Stories We Tell (2012)

Hon var så varm, hon var alltid upptagen med någonting, hon var vital. Det här är några saker som olika personer säger om skådespelerskan Diane Polley. Hennes man Michael, som hon mötte på teatern när de båda spelade i The Caretaker, säger: jag har inte den vitaliteten i mig, jag kan spela en sådan roll på scen, men det är inte jag. Själv beskriver han sig som ansvarstagande men också tillbakadragen, hustruns sociala förmåga säger han sig inte besitta. 

Dianes liv är utgångspunkten i skådespelaren och regissören Sarah Polleys hybridfilm (visst kan man kalla den så?) Stories We Tell. Båda Polleys föräldrar är alltså skådespelare, vilket får olika betydelser här. Tillsammans med andra minns, prövar och funderar Polley kring familjen och, som det visar sig, frågan om vem som är hennes biologiska far. Lika viktigt: vem var hennes mor - som dog när Polley var 11 - och hur förhöll hon, en spirituell typ som törstade efter kärlek, sig till sina egna val i livet? Att Diane Polleys barn togs ifrån henne när hon skilde sig från sin första make är en omständighet vars betydelse påverkar hela filmen utan att det behöva strykas under. Senare i livet gjorde hon karriär i Toronto och Montreál medan maken upplevde att äktenskapet hade gått i stå, förutom en besynnerlig passionerad period. Vad hände egentligen? Är en sådan fråga ens meningsfull att ställa på det sättet? Det visar sig: det viktiga är inte "vad som hände" utan hur olika människor förstår deras liv tillsammans.

Att minnas hänger ihop med hur vi förstår och begripliggör världen och det här förmedlas fint genom berättandet i Stories we tell; Polleys far, hennes (halv-)syskon, släktingar, moderns vänner och eventuella förbindelser lägger ut texten. En fin poäng filmen landar i (tycker jag) är att minnen ju sällan handlar om att rekonstruera "hur det var" (som om det skulle finnas ngt sånt ö.h.t.) utan att det rör sig om att placera sig i relationer till annat. Och det är här den här filmen bränner och sörjer. Det finns så många frågor. Avklarnade känslor men också det pågående. I synnerhet finns en kontrast att se mellan Michael Polley och Harry Gulkin, som visar sig vara Polleys biologiska far. Den tidigare talar om sina egna tillkortakommanden och den kärlek hans fru kanske fick uppleva och den Sarah Polley som nu de facto existerar just som hon är just på grund av denna förbindelse. Gulkin däremot får vi höra berätta bland annat att han alltid trott att hans relation med Polleys mor var en öppen hemlighet. Det drabbande i filmen är just de här människornas olika sätt att berätta (en spänning mellan bekännelse och att spela en roll bl.a.). Inte inst gäller det alla förhållningssätt som det avslöjar, också till andras anspråk på att beskriva hur saker har varit - som när Sarah blir mycket obekväm när Harry Gulkin vill skriva om hans mor.

Jag greps i tilltagande grad av relationen mellan Sarah och Michael Polley, här finns så mycket som trots allt snackande inte behöver sägas ut.

Sedan är det fint hur Polley leker med det dokumentära och det fiktiva, det är i högsta grad en film som vänder och vrider på sitt eget berättande. Bland annat får vi höra pappa Michael Polley läsa ur ett slags biografi som han börjat skriva, och dottern regisserar och rättar till. (Vid sidan av detta ser vi både riktiga och rekonstruerade, d.v.s. fiktiva hemvideor.) Historieberättandet blir här ett sätt att konfronteras med andra, och att det görs på olika sätt. Kort sagt: det här är en film om hur vi berättar och förstår tillsammans och allt är råddigt och snårigt men detta inte på något epistemologiskt plan utan på ett känslomässigt och existentiellt. Jag förvånades över hur rik på dimensioner den här filmen är.

Stories We Tell, 2012. 

Regi: Sarah Polley. 

Manus: Sarah Polley & Michael Polley.

Mr Nobody (2009)

You may or may not remember Jaco van Dormael for the irresistible Toto, Le Heros. I remember that film as hiding its dark secrets in lots of inventiveness and imaginative twists. Mr. Nobody offers more of the same in that sense. Sadly, this movie is eaten up by its own imagination: it ends up being a loony thought experiment. The basic concept is that of multiple worlds. The film throws us from one world to the next, from one possibility to the next. More concretely: we see this guy, Nemo, living his life in several parallell worlds, one in which he spent his youth with his mother, one in which he spent these years with his father - and has a cutesy on-off thing with a girl called Anna, who is something his step-sister, or falls in love with Elise.  I am not sure whether the film should be interpret as some sort of cosmic joke, a light-hearted exercise in metaphysics or as a simple yet very complex story about a boy and his mother. The problem with the film is that I never care enough to pose this as a serious question. For all its fascinating and head-spinning turns, Mr Nobody never succeeds in enchanting me and hardly even in entertaining me.

