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.

Belleville baby (2013)

Lo-fi images, a voice that tells a bitter-sweet tale about love and abandonment, haunting piano music. Belleville Baby, directed by Mia Engberg, mixes documentary & fiction in a seamless, lyrical way. The "I" of the story recounts her memories of Paris and a love affair she had with a drug dealer. They lived in a cramped apartment. It did not last. Where is he now? Engberg's film is a successful encounter between spoken narrative and dreamy images. It's a moving collage that not only explores a personal story. The "I" talks about her artistic striving. She talks about class. Belleville baby is personal without shrinking into the merely individual. In a scene replete with hurt and longing, the "I" talks to her former boyfriend, a person with whom she has not for many years, on the phone. Their conversation - we never see them, just hear their voices - contains level of fiction, even mythological elements, but the film conjures up a fragile kind of intimacy. Everything does not work here. Some of the attempts to make the film "political" seem a bit strained, lacking in real focus. But Engberg has a good way of telling a story using sound & image in an association-based way.

The Simple-Minded Murderer (1982)

With The Simple-Minded Murderer Hasse Alfredsson showed that his abilities reach far beyond comedy. This is a frightening movie, in several ways. Stylistically, the film proved to be far more diverse than I expected it to be. Alfredsson boldly tries out different styles - to capture different atmospheres - realism of a fairly traditional vein is intermingled with the supernatural (along with operatic music!). What works so greatly is that there is no tired distinction between fantasy/reality, but, rather, the supernatural is also, in its own way, real. The film also draws parallels between historical situation in a way that to some may feel strange, but I appreciated his ways of explicating a theme in the movie by suddenly bringing in a completely different time. Somebody has compared the film with Derek Jarman's work (!) and that makes complete sense to me: here you have a similar break with traditional forms.

Sven (good performance by Stellan Skarsgård) is seen as retarded because of a speech defect. He is exploited by some kind of industrialist. He sleeps in a barn and is forced to work hard. As he befriends Anna, who is dependent on her wheelchair, he gets to work for and live with Anna's family. But the industrialist does not like this new arrangement and sets out to revenge. The story is told in bits and pieces, with flashbacks. Somehow, this seems to be a fruitful approach to the material, and heightens the sense we often get of different levels of reality.

One could say that The Simple-minded murderer is about the nature of evil. Without shying away from melodrama (which is both good and bad), the film is built like a morality tale. The industrialist symbolizes an almost absolute sense of evil. He is evil not because of some petty interest he seeks to further, but rather, the evil things he does has no specific purpose. Admittedly, Alfredsson sometimes reverts to all too familiar clichés about evil: we see the industrialist gorging himself together with his pals, engaging in all kinds of debauchery (which, however, is depicted not as exotic and titillating but as very, very boring) - I mean, this association of debauchery and evil does not help us understand anything.

A pigeon sat on a branch reflecting on existence (2014)

Nobody assembles stylized tableux like Roy Andersson - tableux that in one sense seem to be stripped down to the bare bones, but, one the other hand, open up a multitude of existential levels. He inhabits his own cinematic universe, of course; a film is instantaneously recognizable as a Roy Andersson production. There are the run-down locations that conjure up a vague feeling of the Swedish Welfare state in the fifties, mixed with some contemporary details, all built with interior locations so that the end results becomes intentionally artificial. There are the scruffy, sad-eyed characters played in a style that - well - is deadpan in the best sense, in a way that fits these movies.

