Pigen med nålen (2024)

Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) jobbar på textilfabrik. Kriget börjar lida mot sitt slut. Så vi snackar 1917 ungefär. På jobbet går det inget vidare. Hon vräks från sitt rum dessutom eftersom hon inte har betalat hyran. Livet ser inte ljust ut. Redan i början har Karolines ansikte ett oroat, härjat uttryck. Men där finns också ett slags upproriskhet. Upptakten till Flickan med nålen är lovande. Man vet inte hur det ska fortsätta. Det svartvita fotot tar oss med till sunkiga hyresrum och den klaustrofobiska fabriken. Också i staden tycks husen nästan välta över fotgängare och ekipage. Musiken surrar, viner och gnisslar oroväckande. Med andra ord: allt är illavarslande. När Karoline har en grej med självaste direktören på fabriken vet jag inte om det är något slags skillingtryck som filmen nu övergår i, men så är inte riktigt fallet. Det rör sig om en ganska stilren skräckfilm om ett samhälle som i anständighetens namn vänder bort blicken medan groteska och hemska saker kan pågå och pågå. 

Nej, Magnus von Horns film är inte särdeles djup eller subtil men den är uttrycksfull och bygger effektfullt upp sin värld som mot slutet krymper ner till en affär + bostad där Karoline numera bor med en madame, Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) som tar emot barn som olyckliga mödrar dumpar hos henne. "Allt är till det bästa". Småningom går det upp för Karoline vad detta "bästa" består av, men då är hon redan djupt nere i ett eterrus som får verklighetens konturer att domna. Det är väl ungefär så vår egen tillvaro ser ut: omslutna av ett eller annat eterrus lullar vi in oss i tanken att saker nog är till det bästa, allt ordnar sig, det finns arrangemang som gör att allt nog är så bra, så bra. 

Magnus von Horn är en ny regissör för mig. I den här filmen finns det mycket att imponeras över vad gäller stil och atmosfär. Bara en sån sak, i en scen tycks ett öga se ut som textilier. I en annan ser vi ett landskap genom ett fönster som har de bekanta konturerna men allt är ändå liksom upplöst, i nästa stund ser vi Karolines figur i fönstrets glas. Inte minst hur vissa platser etableras på ett suggestivt sätt, som badhuset där mötet mellan Dagmar och Karoline först sker med en synnerligen grotesk inramning. Att det på tal om den här filmen dras paralleller till ryska Beanpole kan jag bra förstå, här finns nog en likhet i det där avseendet. Själv tänkte jag en och annan gång faktiskt på David Lynch och hans osaliga Eraserhead. Fabriker och foster och ett ansvar som tynger över personerna.  

Afsporet (1942)

Bodil Ipsen and Lau Laurizen directed Afsporet, a Danish thriller from the early forties. A woman from the middle class lead an unhappy life. She suffers from amnesia and the film starts when she has somehow derailed into the seedy criminal underworld of Copenhagen. Her daddy, a wealthy doctor, is worried and engages the whole town to find her. The film takes a woozy look at the characters of the crowd: drunks, pimps, artists. The nice girl falls in love with a thief and they move in together - but can they stay happy? Not much happens, but the drama remains tight. The dialogue is almost as snappy as in noir films made in Hollywood during the same years. I am not that impressed by what is called 'Nordic noir' - contemporary films about grumpy police officers with ulcers who drink coffee and think about murdered girls. Here you find the real deal.