Take this waltz (2011)

Can you bear with a hipster-leaning indie movie about a middle-class couple in some nice Toronto neighborhood? Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz surely has more than a few annoying sides : it's easy to be infuriated about respectable indie movies about respectable, rich white people who have respectable problems.

I guess this story could have been made anytime between 1850 and the present. It inhabits a particular modern problem, a problem of sticking to the safe haven of a nice and cozy wedding or trying out (or giving in to) one's spontaneous, unruly desires. Margot is married to Lou who has, to quote one reviewer, 'a shaggy likeability' . Lou is a cookbook writer, she is a writer. They share a beautiful home on a quiet street. One day she meets a guy she is instantaneously attracted to. The guy: the romantic, pensive kind - you guessed it: an artist. Turns out they are neighbors.

All of this seems predictable enough. What sets the film apart is perhaps its strangely old-fashioned tone. It is a tale of mores, really, in the sense that perhaps Henry James or Jane Austen would have had it. One can also say that Take this waltz plays out like a prolonged fantasy that nudges against reality. It's an elegant film: the depiction of Margot's rumination is sometimes cinematic in an interesting way, that plays with the ideas about 'respectability' and 'unruly desire'. But that is perhaps also the film's biggest problem: in playing with a classical scenario of adultery and choices, it is never quite resolved in what it wants to do. An example: it presents the new guy as a sensitive artist, the Erotic Female Dream but it also hints at him being a fucking unreliable asshole.

Take this waltz could be seen as a symptom of a cultural pattern - then its aesthetic choices would be in a way more bearable. That would be my good reading. The other one, towards which I am equally disposed, is that this film merely wants to present 'the eternal problem of married life'. Many reviewers praise it for being both 'true and honest' - so.

Sarah Silverman as an alcoholic is great, though.

It's not me, I swear! (2008)

I don't know whether so many Canadian movies around 2008-9 were made about kids who are traumatized by the absent of a mother. Anyway, It's not me, I swear! (Philippe Falardeau) chronicles the story about Leon, a kid who stirs up trouble everywhere he goes. If he is not trying to kill himself he wreaks havoc in the evil neighbors' house. He befriends Léa who is also eager to make trouble. The film focuses on the tumultuous world of kids and adults and the role of imagination. The parents are fighting and mummy moves to Greece. The theme itself is far from remarkable but the film proved to be an unconventionally dark take on this tangle of subjects. The film is set in Quebec in 1968 and Falardeau skillfully mixes the dreamy with the realistic, the funny with the unsettling. Just don't expect the traditional drama about a kid who's having psychological problems and the quest for a happy solution. There's not much of that - and that speaks for the film.

When Night is Falling (1995)

Patricia Rozema's romantic drama When Night is Falling is a rather conventional take on love and secrets. A teacher at a Protestant college falls in love with a girl who works at a carnival passing through town. What makes this film rather predictable is the travelling-carnival-outsider-plot, but also the way in which religious themes are developed. The problem is that the film builds on a simplistic dichotomy: there are the religious zealots at the college (including the teacher that has a crash on the protagonist) versus the free-spirited bohémes at the carnival who seem to lead lives that contain nothing but love and adventure. Honestly, we've seen it before. And no, adding a bit of exciting hang-gliding doesn't bring in a deeper level of subtlety. On the other hand, there are some good moments here and somehow I found myself engaged by the characters, at least to some extent. But beyond that, the movie contains far too many embarrassing scenes - embarrassing in the wrong way - and far too many instances of clunky dialogue.

Mommy is at the hairdresser (2008)

Léa Pool's Mommy is at the Hairdresser is a rather good example of a movie trying to capture the traumas of childhood. In this case, the story is about family struggles and children missing their mother who is working abroad. Rather than ending up as a film that elevates traditional gendered work and the place of the mother, the film sensitively explores tensions within a family. Even though Pool touches on some clichés of the "summer movie" - you know, the genre of films revolving around the pains of growing up - there were still enough good aspects to keep me focused. This is a film about an overwhelmed father trying to manage the situation, a kid whom everyone perceives as a burden and a daughter who befriends a local fisherman who is considered a lunatic. A quite good film with a beautifully crafted cinematography that creates an unsentimental - mostly at least - portrayal of loneliness and family life.

