblance to Theodore's office job - a function that stands in for emotions. The world of Her revolves around attempts to make emotions calculable. Theodore's romantic "partner" is his friend who always reasserts him, boosts him, always has a soothing word. But, oh, then it's this thing about "learning" algorithms. Theodore's OS has a, erm, life of her own. Her muses on the familiar image of the expanding and dangerous machine. Instead of HAL, we have a silky-voiced OS that teams up with her ... friends. The film works because it uses its sci-fi-leanings not as a detached thought experiment but rather as an emotionally grounded investigation of loneliness and social awkwardness. Theodore's OS is the perfect image of wishful thinking - and of course it turns out that there are more to us than our simple wishes, even those wishes are not that simple. Her shows the brittle character of a world that we try to construct and manage, and it also show, to toe-curling effects, what happens when things fall apart. Some of the most memorable scenes portray Theodore's interaction with "real" people - Jonze masterfully mixes the comical with the sadness that these human encounters express. Hoyte van Hoytema's cinematography frames these moments in minimalist, almost claustrophobic settings and lets them bathe in a worrisomely clean-looking light.

Onibaba (1964)

One of the movies that have really struck with me in a way that I can't really explain is Woman in the dunes, the strangely evocative film (directed by HiroshiTeshigahara) about an entomologisk who is stuck with a woman who lives in a pit. Onibaba, directed by Kaneto Shindo and released in the same year, has a similar dreamy and mysterious quality - and they also share a focus on the sensual that never strays from the mysterious tone. Nothing is explicitly explained in these two movies. We are taken to places - in the latter case, a wild and rugged-looking grassland. The time: feudal, pre-modern. The story of Onibaba has mythical qualities, but none of this has the effect of distancing. Basically, the tension that builds up between the characters pours from basic emotions, erotic jealousy. And gruesome, almost cosmic, revenge (the story is said to be based on a Buddhist parapble, but no explicit references of this kind are obvious to this viewer.)

A woman lives in a swampland with her daughter-in-law. Most of the people they meet are soldiers. But these are not the meek kind. They are killers who murder samurais and sell the goods they scavenge. Their cozy little routine is threatened when a man tells them that the son/husband is dead. The man asks all kinds of questions. The older women suspects that the daughter-in-law will engage in both business and other affairs with this man, and tries to offer her own services to him. This is the starting point of a series of hostile and also genuinely scary events. A demon's mask will have a significant role.

The reason why Onibaba is actually a frightening film is that it so closely takes us to a specific place - we are, so to speak, dragged deeper and deeper into the world of the movie. The place - with sword-like grass and compact, thick nights - almost becomes a character in itself. One could say that it is a family drama that lapses into a horror story immersed in erotic tangles and fears. A family drama that is the opposite of "genteel". Onibaba is all about lust, blood and darkness. Along with sweaty, matter-of-fact acting that really enhances the grimness of the gothic tale.

Shindo has made lots of movies. I haven't seen many of them, except for the marvellous, haunting documentary-like Naked island that was made a few years before Onibaba. Both films attend to a ritual-like form of existence, even though they show extremely different existential modes.

Bekas (2012)

The protagonists of Karzan Kader's Bekas are two brothers, Kurdish orphans, who try to survive in a war-stricken country. The story is set in the 90's in the Iraqi part of Kurdistan. The kids head out on a journey in which they try to cross the boarder. They run into shrewd smugglers and shady businessmen - the world of the grown-ups is a world of war and cruel deals. The brothers often fight but when they are torn from each other they long for one another. Even though the film engages with tough living situation and manages to make the viewer care about the characters, I get the feeling that the attempt to evoke "the children's perspective" is imprisoned within a very traditional cinematic way of presenting this perspective. The director seems to be worried about the viewer being unable to take interest in a harsh story about kids growing up in hostile circumstances, a military zone. He choses the path of "childish imagination" to shed light on their predicament. The two kids dream about America, about Superman. Their dreams could of course have been used in a good way but here this land-of-nowhere is reduced to formulaic scenes: two kids screaming their lungs out on top of a hill, action-packed danger scenes, a donkey called Michael Jackson, a small romance, even.... The cinematography is much too neat and the music enhances the sugary vibe.

