White god (2014)

Kornél Mundruzcó's White god works best if you allow it to move from level to level. Parable, horror movie, drama - the film moves boldly from genre to genre and doesn't shy away from trying to say big things with a story that may strike some as bizarre. If you accept this restless plunging into several different cinematic expressions, this is for you.

The story starts in a very simple way. A girl moves in with her father. Reluctantly, very reluctantly, the father allows her to take the dear dog along with her. But the dog is too much trouble, he thinks, and drives out to the outskirts of Budapest, where he sends the dog to look after itself. The rather original way of telling the ensuing story is that we follow both the dog and the girl who goes to look for her pet.

The image of what people do to animals is not exactly flattering. I dare say that the film takes us on a spiritual journey from a dog's point of view. The dog encounters other dogs and humans who exploit, capture and hunt. The city of Budapest is seen from the perspective of the animal living in a precarious existence, hunted by humans who want to take advantage of it. It is easy to read this - there are also more or less explicit references - as a story about neo-fascism, about the emergence of race-thinking and a class of people living in fear. One could also interpret the film as a scary image of the kind of people bred by a situation of being outcasts in society. The eventual rage the film depicts towards the end is very, very hard to forget. But here the problems begin: isn't this kind of fantasy about the roaring, violent underclass actually often an expression of an extremely shady idea? What kind of fantasy is it, how is it meant to unsettle us? What kind of revenge does the ending signal? The film ends on an ambiguous note that suddenly seems inclined to pander to our longing for fairy tales with a happy resolution. I suspect that if I would re-watch the film, I would have a much less generous verdict - there are, one might say, traces of an exploitative approach here, where the dogs are reduced to mere symbols.

I find no fault with the element of allegory. It works rather well, even though the way of delivering the message is not exactly subtle (the father works in a slaugtherhouse...). But why settle for the subtle? Mundruczó skillfully conjures up fear by using a frantically pulsating camera that tracks the movements of the dog (dogs) and the girl who sets out to find it. The problem with the film - for me - was the music. The use of a bombastic action film score reduced some of the suspense. After all, this was not a Bruce Willis movie.

Colonel Redl (1985)

Blackmail. Espionage. Unholy alliences. These are the ingredients of Istvan Szabo's Colonel Redl. Colonel Redl is the Ukrainian boy who advances in the Austro-Hungarian military hierarchy. He has many enemies and in his homophobic world, his romances are held against him. He is thought to have been a spy for the Russians and at the same time he appears to be a supporter of the Habsburg regime. Redl is the pariah who learns to play the game, to keep up appearances, to pretend to be the perfect soldier. Tragedy, of course, ensues. The story is intertwined by the upheavals within the empire: ethnic groups are persecuted, order is to be kept up at any price. I must admit it was not all too simple to follow this movie and what Szabo is trying to say. Redl is portrayed as a man who can do almost anything to rise in the hierarchy. He's a climber. But Szabo tries to understand him and his motives for acting the way he does. We see him live an affluent, guarded life in the secret service. He is lured into treason because he wants to keep climbing; this happens almost by chance, in a moment of hapless speech. Szabo's rendition of the scandal has puzzled many. He tones down Redl's affairs with men and ascribes to him "noble" characteristics. Szabo's film is at its best when it focuses on the social situations in which pretense and play-acting stand at the fore. Early on in the film, Redl is introduced to high society. He's a poor boy who quickly learns the rules of the game. Szabo focuses on tragedy, rather than harsh critique. In the end, he is seen as a doomed figure in a big net of players in a restless time.

Tender son: the Frankenstein project (2010)

Kornél Mundruczós Tender son contains many striking scenes and it was worth watching it simply for some of the scenes. It was, however, a problematic film where the idea just didn't work. Some of the twists of the story seem to have no motivation except for the impact of them - this makes the film a rather shaky affair. Watching it, I kept wondering how exactly the people who made this film perceived the progression of the story: to me, many many things were just elusive, in the wrong way, and sometimes outrageously so.  

The main character is a kid who has spent his childhood in an institution. He goes to look for his family and it turns out that they don't want to see him. His father is a director and his mother leaves in a dreary apartment with a girl who might or might not be her daughter. The kid's response is - well you have to look for yourselves. Somehow, it has to do with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein but well, I don't know. But it is here that the film's psychology goes down the drain (the way the film deals with violence is utterly utterly strange and disturbing). Usually, my complain about movies is not that they lack psychological realism. Here, however, there is just flaws in basic intelligibility which makes it hard to take anything seriously. What made me sit through the film was its beautiful rendition of wintry Budapest. The images were forceful, even though the film itself, sadly, were not.