Archangel (1991) & The Saddest Music in the World (2003)

I've been watching some Guy Maddin stuff lately. If you don't know who he is, you should simply plant yourself on the sofa and enjoy any of his weird, dreamy films: like very few other directors, Maddin is madly in love with movies, with experimentation, the strange glow of the moving images. Maddin makes movies like it was 1923, and this is not only true because he draws heavily on techniques and ploys used in silent films - his films also evoke the playful exploration that is so characteristic of film from the early era. Archangel is the type of film you could sit down to watch in the middle of the night, perhaps after a long, boozy night or a rough day when all you want to do is the fall asleep. You see, Archangel is the stuff of dreams, or nightmares. On the face of it, this is "historical drama" but I guess this is more psycho-history than the usual sober presentations of battles and losses. The story is set in 1919. World War I is ending and we're in northern Russia, where there has been Canadian soldiers have been engaged in fighting. John Boles has lost a leg and a lover. We follow his eerie path in re-assembling his past - Archangel takes us to the sprawling depths of memory, or amnesia (DOUBLE amnesia as a matter of fact!) and Maddin brings us there employing all the tricks in the book, and tricks he has invented himself, such as dubbed voices which do not really match the images. Arctic winter, battles (some warriors dressed in evening wear...?), and ROMANCE of course! Deranged romance. Leyland Kirby should've crafted the soundtrack.

The saddest music in the world, a later film, is equally hallucinatory but not as melancholy - it's even more whimsical than Archangel, but plenty of fun at least some of the time. So the big question is posed by a beer baroness: WHAT is the saddest music of the world? She arranges a competition, and the film follows the eerie amputee baroness and the strange competitors, all sad-sack and bizarre types playing you some sad tunes. The story is an endlessly whirling tale of family tragedies, betrayal, love, legs made of glass and - beer. A funny fact about the movie is that it is somehow, at least to some extent, based on a novel by ... Kazuo Ishiguro! I guess The Saddest Music in the World is as far you can get from Remains of the day. I mean, I can't for my life imagine Anthony Hopkins together with a talking tapeworm. The film is mostly in b&w but color is sometimes used as spectacular embellishment. Meandering and demented - I liked it. What better motto could you think of than: "if you're sad, and like beer, then I'm your lady!"

Roadkill (1989)

There are three or four movies I simply cannot watch without falling asleep (Alien 3 comes to mind). This must prove they are bad movie, you might think. No, not necessarily. Roadkill (dir. Bruce McDonald) is one of these movies - I watched it again in the middle of the night at my parent's place and I, well you know, fell asleep. It's the dreamiest film about rock musicians on the road I ever seen, as if Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man was set among sleazy, beer-drinking indie rockers. Well, it kind of works. The story is strange and massively erratic and so is the film, in a good way. Somehow, the film has a sort of atmosphere that prevents it from falling to pieces. The main character is a record label employee who is commissioned to track down a rock band. She doesn't know how to drive so she takes ... a cab that worms its way through Northern Ontario. The journey is winding and even though she finds the band, she loses them again, but she meets other characters along the road, one who is obsessed with animals killed by vehicles. I didn't always know what exactly was going on, but that was OK. Roadkill is filmed in beautiful B&W and Canadian bands from the late 80's play on the soundtrack. My recommendation: buy yourself a couple of bad-brand beers, sit down in front of the telly late at night and let yourself be wooed by this eerie, little movie. 

Cosmopolis (2012)

Cronenberg is Cronenberg and Cosmopolis is no exception. Cronenberg has always been interested in how the world as we know it is torn apart, how glitches are opened, how the clean surfaces are smudged. In my opinion, this is a far better achievement than many of his last films (Spider, A history of violence, the Freud&Jung film), which does not imply that Cosmopolis is a masterpiece - it's not. It's a messy film that could've been straightened out, some scenes could have been discarded. Especially towards the end, the film loses much of what it had going for it. It is the urban dystopia of the first part of the film that I was thrilled by. Cronenberg's cold, icy gaze looking at these people who are not elusive at all - they are walking dead. A young businessman sits in a limo. Destination: the young man needs a haircut. A security risk has arised on the radar and the president is in town. A rap star's funeral is celebrated somewhere on the streets. The traffic is on a standstill. The security guys advise change of plans. The young man wants his haircut, and the limo continues its strange and hallucinatory route uptown, NYC. (Or I guess its uptown, I don't know exactly.) Business talk mingles with quasi-marxist speeches. The world of business is depicted as a lonely, lofta universe with no contact whatsoever with the surrounding world. Capital shits out golden eggs but the eggs are rotten inside. A world is about to crumble, or will it? The businessman has what he needs in his car, even his own theoreticain and prostrate doctor, and he doesn't let angry demonstrators scare him. He speaks in a monotonous drone and there is no sign of life in him. He quarells in a zombie-like way with his girlfriend, and engages in anonymous sex with a security guard and a mistress. Towards the end, we meet his Nemesis. The nemesis dons a towel on his head; Kraaazy vs. Kraaazy. Is there a Resolution? Oh.... My friend pointed out that Cronenberg's film lacks perspective. What should we understand this scenario as? Dystopia? Or are we already there? What kind of dystopia? I agree with my friend that there are many unclear things here. - - And what should one really say about a film as icy as this one?