Tru love (2013)

The yearly LGBTQ film festival in Turku is a treat of both feature movies, shorts and documentaries. All movies are not great, but it is great to watch new films from various countries. This years I watched Tru love (dir. Kate Johnson/Shauna MacDonald), a well-meaning but rather conventional film about a woman who falls in love with her friend's mother. The main character: a rugged type with committment problems. The friend: the straight girl who has second thoughts about who she is. The theme in itself is good, and the film explores a mother-daughter relationship in a way that reveals fragility and hang-ups. Sadly, the directors do not steer away from melodramatic traps and the directors also seemed to have been preoccupied in a problematic way with offering a Haunting Lesbian Love Story. The storytelling is, to put it short, not very skillful. The film is partly bogged down in schematic ideas about how a conflict is to be showed on the wide screen. How about the way this film is executed? The cinematography tries to evoke a poetically wintry New York. The result, I must say, is quite flat. The magic never happens. The result - the composition of images - is at times embarrassingly calculated and there are few moments when it does not feel belabored. The big flaw of Tru Love is that it does not rely on subtlety, that is, the viewer's capacity to realize how things are. Every aspect of the relationships are spelled out meticulously - which pretty much ends up killing the movie and the dynamic between the people in it.  

The Apartment (1960)

How many movies about hetero-patriarchy and office politics do you know? Well, Billy Wilder's The Apartment is one of the few that come to my mind. It might be to stretch it a bit too far to desribe it in this way, but there's something true about it, regardless of the lighthearted tone of the film. The anti-hero of the story is called C.C. Baxter and what gives him a place in the world is the fact that he has an apartment ... that he borrows to his sleazy bosses who want a fuck-pad for their girls. He wants to change jobs and does whatever it takes. He climbs the career ladder while being practically homeless.  The film focuses on the loneliness that this career-climbing requires. The film really manages to bring out the sleaziness of these elderly guys and their need to take care of their business in a practical, low-key way. Visually the film is a treat as well. The office looks gloomily sterile; a place where nobody can be at home. Endless rows of desks, harsh light, anonymous space. Idle chatter by the elevators. This is contrast with the apartment, the home - that is no longer a home. Jack Lemmon is quite great as the mousey Baxter - he lends some warmth to the figure. The viewer is always on his side. The comical twists and turns feel a bit outdated: there is the neighbor who assumes that Baxter is some big-shot Cassanova because of the sounds that can be heard through the walls. Etcetera. But interestingly, the romantic plot of the film doesn't just add to the lightheartedness, but has a critical side as well: Baxter and the girl he fancies share the idea of making "a practical deal" by sacrifizing certain things. In general The Apartment is a pleasant movie ... about hetero-patriarchy and the dreadful lies of "meritocracy" in the office.

(500) Days of Summer (2009)

In (500) Days of Summer (dir. Marc Webb) a messed-up chronology is a device to chronicle a failed romance. Unlike most similar movies, it does not start from the moments at which the parties laid eyes on each other, to go on to various expressions of romantic interest, etc. This film goes about it differently, perhaps wanting to give a more authentic picture of how we remenber things, that when we think back on something, we do not line things up in a neat series of events. Usually, memories appear chaotically, sometimes involuntarily. One thing is associated with another, it's all a jumble of emotion and thought. This is perhaps the most interesting feature of this otherwise conventional tale about the guy who falls for the girl who shies from attachment. - - - My own impression of the way this film takes on its subject is that there are an ugly undercurrent there somewhere. So the guy wants the girl but the girl wants to be independent. The story is told from the guy's perspective, which is also the film's point of view, it seems. I would say that the pespective expressed, but never really acknowledged, is that of self-sentimentality, of pity for oneself. The main character seems more in love with being in love, than nurturing a real interest for the lover. She seems to be reduced to an image, and when she breaks with that image, he is shattered. (500) Days of Summer in no way departs from the old&tired tradition of making movies about guys whose yearning is directed at "mysterious girl", and where this "mysteriousness" is both the core of attraction and the big problem. We end up with the following piece of eternal wisdom: women, you truly madden us men.

Starship troopers (1997)

Paul Verhoeven is in ... his own league as usual. In good and bad ways. Starship troopers is a sleazy sci-fi movie that one may or may not interpret as a parody of what a fascist utopia would be like. Or if one leaves that high-brow interpretation behind, one could just say that Starship troopers is a ridiculous movie swimming in repulsive ideals. Mankind is under threat and this time, the threat is embodied by giant bugs, horrific-looking and terribly hostile, of course. The film shows mankind at war with the bug-things, which are entirely reduced to their killing capacity. We are introduced to a bunch of kids who are about to do their military service in this war. Military service is a way to earn citizenship, it turns out. A fine political system, eh? These kids embrace the warrior culture. When we do not see them falling in love with each other, they are at it with the bugs. At it in battle, yes. What makes this film overwhelmingly entertaining is that it is so, so bad. Everything looks ridiculous, funny and every turn of the "plot" is giggle-inducing in their implausibility. The bugs are cute to watch, spit and mush and all. A charming piece of pulp.

Egg (2007)

Egg is the first film in Semih Kaplanoglu trilogy about a poet's life. Curiously, the trilogy moves "backwards" in time so that the first film explores the middle aged poet's, Yusuf's, life. He has returned to his village, where he hasn't been for a long time. His mother is dying and his cousin is now living in her house. They share the house in a slightly uncomfortable way. Yusuf gradually seems to settle in, and begins to remember what life used to be like. His cousin tells him that his mother had a wish; a lamb is to be sacrificed to her. Yusuf, an urban type, resists, but then succumbs. At the village in which they are to pick out a lamb to sacrifice the two bond in a new way.