The problem with A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is that it feels like Andersson is repeating himself, using old ideas, employing a technique he knows so well. For me, some of the scenes felt a bit stale and lifeless and Andersson's quirks stood out much too obviously. On the other hand, there is plenty to enjoy - there is a heap of scenes that capture Andersson's personal blend of sadness and humor. So what is it about? Jonatan and Sam are salesmen. Not very good ones, but they try, you know, with the leading ambition that they just want to help people have fun. They sell novelty items. Not very funny ones, but still. The film revolves around these two, and other creatures of this world. The basic mood the film delivers is that something is deeply wrong in our lives, and that we try to gloss this over with lines like 'I'm glad you're doing fine'. One of the striking things about Andersson's rendition of such existential forgetfulness or hopelessness (haplessness also) is that it is not cynical. In this, and other movies he takes a look at clichés from a point of view where they exude both human warmth and a kind of existential horror. Warmth and horror? How is that possible? Somehow, in Andersson's apocalyptic-humanist approach, it is. His films are full of contradictions molded into a perfected style, and perhaps that is why it works so well when there is more to the vignettes than Andersson's own favorite themes.

The best, and truly elusive, scenes involve .... the Swedish war king Karl XII. It is hard to put into words in which way these scenes dodge silliness, and instead end up being both moving and scary.

Force Majeure (2015)

Ruben Östlund has a scathing eye for social tensions. His films tend to scrutinize the moments before conflicts are about to erupt, and they let us follow the ways people try to handle these kinds of often understated eruptions. Force Majeure contains a dose of Östlund's rather grim sense of humor, along with a scenary that is a perfect frame for middle-class crisis: the holiday resort in the Alps.

The drama is centered around a family eating lunch when an avalance breaks out. Tomas grabs his mobile phone and runs away from the restaurant. His wife Ebba understands this as an expression of selfishness and even neglect. The ensuing drama zooms in on marital difficulties. How does Tomas understand the situation? His immediate reaction is to play the whole thing down. He doesn't see why Ebba is shocked - as he sees it, 'upset' - and tries to evade the subject. This makes Ebba feel even more hurt: she thinks that her husband is unwilling to face the truth of what the situation is really like. During all this, there kids are left to themselves. Östlund expertly captures the childrens' sadness and confusion with regard to the parents' conflict.

Force Majeure is a drama laced with caustic comedy. While some have interpreted the film as a film about masculinity, I would tend to view it as more relational. Gender is an important aspect, and Östlund studies the way the spouses' reactions are mutually aggravated in a process of ressentment, silence and outbursts. The wife's anger is coupled with the husband's silence and, later, outbursts - we get to see how destructive emotions are rolled into a complex situation of mutual distrust. At times, the film might lean towards cheap psychologizing and perhaps it can also be said to end up confirming many cinematic clichés about the hollowness of the seemingly ideal middle class life, but mostly, I found the excavation of uncomfortable revelation rather penetrating, given that I take the film to be a satire. 

Stylistically, Östlund borrows a lot from Haneke's clinical frames and sense of sparse location. The hotel is an impersonal space of corridors and balconies. Nature appears as a frightening setting of danger, but also as landscape domesticized by the tourist industry. The snow, the avalanches and the slopes are all seen as factors to be handled and controlled. And the whole thing is punctuated with a few bursts of music - by Vivaldi.

The flaws of the film can be derived from the director's attempt to add some dramatic frills to the basic outline. A few extra characters are thrown into the story, along with an extra catastrophy and an end that leaves one with rather counter-productive questions.

The Ape (2009)

The Ape is one of the most unsettling movies I've seen in a long time. This is not because of the explicit violence that the film features, but that it is so unclear what is really going on. The churning machinery takes us to a hellish place. The film takes me places but I'm not sure where. From the get-go I learn that something is deeply wrong with the main character, a weary-looking guy called Krister. He's a driving instructor and we sense that this guy is going to explode, or is what we see some kind of gruesome aftermath to events we haven't seen? Gruesome things follow and the film follows them, well, quietly. I end up feeling shellshocked, unable to take it all in. The film works as a dream, and so images are so startling that now, thinking back, I cannot really recall them other than as a fuzzy memory, like the memory of a dream. As with regard to dreams, I can't piece things together. I remember an atmosphere, a car. What makes Jesper Ganslandt's The Ape such a strange viewing experience is that somehow places me in a zombie-like mode where I witness really violent stuff as if in a state of half-sleep. All the time, when I watch the man's harried and scared face, I can't make myself ask the relevant psychological questions (what the hell, why the hell, etc.). I just watch. Or: the film does not elicit watching, it elicits squinting, a sort of horror that is expressed in glimpses, rather than a full-blown disclosure or revelation.