Almanac of Fall (1984)

I tried hard to like Almanac of Fall - it's a Bela Tarr movie (I usually love his films) and the use of colors and shapes was simply marvellous. But this was just not that good a movie, despite its aesthetic brilliance (which is a reason why you SHOULD watch it!). It seemingly emulates the gloom and cynism of Fassbinder, but there's little of Fassbinder's social critique in Almanac of Fall. That is, as far as I can see, but I guess one could read a critique of the capitalist unit of the family into it and perhaps one could say that Tarr shows a recurring set of relational formations in which paranoia and reality coalesce. Distrust is the order of the day. The claustrophobic feel of the movie - which takes place in one slightly dilapidated apartment - never reveals anything. As a viewer I'm thrown into that sense of crammed space, locked relations, plots and scheming. The characters all have tangled, often erotic, relations with each other. There's the ailing matriarch, her nurse, the son, the nurse's lover and an alcoholic teacher. The only glimpse we get of their lives is through their constant quarelling, their constant suspicion and bitterness - ceaseless consternation. The amour going on here is of the doomed sort and its center of gravity is the nurse, who is depicted as the leathal femme fatale - and believe me, there is more than a hint of sexism in how women's sexuality is treated here: female sexuality as dangerous, deparaved and voluptuous - female sexuality opens Pandora's box, yes we've heard that before. The existential sordidness - greed, mostly - on display churns and churns and churns. In that sense, the movie does not have much to offer, as Tarr seems to have very little insightful to say about these relations, or the characters' malaise. It's just there. In later films, Tarr's pessimism attains an altogether different level of communication, so that he lets the visualization itself conjure up an often elusive sense of apocalypse or social catastrophy.

But hey! Let's talk about the colors! As Tarr usually works in b&w, I was overwhelmed how good he is with colors - I wondered why he chose the b&w format later on? Tarr uses a palette of greens, blues and reds which are often contrasted in very striking ways, often to - and well, this may be cheesy - underline a certain tension in the situation. Camera angles are also used for a similar purpose, and here I once again think about Fassbinder and how he evokes a creepy social universe by tilting the camera or making us look at the character's from a strange perspective.

Damnation (1988)

I consider Béla Tarr as one of the most important contemporary film-makers (I'm sad he has stopped making movies), but Damnation is not his best film. It's worth a look, though. It features Tarr's typical slow-panning long takes, deadpan lines (people speak rarely and when they do they mutter some apocalyptic aphorism) and elusive events. And yeah, the music would be a good competitor in Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World. Maddin's film was not sad, but Tarr's is, and the problem is perhaps that it eventually flounders on the border of miserabilism.

The characters and the way they speak and move are extremely stylized, wooden even - but in contrast with other movies by Tarr, this stylized acting doesn't take off, it doesn't take me anywhere: I am crammed within a crumbling, depressive world. Why is it so miserable? Why is even dancing a form of death-like, or somnambulistic ritual? When I have been watching other movies by Tarr - other glacial-paced, depressing movies, these questions haven't occurred to me; then, I have been in the grips of the movie, not questioning its universe.

There's a woman who predict the apocalypse, there's a sordid proposal to take part in criminal activities and there's a doomed erotic affair between an alcoholic guy and a nightclub singer. Misery, alienation and betrayal. Everything spirals downward. Or no, it doesn't spiral anywhere, we're already there. If this film wasn't made by Tarr, it would have been quite unwatchable - I thought several times about which sides of Roy Andersson's films I don't like (a sort of pessimism that is revered as a prophetic view of life), and how these sides all seemed to be present in Damnation. But as this IS, thankfully, a Béla Tarr film there is plenty to enjoy, most of all, of course, the striking way Tarr lets the camera roam and our attention follows this hypnotic journey into a world that mostly contains very, very little: the texture of a wall, rain, a rattling and clanking mining conveyor belt, a night-club singer crooning a song that evokes the end of the world. Damnation isn't a boring film; but even though it is often stunning, the film goes off [creeps off] into a direction I am not at all sure about.

Fun fact: one of the bars to which the main character goes boozing is called Titanik. What a Kaurismäkian name, and the general feel of the bar is also totally within Kaurismäki's cinematic imagination.