Jauja (2014)

I was completely mesmerized by Lisandro Alonso's quiet tale about a man who goes back to visit the village where his mother lives - Liverpool. That film: mysterious and captivating. Jauja is equally mysterious - perhaps even more so. It's a bold film, perhaps one that is easy to mock. I mean, in a certain sense, this is a completely outrageous and ridiculous film. What we have: a grim-looking Viggo Mortensen, dressed in 19th century gentleman's clothing, ambling along looking for his daughter. The cinematography (by Timo Salminen, famous for his work with Aki Kaurismäki): 4:3 ratio - enhancing a cramped, claustrophobic feel -, wandering shots that endow the sea and the wind with fierce power, surreal lush colors. Mortensen plays a captain posted in Patagonia; his mission is to kill aboriginal people. His teenage daughter has run away with a handsome soldier and now he sets out to bring her back. The film's locations - barren plains and rocks - end up becoming some sort of spiritual (liminal) landscape. This is a tale of longing and desperation and perhaps also futility. However, this is not a psychologically rich portrait of a father's quest for an authentic relation to his daughter - not at all. It's not only the opacity of the main character. Something else is going on, something beyond psychology. Something rooted in the plains, under the stars, in the turquoise sky. Think of the quiet moments of a Herzog film and you get the idea of this kind of journey. Most importantly, reality itself is displaced throughout the movie: the characters wander from one eerie dimension to another. A tale about colonialism, the heart of the unknown within what we thought we knew (dignity, purity, 'civilization'). - This is a film in which everything looks unreal or, rather, hyper-real - one reviewer talks about warped naturalism which makes perfect sense.

Mortensen's captain walks and walks - the camera silently follows. Watching his trek is both hilarious and sad - that Alonso pulls of this weird mix of response is rather skillful. The same thing can be said about the astonishing and baffling ending of the film, that takes you to an altogether different place - I won't spoil it, but for me, this way of bringing the taciturn and desolate story to an end was simply marvelous. Such bold solutions should be tried out more often (for some reason, I sometimes thought about the film Innocence). The great thing about it all is perhaps also its leading actor. Mortensen's role is bold in a peculiar way. It's a wonderfully serious AND silly act to work with, and he succeeds, I think, in not seeming to fear the silliness. He goes from moments of grief to moments of sheer craziness in a remarkably dignified-undignified manner - without vanity, somebody pointed out. At the moment, when I try to recall similar roles, it's more of the Herzog-stuff that comes to mind: Klaus Kinski embodies this kind of boldness, but Viggo Mortensen is a very different actor.

This is a film where you, dear viewer, has to endure a very high level of openness. The takes are often long, but sometimes the cut is drastic and takes you by surprise. I get the feeling that I don't have any idea about what will happen next, even though the whole thing is very focused on Mortensen's eerie journey. Liverpool had that openness as well, even though Jauja feels like a more elaborated cinematic expression. Alsonso is one of the directors that demonstrates what film can be, that it can be far more than you think.

Århus by night (1989)

A motley crew of kids are making a movie. 1970's Århus: free (?) love and dingy bars. The director is a young man who still lives with his parents. The making of the movie is a messy affair: friendship is threatened by jealousy and the big question seems to be who gets to sleep with whom. Nils Malmros, if I have understood it correctly, has built his career around making deeply biographical movies. Thinking about the biographical element of Århus by night is mostly, for me, thinking about what kind of perspective it gives expression to. The director (who is clearly supposed to be Malmros himself) is presented as a shy guy to whom all the girls are drawn. The film zones in on his inhibitions, his shyness - he is the talented film-maker whose kindness is exploited by his rambunctious pals. What ensues: a rather conventional, male-focused film about sexual awakening. The women in the film mostly serve as props for male attention, desire and jealousy. This conventional story about the kid's artistic and spiritual development mostly takes its departure from the idea that the world revolves around men whose ego are dependent on women who desire them and men who admire them. And then there is the mother: the young man has a special relationship with his mom and the film dwells on the rocky road from mommy's arms to another girls'. // Århus by night is not an awful film. Its locations - a Danish small-town - is gorgeously filmed and some scenes about the travails of making the film end up being quite funny. At times, the usage of memories that haunt the adult works pretty nicely. But much too often, this film falls into the trap of a very, very tiresome image of what it is to Be a Man.