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.

Glowing stars (2009)

Glowing stars (dir. Lisa Siwe) tackles a challenging subject: grief. A teenager grapples with the feelings of growing up and in the middle of all this, she is confronted with the illness of her mother. Mother and daughter live with the grandmother, an easy target for the angry and sad teenager. The challenge of the film is what type of story it seeks to commit itself to. At times, the narrative lazily goes through the usual suspects of teen angst. Other scenes come across as having a real story to tell, beyond the stereotypes of the teen drama. The strength of the film is how it deals with the teenager's bursts of anger: it focuses on the way unconditional social relations are strained, yet not broken, by these very strong emotions.

Återträffen (2013)

A reunion party. The guest have come to have a nice time and to talk about the good old days, the innocent days of childhood: a night of nostalgia and jolly chatting. One of them feels differently. She makes a speech about having been bullied. The others are outraged by this way of spoiling the cozy party; why should this person come there and destroy their nice evening together? This is just the start. We realize this is a movie within the movie. Another level of stoytelling is laid out. Anna Odell is the director, now a famous artist, who has made a movie about the reunion party she was never invited to. Her project is to confront her old classmates with this film.

In The Reunion Anna Odell blurs the boundaries of documentary/fiction and she plays with ideas about acting and being. When one reads the story, without watching the film, one might get the idea that this is the director's narcissistic revenge project, in which she indulges in a story that revolves around nothing but her own ideas about herself. But this was not my verdict when I had seen the film. It's tough to sit through it, tough because the social tension creeps under the skin, but I never felt the director puts the viewer in a position in which s/he is led to admire "Anna Odell". The character Anna Odell is just as fragile, messy and conflictual as anybody else in the film.

What I found engaging in this film is the way it deals with a complex nest of images of and feelings about what a situation was like. These feelings are intertwining with the present situation: putting on a decent face, wanting to emphatize or expressing how much one is still bothered by "this person". As a viewer, I was drawn into this nest. The film maps these tensions, and looks at the nodes of a social network: the people who are accused of having been the real bullys, the mere onlookers, the passive/active cheering. Odell's own part (now I talk about the character) is complex. The film does not treat her perspective as automatically valid or exempt from challenge. She is in the middle of the tensions, but she is also questioned. 

The Outlaw and his Wife (1918)

At the Sodankylä Midnight sun film festival Victor Sjöström's The Outlaw and his Wife (Berg-Eyvind och hans hustru) was screened with a live performance by Matti Bye's ensemble. I must say that the music really enhanced the experience and Matti Bye's melancholy score was on the spot. Some chose to see Sjöström's film as an early forerunner of what later grows into a formidable tradition of outlaw movies. And sure, outlaws abound; the tale is drawn from Iceland and the big, revolutionary message is that love is greater than society and societal bonds. Eyvind is the guy who stole from others to survive and who runs away from the people who want to punish him; he takes on a new identity and hides in the ranch of a widow, Hella. The two fall in love but soon enough, Eyvind's identity is disclosed. They run away to the mountains where they are joined by another outlaw. The scenery is brilliant and majestic (it's pretty funny to think about the process of dragging very heavy camera equipment up those hills...). The moemtns of suspense root in your gut and it's hard to know one which level these moments feel so riveting: the good thing is perhaps that there are a multitude of levels but the landscape is never reduced to a mere psychological metaphor or a romantic-sublime backdrop for the romance. Berg-Eyvind is a heart-wrenching film about love in a harsh world. During the screening, I was mystified (and a bit annoyed) by many people's inclination to laugh at the hardships shown in the film. To me, there was very little overwrought melodrama or camp in the film and I wonder what it was the people reacted to (did they come there with a steadfast conviction that all silent movies contain funny gags?). So is calling this film an outlaw movie correct? Yes, maybe, but one needs to acknowledge that Sjöström does not romanticize the world of the outlaw; he shows how the vastness of the mountains  for these two people is at the same time synonymous with a shrinking of world, as they are expelled from communities.