Turin horse (2011)

There are movies about the apocalypse like Independence Day: brash, loud movies where not much beyond the action is interesting. Then there are psychologically tinged movies like Last Night, Melancholia and perhaps Quiet Earth - movies that say something about the human condition through stories about how the world is coming to an end. And then there is Turin Horse. I dare say it is unlike any other movie. Or well, if it could be compared to anything, it is the rest of Béla Tarr's oeuvre (or what do you think?). Tarr has stated this movie to be his last, and watching in, one can understand why. It is simply hard to imagine a cinematic place beyond Turin horse. I assume Tarr is not the type of person who could change gears and start making romantic comedies.

It is quite rare that you find it hard as a viewer to spell out even the main topic of the film. Usually, it is completely straightforward what it means to sum up "the story" or at least to give a main idea about the themes of the film. Turin horse, as many other movies by Béla Tarr, can't be unwrapped in that way. Of course one can say different things about how one views it, but I always feel uncomfortable doing this.

In the beginning of the film, a voice-over says a few words about Friedrich Nietzsche who before he had a mental break-down that led to a long period of silence, saw a horse being whipped and embraced it. But what about the horse? We see a horse on screen. A man takes it home. He steers violently, handling the animal cruelly. The wind is howling. They arrive home, to a small isolated house where the man lives with his daughter. But the horse has had enough. It won't move, and it won't eat. The man and his daughter try to stick to their daily routines - which the film meticulously follows - but it is as if the basis of life, life itself, is shrinking. We see them dress, eat, fetch water, tend to the horse. But then the well dries up. They continue with their routines even when it becomes impossible to light a match. Every possibility of life has eroded. They - endure, but what does endurance mean? This is one of the mysteries posed by the film (I wonder what Arendt would say).

Some have suggested their defiance (and the horse's!) expresses a form of heroism, but I'm not sure if I would call it that. Nor does Tarr seem to be an existentialist who would point us towards "absurdity" and meaning as some sort of "creation" of the will against all odds. I guess one might think of Camus etc. but somehow I feel that misses something. But Turin Horse is an extremely open-ended film. It not at all clear how the film relates to Nietzsche, whether we should see an affirmation of what he says or rather a rebuttal of his perspective. But at least it is hard to see the film as a glorious celebration of individual strength - one could just as easily see it as a film about how the man and his daughter are dependent on everything around them.

The story is stripped to its bones, and so is cinema. It's a stern film in that way, but somehow it does not come out pompous or far-fetched. If you agree with the premises, you will follow Tarr's journey to the end of the world (as some have suggested, to the de-creation of the world). The camera focuses on the routines. The black&white cinematography is matched with the naked sound of howling wind along with an insistent piece of music and a very, very sparse dialog - mostly the film is silent. At one point a neighbor bursts in and talks about something that seems to come straight from Nietzsche's Zarathustra, but the bearing of this little speech, or rambling, on the arch of the film remains elusive. So as you realize having read this far is that the very limited setting of the film never becomes boring, not for a minute did I squirm in my chair and this is not because Tarr would make drudgery look interesting (it doesn't). Somehow, the film drags you along and I felt completely immersed in its cinematic universe. The problematic scenes I noticed there (one scene in which a band of people appears and already before they have arrived the man is sure they are "gypsies") did not destroy the rest of the film, an exquisite artistic achievement solely in pulling off making a movie about - well, whatever you want to call it - the end of the world, the shrinking of life or de-creation. 

The Turin Horse is not a movie about psychology. Both characters remain inscrutable and I was not for a minute tempted to worry about what is going on in their heads. As I said, we are confronted with a mystery, and this mystery is not begging for answers but perhaps, an active gaze. Turin Horse didn't puzzle me - it is one of those movies that sharpens your senses and your engagement - a film to marvel at.

Delta (2008)

Delta seems to be one of those films that is shown on a couple of film festivals and is subsequently sent off to mould in movie archives. Then again, Finnish TV showed it a few months ago. To my pleasure, because this is a quite good film.

The young director, Kornél Mundruczó, is mostly in charge of what s/he does here. It's an artistically successful movie: visually stunning, great scenery (the Danube delta), great work with colors, mostly unostentatious acting (but maybe not through-and-through convincing). Interestingly, Mundruczó is the person responsible for the horrendous Johanna, which I reviewed a while ago. Arguably, his work has an inclination towards the controversial. In Johanna, that proved to be a bad thing. With regards to Delta, I'm not sure what to say.