I wonder what the Twilight fans thought about Cosmopolis.

Dead ringers (1988)

Dead ringers is very much a David Cronenberg film. Two twins pursue the same woman, who cannot separate the one from the other. Gradually, the twins' identities start to blur. Of course, I mean: of course, the twins are gynecologists. As this is a Cronenberg film, the gruesome perversity of corporeality must be explored. But Dead ringers is a much less raunchy affair than earlier films such as Videodrome or The Fly. Cronenberg's style here, and in many other films, is based on a drab scenery, quite dry dialogue, and then - the sudden rupture of strangeness. Often, this works. At time, Dead ringers is, however, too monotonous for its own best and I mean monotonous not as in slow but as in the film becoming empty, so that this viewer starts to scream inside: yes, yes, I've seen this scene a thousand times, we know that these guys' inner lives are falling apart! What I like about the film relates only secondarily to the story. I adore Cronenberg's fondness for what first appears like icy, clinical elegance (look at Jeremy Irons' fabulously bloodless appearance as both of the twins in the beginning of the film!) - and then this whole world is torn to pieces, it gradually transmutes into something completely different, very un-clinical. Dead ringers is a quiet and subdued film with a grisly content. Put it on at 3:00 am on a Tuesday night and you will have a blast!

A Dangerous Method (2011)

David Cronenberg was perhaps more fun two or three decades ago, when he was occupied with all sorts of monsters and weird forms of existence. His style has been cleaned up, to the extent that his latest film is a costume drama about prima Victorian people. But yes - the point of the film is to show the ways that this civilization is kept in check, and only barely successfully so. All this is going on in the relation between Freud and Jung. Jung is portrayed as a man who fights with himself. Freud, on the other hand, is presented as a man who rarely doubts, whose presence is a bit suffocating, and whose ideas are piece and parcel of bougeois reality. But, honestly, I am not sure what is supposed to be the most important element of the film. The major part of it is taken up by the relationship, sometimes professional, in many senses of the word, and sometimes erotic, between Jung and a certain Spielrein. Of course, the drama between the two are intertwined with the history of psychoanalysis. But I am not sure whether the film makes an interesting case of two images of psychoanalytic treatment or ideas. It is far too involved in images of a woman on her way to personal liberation and societal normality (or something) and a man's feeble denial of himself. Some of the scenes are plenty of fun. The wackier side of psychoanalysis, embodied by a certain mister Gross, is absolutely hilarious when put in action together with the two family men Freud and Jung. It's also amusing to see Viggo Mortensen as the authority-loving, constantly pipe-sucking Dr Freud. When reading Freud's own texts, I have a hard time not hearing Mortensen's snarky, gruff interpretation. From a cinematic point of view, there is not much to say. Cronenberg's touch is light, traditional - conservative almost. To some extent, I think Cronenberg is playing with this formula. The scenes of female madness are so over the top, and the same goes for the images of the bourgeois, respectable wife who never thinks badly of her man. Sexuality, of course, is reduced to a dark and uncontrollable force that all characters grapple with in their own ways. --- What's new under the sun? Not much, apparently. I found very little that would provide a fresh understanding of psychoanalysis. In my view, Cronenberg was just repeating the old story of psychoanalysis as an expression of the slight discontent we, or at leaste the more affluenct classes, have with society. The interpretation the film seems to give is that traditional psychoanalysis did not help very much to cure this discontent, even though it will make people "less ill" in the eyes of society. But it won't provide any insight into any deeper things. - -- At least partly, this is what the film appears to say.

eXistenZ (1999)