She Male Snails (2008)

Pojktanten/She Male Snails is Ester Martin Bergsmark's dreamy and contemplative documentary film (with elements fiction) about youth, gender and socialized limits. Bergsmark shows two individuals, Eli and Ester, who subvert these limits. One is a writer, the writer who wrote the book You are the roots that sleep beneath my feet and hold the earth in place. The tone of the film is reflective rather than combative. Two young people sit in a bath-tub. They are lovers, or have been. They talk about their lives, about violence and love. Both of them have withdrawn from the normative binary gender system. But what does it mean to take a stand, or to be thrown out? Instead of conjuring up a vivid image of the Outsider, Bergsmark focuses on how there is no simple inside and outside. This means that there is no final or cheerful positioning on Identity to be found here; it is as if the film moves, at least partly, on another level. The two main characters reflect on the difficulty to understand oneself. They create a fantasy world, but its not mere 'fantasy', it's also life, their encounter. She male snails is not a film revolving around talking heads and drawn-out discussions. Bergsmark has built scenes in which we get a glimpse of the two characters' lives. These are quiet scenes rather than explosive encounters. Bergsmark also evokes a mood more abstractly, using images of nature. Even though there is plenty of things to like in this film - its approach to gender fluidity is one of them for sure - what bothered me was what sometimes came out as an overwrought attempt to conjure up a Mood. The direction of these scenes appeared too unsure or even self-indulgent (for example when certain symbols very used repeatedly). Still: this is a beautiful and hypnotic film that carves out a space of its own, and does things on its own, unruly terms.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

I haven't read any of Stieg Larsson's books but some of my friends have read them and they have had some positive things to say about them. That made me a bit curious about the movies based on the famous trilogy. My main impression is that yes, Noomi Rapace is fierce & tough and she's got a great energy in the film but beyond that ... well I don't know. Most of all, I felt that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (dir. Niels Arden Oplev) didn't make a very good job in tackling the issues on the table: misogyny. Instead, the story was torn to pieces in all kinds of strange twists and turns and instead of a critical account of a misogynistic society, we got a couple of guys that in their psychopathic dealings did not defy the traditional "bad guy", the stereotypical "monster" in almost any sense. The main problem with the film is that is so engrossed in explaining, explaining, explaining (in a way that is no more elusive than a run-of-the-mill episode of Inspector Morse) no time remains for anything else. Another thing is that many of these explanations end up in a muddled attempt to hint at the Scary Past, a past which, again, is more explained than felt. Without Rapace, this film would be quite painful to watch - that's my harsh verdict.

The Virgin Spring (1960)

The ideas about rape and male sexual violence represented in The Virgin Spring range from clear-sighted critique of 'purity' to images that seem to promote the same ideas about purity that otherwise seem to be the object of critique. Some contemporary reviewers considered the film to be an uncomplicated morality tale. I would not concur with this judgment: there are lots of ambiguities at play here, some of which Bergman might have been aware of, others not.

