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.