Hunger (1966)

Per Oscarsson is perfect for the role as Hamsun's restless wanderer in the film adaptation of Hunger (Dir. Henning Carlsen). His acting exudes a fidgety energy that takes us straight into the world of Hamsun's suffering writer who walks the streets of Oslo without finding much comfort anywhere. He has no money and whenever he manages to get some, he gives it away. He looks at himself as a Writer, a finer person than the ordinary bourgeois people - desperately, he seeks to keep up the appearance of being an honorable person. The oscillation between shame and pride is a crucial theme. The protagonist grew up in the country but for some reason he has ended up in the city, where he leads a life of poverty and humiliation. He visits the pawn shop and he tries to sell his articles to a newspaper editor. Carlsen's film manages to create a feeling of social realism that simultaneously is situated within a subjective point of view. We see Oslo as the tormented protagonist sees it. It is many years since I read the book, but my impression is that the film is a much more open-ended affair than the book. The main character never becomes a hero, the stereotypical suffering Artist. Carlsen and Oscarsson zone in on isolation, the frenzy and the humiliation the main character experiences. One example is the encounter between the main character and a girl he meets on the street. My memory of the book is that we are lead to look at these people as two tragic lovers, two equals, and that this doomed man needs a moment with a woman who understands him. The film shows the strangeness of their relation, and the distortion of reality. Oscarsson's performance is expressive, but it is also fragile. His face really lends itself to this character: through the contorted, scared face we see a complicated character. // For all its portrayals of humiliation and destitution, Hunger is also a grimly funny film. It is funny in the way it looks at fragility: it describes a world in which reality is always on the brink of dissolving. In this case, this is both funny and unnerving to watch.

The Hunt (2012)

The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg) is a psychologically chilling movie about social dynamics in the most hellish sense of the word. The main character is a kindergarten teacher who seems to be liked and appreciated by all community members. But then something happens. A kid at the kindergarten gets angry with him and as a sort of revenge she implies that he has done something sexual to here. People get hysterical, jump to conclusion and suddenly the teacher finds himself alone, a person whom everybody sees as a criminal and worse. The film explores the way these social mechanisms work: a sort of social paranoia which is of course not unintelligible - we can all recognize it in ourselves. But Vinterberg's eye for social tension could not save this film, which gives in to many, many clichés about what a conflict should look like on film. Stones are thrown through windows, a dog is killed (and the teacher buries it in the ground with a stern look on his face), there are fights, more fights and then some reconciliatory gestures towards the end. The problem is that the film follows the blueprint so much that I lost the sense for the seriousness of the topic at hand. I was caught up in the dramatic swirl and got lost there. And well, the symbolism sometimes get a bit too tacky. We don't actually need that elk in the woods which is about to be shot in order to understand what "prey" means in the story. In my view, the film is so eager to tell its message that the cinematic, deep tension disappears. I can understand Vinterberg's depiction of the decent guy who is hurt to be falsely accused. But then the familiar series of events ensue: good guy is devastated and incredulous and ends up making things worse and he has almost no ally - it is his best friend who is the parent of the child who has accused him of molesting her. Endless ostracism. It's just that I've seen this before, and my own reactions go smoothly along with this path. I don't feel cheated because Vinterberg has something important to tell about social herd mentality (among other things), but I still feel the film could have chosen another angle. I liked Vinterberg's raw debut film, Festen, and admittedly, The Hunt is a powerful film. Powerful, yet perhaps a bit too self-conscious?

Submarino (2010)

Two brothers whose lives go from bad to worse. The brothers had a horrible childhood with abusive and alcoholic parents. Now they don't speak to each other anymore. The first brother has a kid and he tries to act like he leads a normal life - for the kid. Except that he is a junkie who needs to finance his abuse somehow. The other brother has recently been released from prison. He drinks beer and works out, trying to make do in a tough world. Thomas Vinterberg's Submarino has its indubitable moments of tragic realism, but too often I feel I know exactly where it's going and, yes, it's going right in that direction. Two weeks after having seen the film, I can no longer recall more than a couple of scenes, all of which have an immediate sense of depression in them, which Vinterberg captures rather well - especially the father trying to keep up appearances. I feel like I've seen this film a thousand times: a dark film about misfortune and emotional fragility, but which has no particular perspective on this misfortune; our faces are just pressed against it. And it is also quite revealing that the two characters are men - there is a clear tendency towards male miserabilism here. Some of the actors are good, however.