Bergman returns to the medieval settings and to be honest, Max von Sydow's speech that concludes the film crystallizes the Platonic Idea about Bergman-and-the-middle-ages. The story, based on an folk song, takes off from a family scene in which the daughter of Christian well-off farmers is dressed up to go to church and deliver candles. The daughter likes fine garments and she seems pampered and self-aware. Her opposite in the film is Odin-worshipping Ingeri, an 'unpure bastard' who comes along as a kind of servant. We get the sense that this other girl lives on the family's charity: they despise her but lets her work for them. On the way, after they have split up, the daughter meets a group of goatherders. What follows is a story about violence, revenge and repentance. If one reads the film charitably, Bergman contrasts the idea about the maiden who goes from pure to 'used' with the idea that some people are born to be conceived as 'dirty', as standing outside the rules of sexual mores. But this thread is cut off as soon as Bergman starts to build up his drama about revenge. The herdsmen who molested and killed his daughter comes to visit - they don't know it's her house - and the father contemplates how they are best to suffer. I'm not sure what Bergman tries to say here, and how seriously he takes the story about Christian and Pagan morality (there's a weird scene in which we see a pagan almost-god manipulating the natural elements). To me, this part of the film is executed in a half-hearted manner with a lot of boxy lines churned out by stiff actors, even though Max von Sydow acts in his usual forceful way when performing the agonized father whose mind is filled with thoughts about revenge and who goes about the business with an immense zeal. But at least Bergman relies on no simple conflict between Pagan and Christian as the meaning of both of these religions are questioned throughout the film.

For all its covert (or imagined, by me) critical content, I am disturbed by the images of 'purity'. The maidens golden locks are contrasted with the herdsmen, portrayed like brutes acting out of what is here seen like some primal force of lust. However, one of the herdsmen is a witness rather than an accomplice. In a few striking sections of the film, we see this boy's trauma over what his brothers have done. The point is here precisely that there is no 'pure' purity. One could also say the same thing about the maiden: her purity is constructed with her clothes and a certain social system. But granted that scene, the title of the film seems a bit odd.

Ole dole doff (1968)

Pedagogy as horror movie - that's the core of Jan Troell's Ole dole doff, an extremely disturbing movie about a teacher's existential troubles. When I say 'disturbing' I don't mean that there are any particularly shocking sense in a conventional sense. Instead, the film is built upon explosives. The main character works in a school and we see him trying to stay calm, deal with the rowdy kids and be civil to his girlfriend. He is distant and insecure and what he does only aggravates the distance. Troell gets under the skin of this middle schoool teacher: we see the world through his eyes and we see his everyday life intermingled with nightmares. Troell uses both sound and image to evoke a truly haunting and genuinely frightening existential place. This is the anguish of ordinary life and he uses ordinary locations (a swimming pool, the home, streets) to capture this sense of immediate fear. A film with a similar approach to fear might be Repulsion by Polanski: what the two films share is the everyday as a frame for alienation. Per Oscarsson is absolutely stunning in the role of the teacher: he inhabits the part using twitches and fidgety movement - a very detailed form of acting. This is a film I can't get out of my head. It feels real even though it also uses dreams and some almost surreal elements to enhance the feeling of disintegration. Ole dole doff (also called Who saw him die?) is not primarily a film getting to grips with the school system or social problems. Nor does it follow the pattern of heroic representations of eloquent teachers. The teacher in the main role has problems with authority but what the film seems to say is not at all that authority should be reinstated, nor does it necessarily say that the teacher comes "from the old society" and feels awkward in a new system. Troell places the teacher in a social setting, but he doesn't churn out a socio-political agenda. We see a parents' meeting at the school. The parents sit at the kids' desks and they all express opinions about this and that in a way that is self-centered. Each parent has hir own agenda. The teacher is, again, responding with helplessness: he tries to embody the role of the teacher. He always fails. He can't become the role. This is one of the main topics of Ole dole doff - the main character goes through life in a state of insecurity. He tries to accomodate himself with the expectations and he tries to do what he thinks he should do, but all the time the social situation overwhelms him and there always seems to be an aspect of impersonation in him. This is a film I would like to watch several times.