Mihail returns to the village where his mother, new boyfriend & half-sister lives. He has saved some money to build a house on the river delta on land owned by his late father. His sister goes to live with him and it turns out the bond between them is not limited to the Hegelian/Platonic purity of brother/sister relationship. There are some twists along the way and right from the start, I have a hunch something bad is bound to happen. There's a heavy feeling of tragic foreboding in these images, regardless of what they depict: beautiful landscapes, the peaceful ploddings of a turtle. 

There are weaknesses in how the story unfolds & in how it is developed. Some scenes are ingeniously shot with long, swirling takes, but not complex enough in terms of content. But that doesn't bother me too much. It was an interesting film that managed to stick to its aesthetic ideas - even though it is clearly inspired by the great Béla Tarr, it didn't end up being intrusively derivative. Mundruszó doesn't play in Tarr's league with this film but the visual poetry it creates is still quite marvellous.

Some things bother me, though, and, as in Johanna, it concerns Mundruczó's interest in female sexuality. To some extent, he shows awareness of patriarchal society & the kind of repression and violence it exerts. But maybe the problem is that the elements of violence runs the risk of becoming a mere visual shock disrupting the languid pace of the film - that Mundruczó is more interested in scenery and people end up being mere dramatic prop? But that is not entirely true.

The man from London (2007)

I regard Béla Tarr as one of the most interesting contemporary directors. The 7 ½-hour long Sátántangó is a mysterious exploration of greed and decay - and so is the marvellous Werckmeister harmóniák. These themes are not discarded. In The man from London, he re-builds the world of gloom and shadows for which he is known. Somehow, it makes perfect sense that the present film, shot in dazzling monochrome, is a take on 40's film noir. The cynism and alienation is there, for sure, along with disquieting moments of fear and paranoia.

The story is of a familiar kind: a railroad worker called Maloin (with a standard noir-ish haggard face) witnesses a possible murder in an anonymous dock area. A briefcase is dropped into the water. Maloin retrieves the briefcase, in which there is money. Some time into the film, we find out that Maloin gains knowledge of who murdered the man, and that a detective (whose talks more slowly than any actor heard on film - ever) is looking into the case... But this would not be a Béla Tarr film if the story was the primary source of interest.

Once again, Tarr challenges his audience with long takes and stunning camera work. The scenes from Maloin's watch tower are simply stunning. The movement of the camera, the play with light and shadow, evoke a truly eerie atmosphere. The sudden moments of humor (mainly represented by nods to the noir genre) work to great effect. And the last 25 minutes of the film, which contains a longish take of the murderer's wife that (as my sister said) is on a par with a Carl Dreyer moment, ties the film together in a beautiful way. But there are some problems. Tilda Swinton is a great actor, but her character in this film is bizarre in the wrong way and does not work in the context. The rest of the actors (especially Ági Szirtes as Brown's wife) are very good. Another problem concerns the role of the images. In Tarr's other work, I have never felt that there was a gap between the meticulous composition of the images and the few strands of "story". His images encourage me to contemplate over what I see, what is it I see? But in A man from London, there is not the same sense of mystery or wonder, even though that is what he seems to aim at. The question "what did I see?" is posed differently, in a more conventional way. On some moments, the images lapse into being just ... stunning - in the desolated and dreadful way that has come to be the Tarr trademark. It's just that most images lack the depth of his previous work. Disappointed? Yes, maybe a little.

Johanna

A pornographic opera about a drug addict-turned-saint? Is there such a film? Yes there is. Kornél Mundruczó made Johanna in 2005. It's one of the weirdest movies I've ever seen. One might assume that this is a positive judgement, but it isn't. I simply couldn't stand to watch one more minute of a film about a young woman at a hospital ward who is considered a saint because she "cures" men by having sex with them. Was there a twist? I don't know, and I don't care. The film started off as an attempt to turn The Kingdom into an opera, but gradually, we ended up in the twisted world of Breaking the waves, without the slightest context. I liked the silvery cinematography, but no, but yes, this was quite unbearable. This is supposed to be an up-dated version of the story about Joan of Arc. Well, if it is, I prefer Bresson or Dreyer or even Luc Besson. Listen to this summary:  "A modern operatic version of the Joan of Arc story, where a young drug addict wakes from a coma with the power to heal the sick by having sex with them." I mean - gosh!