Hævnen (2010)

What drives people to revenge? This seems to be the central question of Susanne Bier's recent film Hævnen (In a Better World). Even though serious moral questions are placed at the core, this is not a completely satisfying film (would I have liked it better as a novel? Maybe.). Two conflicts play out, one in Denmark, and one in a refugee camp (in Darfur?) and the point seems to be to shed some light on violence, how violence is sparked or how it could be rejected. Bier refrains from providing one overarching idea. Instead, one could say that she tests our reactions (I am inspired by this reading of the film.) A prominent temptation is to present moral problems as given questions to which universal answers are to be provided: "is it right to....?" Well, is it or is it not? When these type of questions are set up, one starts to imagine a situation as comprising a bunch of facts. Then the task is to churn out the optimal solution in accordance with a principle or a standard. Moral problems then seem identical with problems in engineering, it's just that principles mess things up with their fact-value fuzziness. (If you read moral philosophy, you are bound to bump into this understanding of what moral problems are.)

In my opinion, Bier does not open up that kind of approach. One of the stories are about two boys who have made up their minds to blow up a man's car. They have both witnessed the man hitting their father, twice. One of the boys start to question the plan, but the other boy insists that they have to go through with it. And so they do, and irrevocably bad things are about to happen. Was it right to do it or does the film instead show that revenge is always bad? That would be to simplify what is going on.

In many films, vengeance is portrayed as an unstoppable force, an ineluctable expression of human nature. A temporary equilibrium might be reached, but these films always hint at the inevitable moral functioning of human beings. - This is not at all Bier's point of view; some of the best scenes involve the tension between the two boys. One of them tries to talk the other out of it, to make him change perspectives. The boy persists, and persuades his friend to be complicit in the crime. One of the boys is blinded by rage (we learn that this rage is deeply rooted in him). The other boy loses his clear-sighted reaction. - - It is important that these descriptions in terms of 'blinded by' or 'clear-sighted' is my own reaction - it is not a matter of neutral judgments.

The problem with Hævnen is that too often, it resorts to conventional, soapy drama where one tense situation is followed by another, one problematic relation is put on top of another. For this reason, many aspects are dealt with superficially. The scenes in the refugee camp, for example, risk being swallowed up by the moral drama in Denmark, so that this story about vengeance and medical ethics is reduced to a mere shadow of the central story about the two boys and their plot. And this type of juxtaposition also comes close to the pitfall the film otherwise stays clear of: vengeance is a part of human nature, it is a universal phenomenon and no good intentions can stop these destructive chains (Bier's attempt to portray reconciliation is not that convincing as it follows too many film conventions - the whole thing appears half-hearted).

Melancholia (2011)

I can't get my head around Melancholia. Or, in some respects I can, and some things just baffle me. I watched the movie a week ago, and I still don't know quite what to say. The film starts on the grandest note possible. The thundering intro to Tristand & Isolde rattles the viewer's bowels. We see images in slow-motion. People are moving around, slowly, slowly. A small child. Two women. A horse. But we also see a planet moving towards Earth, and, after a long, long time, colliding into it. This long prelude is on a par with the most bombastic, yet strangely dazzling, scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Lars von Trier is not the man of understatement here. APOCALYPSE is spelled in capital letters. But that doesn't make me any more convinced I know in what way this is a film about the end of the world.