As soon as one starts to interpret eXistenZ, the film falls to the ground as an utterly silly attempt at criticizing some sort of world-alienation. Provided that one does not go into that at all, one can still enjoy the film for what it is (despite Cronenberg's intentions): a funny, perhaps a bit tedious, story about levels of games, and, most of all, bodies that matter-as-matter. The seedy surroundings and Cronenberg's affection for eerie bugs make eXistenZ a quite entertaining film. As a meditation on the state of postmodern society - forget it. In the films, games have been developed so that they make out existences of their own. In the film, we see a process of entering games and exiting games. Gradually, the distinction between the game and "reality" becomes blurred. --- Well, Willem Defoe is fun. eXistenZ presents us with Cronenberg's post-human universe: a blend of technology and flesh, determinism and is-not-morals-only-a-surface (and what's-real-anyway-huh's). As I already said, let's not go into that territory. But, honestly: if I have to choose between the games versus reality-themed Matrix and eXistenZ, I'd rank eXistenZ as a better film simply because it is far less self-important and pompous than Matrix. Plus the bugs. Actually, despite their stupid quasi-philosophical mumbo jumbo, I like the way his films create claustrophobic atmospheres by means of a cinematic style that is rooted in the drab and the ugly.

Naked lunch (1991)

As much as films about Artists and Creativity tend to irritate and bore me – DAMN IT, Naked Lunch is a funny, disturbing film, one of the fewest films about "creativity" I can actually stand. Clearly, I have a thing for perversely talking typewriters. Even though I don’t like all of his films, David Cronenberg’s interest in metamorphoses and corporeality tend to make for good movies.  As you know, the film is based on Burroughs’s famous novel. Our hero is William Lee, exterminator. We learn that the powder that kills the bugs is not only good for that particular purpose – Will and his wife use the powder as a drug. At a drunken party, they play the Wilhelm Tell game. Will aims a gun at an object on his wife’s head, accidentally killing her. William is approached by a giant bug. We learn about “Interzone”, some kind of North African country. William goes there – or is that where his druggy hallucinations take him – to write some kind of report. Under the influence of drugs, he starts to write a novel. The typewriter he uses is not a dead tool. It’s a communicating creature. So – there we are, in a strange country, where American men (and some women) hunt boy toys, where eerie talking bugs lurk around the corner, and where there is a scheming corporation that William is destined to get in contact with. Nothing is quite what it seems here. Naked lunch builds layers and layers of dread and paranoia. But it does so humorously, almost gently. Even some of the grotesque machine-bugs are gentle. That I have no idea what this is all about doesn’t worry me one bit. I wasn’t really looking for hints about Burroughs’s life and pals. I enjoyed Naked lunch immensely. Even the slightly predictable free jazz soundtrack works just marvelously. I also like the sleazy feel of the sets and the brown desaturated color scale of the cinematography. Every little detail of Naked lunch is just right, even the cheesiest bit of quasi-sexual (always very queer) imagery (you see some literary eroticism going on here … for sure). Sleazy entertainment! "Exterminate all rational thought. That is the conclusion I have come to."

Heading south (2005)

Laurent Cantet is a director I tend to appreciate. I liked The Class, and Human resources is a striking film. So, I sat down to watch Heading south with some positive expectations. The film takes place in the late 70’s. We are presented to a group of women who spend their vacation(s) in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Soon, we grasp why they are there. These middle-aged women have hooked up with local youngsters, with whom they have sexual relationships. It is clear that the boys are exoticized to an almost extreme degree in the eyes of these women: one line that is repeated, over and over again, “it is different here”. Their tourist resort is to be kept as a safe haven, tending to their needs and emotions. “You know money is not a problem.” 

The boys are not “professional” prostitutes (it seems) but at the same time, they are compensated for their “services”. This is of course one of the very few movies to depict female sex tourism. Cantet has perhaps not made a cinematic masterpiece (as a film, this is nothing special, really) but it is more than satisfying in attempting to put these women’s activities in a global perspective of race, class and gender. The three women all offer different perspectives on this kind of half-monetary relationship. Ellen (played with wit and ingenuity by Charlotte Rampling) is the cynic who appears to see through romantic dreams (but it turns out she is not as honest to herself as she thinks she is). Her friend Sue adopts a more playful attitude. Enjoy it while it lasts. Brenda, on the other hand, seems to have fallen romantically for her Haitian “friend”. What these characters have in common is self-delusion. They tend to see themselves as liberators for these boys, to whom they offer passports. The film could have dedicated a larger part of the story to the boys’ perspective. The information we obtain about their lives – a girlfriend, a worried mother, lethal threats – sheds little light on how they experience their everyday life with these women. What I would have wished for is a more direct way to address political issues.  It’s there, all right (especially in all scenes, in which the waiter Albert takes part), but it could have been dealt with in detail – instead of looking at the competition between two self-indulged women. But Cantet’s film is surprisingly low-key, and it has its merits. 

Laurent Cantent is one of the few directors that takes an interest in work/labor. This theme has been recurrent in all his film, and he deals with it in a very non-preachy way.