Kaplanoglu's first film in the trilogy is rooted in a rather realistic tradition, even though there are many poetic excusions. The film dwells on spaces and sounds and lets us know about the relationships through hints. The mother's house is central. A shabby, crumbling place, but also a place of many memories, most of which we can only imagine and guess at. Egg is a slow film without the slowness appearing to be a trick or mere style.

The trilogy consists of Egg, Milk and Honey. These are titles loaded with symbolism, of course. The films can be said to be, too, but that would easily distort their very earth-bound quality. Take, for example, the lenthy account of the ritual. A lamb is to be picked out. But it turns out the herd has gone missing. The ritual is immersed in the main character's own exploration of the place, a place he encounters with a mix of alienation and curiosity. Also the relation with the dying mother is similarly earth-bound. There are distances to be crossed, and communation to try out. In their relationship, we see the son's doubts about himself, and where life has taken him. He is a failed poet that has been working in a bookshop in the city for many years. His mother lives in a rural place with other ways of life, other rhytms of life. Egg establishes the gentle and soul-searching tone that characterizes the trilogy as a whole. I would like to see the entire trilogy again: these are films that it takes time to let sink in. There are many layers of the cinematic approach and often I felt myself so amazed by a specific image or scene that I felt I was missing some other aspect.

Belleville baby (2013)

Lo-fi images, a voice that tells a bitter-sweet tale about love and abandonment, haunting piano music. Belleville Baby, directed by Mia Engberg, mixes documentary & fiction in a seamless, lyrical way. The "I" of the story recounts her memories of Paris and a love affair she had with a drug dealer. They lived in a cramped apartment. It did not last. Where is he now? Engberg's film is a successful encounter between spoken narrative and dreamy images. It's a moving collage that not only explores a personal story. The "I" talks about her artistic striving. She talks about class. Belleville baby is personal without shrinking into the merely individual. In a scene replete with hurt and longing, the "I" talks to her former boyfriend, a person with whom she has not for many years, on the phone. Their conversation - we never see them, just hear their voices - contains level of fiction, even mythological elements, but the film conjures up a fragile kind of intimacy. Everything does not work here. Some of the attempts to make the film "political" seem a bit strained, lacking in real focus. But Engberg has a good way of telling a story using sound & image in an association-based way.

Night moves (1975)

Sleazy types in shabby surroundings uttering woozy lines & trying to solve the mysteries of life: thrillers from the 70's at their best. Gene Hackman excels in the sleaze league in Arthur Penn's Night Moves, a story about a private eye called Moseby (MOSEBY!) working in a dreary office doing various gigs. His wife nags at him and life looks pretty miserable. Then he gets the classical film noir gig: he is hired by a femme fatale-ish woman to look for her 16-year old daughter who has gone missing. The mission finally takes him to Florida, where he finds the girl with her stepfather and his lover. Night Moves is all about the atmosphere. The story itself is .... r a t h e r elusive. Gene Hackman has little clue about what is going on and new surprises awaits for the viewer and the rather hapless private eye who instead of doing his job flirts with women. This private eye is left in the dark, rather than stepping up as a world-weary hero who ties all the threads together. Some say that the plot will reveal itself upon multiple viewings. Speaking for myself, I am not sure whether I am willing to put in that kind of effort.

The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

No directors bend genres the way the Coen brothers do. Western, thriller, film noir - they can fuck it all up and make the genre mannerisms parts of their own goofy world. In The Hudsucker Proxy the brothers inhabit the universe of the screwball comedy through sleek-looking office landscapes of 50's New York. The film might not be a peak of the Coen-ouvre, but it is a charming dissection of careerism: the film shows you where "ambition" brings people. The world of business is not taken seriously at all, which is mostly a good think. Business, here, is all surface and style. Tim Robbins plays Norville, who goes from mouse-like mailroom clerk to sleek-looking exec sitting on the top floor of a glossy skyscraper. The road to the top: the invention of a hoola-hop. Of course, the Coen brothers do everything in their power to project the absurdity of capitalism. Norville is surrounded by plotting background puppetteers and wise-cracking journo ladies (Jennifer Jason Leigh with an ... accent). Hudsucker Proxy is about the little guy from the small town who becomes the boss because the top management tries to make the stock value fall; Norville seems to be the perfect proxy - a useful idiot. The American dream? Some more nightmarish version of it, yes.  Some parts of the film are rather contrived and does not quite take off. But it's well worth watching for its icy description of life at the successful business company. Among the classic office movies (The Apartment and so on) this stands its ground.