What I find perfectly rewarding is the drastic changes in styles that occur several times during the film. The Wagner-fuelled prologue is very different from what comes next; an upper-class wedding is depicted using a wobbly, nervous cinematography. Early on, we get a sense everything is not quite right. The bride makes several attempts to escape from the wedding dinner, among other, worse, things, and her parents can't stop hating each other and acting like small children. It's all a nightmare of dysfunctional relations, really, too much for a desperate wedding planner (Udo Kier!) who tries to keep up appearances. In the last segment of the film, the pace is slowed down and we follow the bride and her sister's family in the days after the catastrophic wedding. The planet from the prologue is re-introduced. The planet Melancholia is known to approach Earth, but according to "reliable scientists" it will pass by Earth on a safe distance. Each family member deals with the news in her own way. Justine, the bride, is wrapped up in depression. We don't really see her react in any way, in relation to the strange planet or anything else, for that matter, until the very end. Her sister Claire takes care of her, while at the same time trying not to check the latest news updates on the Internet. She is a down-to-earth person who just want things to work out, but that planet keeps her awake at night. Her husband (who resembles the male protagonist in Antichrist) represents himself as the voice of reason, of science and clear-headed sobriety.

What makes this film bearable, good even, is that for all its overblown end-of-the-world scenarios, for all its cheap metaphors and tired clichés of the mad woman eating jelly with her hands - the film takes a stand to represent depression in a novel way, not as an irrational aberration but as a place where you will see reality from a certain point of view. For that reason, the ending scene has an eerie beuty to it. I say this even though I'm not sure I should buy von Tries defense of the depressed. But in this health-crazed culture where each of us is encouraged to tread through life in sound knowledge of "business being business", von Trier's film provides a refreshing protest.

There are even more reasons for watching it. Charlotte Rampling is excellent, as always. Even though one could lament some overly beautific images, I really dig the film's sharp contrasts, making the erratic cinematography of the beginning nudge with the tranquility of the later segment. Melancholia has some weak parts and some pieces of dialogue are just out of order in being so, so pretentious - but it still is a film I've been thinking about all week, re-enacting some images in my mind's eye.

Direktören för det hele (2007)

When he wants to, Lars von Trier can be completely humorless (parts of Antichrist are sufficient evidence). On the other hand, he can also be very funny. Direktören för det hele is a comedy and a good one at that. An actor is hired to act the role of company boss. Not on screen, but in the company, where one man, Ravn, can not take the responsibility of the boss, but rather wants to give it to somebody else. Kristoffer is an unscrupulous man who thinks that a good actor should be the master of any situation. So, Kristoffer is presented to the personnel of the It-company as the boss who has uptil now been invisible. Even though this is a lightweight (but not conventional) film, it has moments of brilliance. In one of them, the real boss and the actor boss is sitting on a childish carousel taking about gravely things. In a very funny way, the film shows the self-deception involved in dodging responsibility. Ravn wants to be the cuddly bear, friends with everybody. The friendly bear cannot be the same person who makes tough business decisions, such as selling the company off to a pair of tough Icelanders who hate the sentimentality of the Danes. It turns out that Ravn is perhaps the one doing just as much acting as Kristoffer, and that we might even say that Kristoffer's acting is more uncomplicated than Ravn's. Of course, the film can be read on two levels: as an insider joke about directors and actors, and as a film about the lack of responsibility in business.

A curious detail of the film is its cinematic style, which is claimed to stem from a computer generated system of angles, pans and tilts. All this creates a frenzy & nervous backdrop for the story. This film won't change your life, but it is indeed very entertaining in its self-conscious "flat" and "harmless" way.

Ordet (1955)

Not only is Carl Th. Dreyer's Ordet a great film about variations in religious and anti-religious consciousness - it is a beautifully executed film that boasts an integration of image, sound and composition. I've watched some of Dreyer's movies. One thing that strikes me about them is how gender-conscious they are. In film after film, Dreyer makes assaults on patriarchal power. Gertrude is maybe the best example, the film about Jeanne D'arc another one. In Ordet, Dreyer shows how patriarchal power (men deciding over the fate of women) is connected with ideas about class and faith. Is he famous for his points about gender? I really don't know.