Vi är bäst! (2013)

I have nothing against feel-good movies; if they don't try to manipulate their viewers into dangerous but amiable corners, they're all right. Lucas Moodysson's comeback film, Vi är bäst! struck me as a good movie simply because of its rare life-affirming quality. It tells the story of two 13-year olds who do stuff that kids like and experience things that kids tend to experience. The year is 1982 and their parents give boozy parties where they listen to the insufferable Ulf Lundell. The parents are a bit immature but they have the heart in the right place. Bobo and Klara are rowdy and happy teens who want to do their thing. In that age, it might not always be so clear what that thing is, but one is trying to find it. These two do find it, in punk music - they sign on a list on the youth center just to piss off the dorks that play metal there and the story takes off from that. They realize, however, that their skills in actually handling instruments is not exactly well-rounded yet so they ask one of the school's outcasts, Hedvig, to join them. The trajectory of their punk aspirations tack the issues of rebellion (both its roots in safe middle-class environments and the kids' uncomfortable relation to their classmates), friendship and condescension (being called a 'girl band'). I like Moodysson's energetic pace, the restless cinematography and the three leading actresses performances make you happy for several weeks on end. The only thing that bothered me was the portrayal of the trio's encounter with two boys their same age who play punk music. During these moments, the story follows a familiar path that conjures up the image about girls who are friends only as long as no boy threatens the friendship (to the film's defense one can say that jealousy is treated as the messy phenomenon it is: it is never that clear to the person who is jealous what she is actually jealous about). I was happy that events took another turn that prevented the film from going too far into heteronormative teen-drama territory. But as I said, Vi är bäst is a wonderfully ass-kicking movie about what it is to be young, fragile and tough.

Oxen/The Ox (1991)

Oh no! Sven Nykvist shot a great many fine-looking movies in his day, but Oxen, one of the films he directed, is not exactly a masterpiece. The images are beautiful, of course, capturing the bleak light of wintry Småland or the harsh environment of a prison. But beyond this, Oxen turned out to be a sentimental, almost embarrassing movie. The story takes place during the drought & famine years in the middle of the 19th century. Some go to America, others remain. The times are tough and in a confused state of desperation Helge kills his employer's ox with the intention of getting food for the winter. His wife blames him for what he did, even though they have a small kid to feed. In the end, his crime is revealed and he gets a cruel life sentence. Stellan Skarsgård triest to make the best of his character, the tortured Helge, but he is given clumsy line and not much to work with. Max Von Sydow is the only memorable character from the movie, playing a well-meaning pastor. The film is melodramatic, immersing itself in misery rather than shedding new light on the situation at hand. This is the kind of film in which one bad thing after another happens but the only thing I was left with was feeling numb, not caring much about the fate of these poor souls. Nykvist tries to scrape up a moral drama about poverty and bad conscience, but the magic is in the details, and in this movie, the details are never focused on. Instead, the characters are one-dimensional and so are their moral problems. The cinematography is austere but the austerity never takes off, it never takes me anywhere - it's just ... pretty.

Apflickorna (2011)

Apflickorna is Lisa Aschan's first feature film. This is impressive, as she develops a style and approach of her own - even though there are of course connections - I though about Ruben Östlund's interest in social dynamics when I watched Apflickorna, the use of static camera and long shots (in this case combined with extreme close ups) also brought Östlund's peculiar mix of intimacy and distance to mind. What I liked about Apflickorna is its refusal to please, to conform to expectations about how a story is to progrress or what characters should do or how they should react. But this is not to say that Aschan has made a provocative film - I would rather describe it as unsettling, elusive perhaps. Apflickorna is a love story, but also a tough tale about power and competition. When you think 'love story', in this case you have to think about hard-boiled lines uttered in a Humpherey Bogart kind of way, stonefaced. When I reveal that the two main characters are training a form of gymnastics on horses, one girl being a newbie, the other more experienced, you might conclude that this still has to be a cute and feminine little film about friendship and such things that take place between two girls who like to create a secret little world for themselves (this is the stereotype). No. The training is situated within a nexus of power and discipline - you are to exert control, not only over you body, but over any situation you are confronted with. Apflickorna explores how this discipline is achieved, or how it breaks down. Sexuality is depicted as playing out both as a way to uphold power and to break it down. In one scene, the two girls are courted by a guy. They tease him, send mixed signals, and dismiss him. One of the girls may feel differently about the situation than the other, but it all takes place within forms of power, even though the character of this power is not at all clear. The situation invokes the idea of femininity as a power tool, but I am not sure in what way the film treats it differently from sexist rhetoric in which the same image is often present (where women are portrayed as scheming, using their sexuality as a weapon) - I guess that one could see it as connected with the film's generally bleak image of relations as immersed in power configurations. An important and heart-wrenching side-plot focuses on one of the main character's little sister, who is in love with her older cousin. The girl is schooled into how to react ('be tough') and the film shows a kind of vulnerability no disciplinary conditioning or attempts at poker-faced self-control could take away.  Apflickorna has its weak points and those occur when too much is spelled out, when things are said, rather than shown. Most of the time, the stiffness works brilliantly and creates an unnerving tension between the characters, but sometimes this stylized acting feels to calculated (I think about what Bresson would have said, how he directed his actors to be blank, but somehow immediately present).

