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.