Babettes gæstebud (1987)

Babettes gaestebud is a slightly overlooked Danish movie about faith ... and food. It's one of those movie I've watched several times over the years and every time I watch it I notice some new detail. I don't really know anything about the director, Gabriel Axel, except that he made this film and it's fabulous. Babettes gaestebud is one of those rare films in which every scene is flawless, ripe with comedy and beauty, small details and great acting that suits the mood of the film. Two sisters live in a small community of religious people in the coast of Jutland. We're talking 1800's. Their father was a priest. When they were young, suitors swarmed around them. Now, they live on their own. They do charity work and go to church. A woman from France, Babette, suddenly arrives at their doorstep. One of the suitors sends her there. She has fled France and, supposedly, the Parisian Commune of 1871. She works for them - for free - as maid and cook. Babette receives a letter. It turns out she has won at the lottery. She decides to spend all the money on a French dinner in honor of the sisters' later father, the priest. But neither the sisters, nor the villagers, are crazy about the idea. They find it sacriligeous. Food and wine! Earthly pleasures represent Satan's temptations. The villagers, who spend their days slandering one another, decide to resist the sensations of the food and drink by prending that they feel no taste. Do they succeed? No.

Why is this film so good? One: it is one of the very few movies that takes depiction of faith seriously. Faith, in this movie, is understood as our relations to one another. The change that the characters go through are depicted without any big gestures, clearly, but not in a sentimental way. Two: the images of the raw nature of Jutland are stunning. Three: There is a quiet sort of humor in this movie that I really appreciate. A Swedish cavalry officers, one of the suitors, is told by his mates to get his shit together. This guy is the sort who stands on a mountain, brooding. He simply responds, "ääh" and for some reason the entire character comes to life during the course of a few seconds. This goes for almost all characters in the film. A glance, a sardonic remark, a smirk reveals who they are. Gabriel Axel needs no lenghty dialogues or scenes in which the characters are thoroughly PRESENTED to the viewer.

(There are still many questions one could pursue in relation to this film if one wants to. Does it glorify sacrifice? Or is it about sacrifice at all? Sacrifice and art?)

I watched this on yet another crappy VHS and after Babette's gästabud some has had the poor taste to record Torsk på Tallinn. Which I watched, afterwards.

Tid till förändring (2004)

Jag hade sett Tid till forandring (2004) en gång tidigare. Det jag mindes av filmen är att det är en dansk, rätt konventionell feel-goodfilm. Jag blir inte överraskad när jag ser filmen en andra gång. Det är fortfarande en dansk, rätt konventionell feel-goodfilm. Av regissören Lotte Svendsen har jag inte sett något annat. Som så många andra filmer i den här genren handlar Tid till forandring om vilsna människor som flyr in i sociala former eller overklighet. Psykologen försöker maskera sitt drickande som "kultur", hans fru rustar upp den perfekta inredningen, den perfekta myshörnan (hyggehörna?). En man med medelklassjobb och steril våning försöker locka till sig en vacker modell. En kvinna försöker lösa sina livsproblem genom att upprepa en selfhelpfras. En marxist lever i en ensam tillvaro i ett samhälle som inte är intresserat av solidaritet med latinamerika. Problemet med filmen är kanske inte att karaktärerna reduceras till typer. Problemet är att ett antal svårigheter radas upp bredvid varandra utan att filmen gör någonting annat av dem än att skapa en viss komik (som när psykologen välter vinflaskan som står vid hans arbetsbord och försöker avleda klientens uppmärksamhet genom att be henne blunda och upprepa en fras). Själv hade jag gärna sett en film som ägnats uteslutande åt den ensamma marxisten Erik som hänger upp banderoller i ett Danmark som slutat lyssna. Det här är en liten, elegant film där speciellt musiken fungerar för att skapa en viss stämning. Men det är inte en film som gör något eget.