Play (2011)

In my opinion, Ruben Östlund is perhaps the most interesting movie director making films in Sweden today. His films explore social situations and the viewer is put in an as uncomfortable position as the protagonists, but this is not to say that Östlund makes some kind of social pornography of the type that we are supposed to take a lot of pleasure in looking at other's misery. One of the recurring themes in Östlund's movies is how fear is handled in encounters between people. He investigates how fear is transformed into a persistent will to make everything all right, to act as if nothing happened, as if the uncomfortable things can be mastered somehow. These topics are also apparent in Östlund's latest movie, Play. It is a difficult movie but not in the sense that it is difficult to follow the story or that it contains a lot of violence. It's difficult to watch because it forces you to think about what all of these situations mean, how you react to them - Östlund's films feel personal in how they seem aimed not at an idealized, statistical audience ("this is what people normally want to see"). He puts some acute questions in front of you, and it is your responsibility to think about what you see. But like Michael Haneke, I am not always sure whether Östlund's films express a moral clarity. As you can probably guess, his films have an open-ended character. They never conclude in clear-cut solutions or narrative resolutions.

Some reviewers and debaters accused Play of being racist. Even though I can see where that worry is coming from, I don't feel that does justice to the film. The question is there, however, what does race mean in the film, in what way is being black important or not important here? But this is not the only questions. There is also another story, a story about reactions that have a racist structure to them that the film reveals as an aspect of a tangled situation.

Through a very sophisticated series of techniques that play on psychological responses, a group of boys makes another group of boys handle over all of their valuable. It all starts with the first group telling one boy that he has just the same kind of mobile phone that has been stolen from another boy's brother. Can he prove that he didn't steal it? The boys bribe, play good cop/bad cop, they talk and persuade, they use force and elicit fear. Among themselves, they are not at all a coherent group. One of them is beaten up for acting differently. The other group of course try to flee from the situation, they try to make all of this end so that they can continue their day in the normal way. Their actions express insecurity, and this is exploited. The other boys persist. Slowly, some of their resistance starts to wither away. They get tired. They submit. They react spontaneously in ways that make them play along. The situation is a perpetual state of social bribery. At one point, they all "cooperate", but in the next scene, it is back to the mix of resistance and lack of defiance.The black kids play with racial stereotypes: the gangsta, the dangerous black, the unruly youth, the victim. The other gang are confounded, they don't know what to do.

The digital camera remains static. It is usually placed far from the actors. We see the situation playing out against the backdrop of urban non-places: a shopping mall, a tram, a train station and in one scene the group has ended up seemingly in the middle of nowhere. I think of Östlund's short film about a robbery, another one, in which he uses a security camera, or the style of a security camera. Östlund juxtaposes the apparent neutrality - the observational camera - of the image with its almost violent non-neutrality - these images are in no way neutral. My own reaction oscillates. Is this a mere artistic trick or does it have a good point?

Some have interpreted the film as a movie about political correctness. One plays along because one fears that otherwise one will be complicit in racism. I think this makes sense. But the film also ties in with Ruben Östlund's other films - in what way do people react to oppression or threats by a form of passivity, so that the only wish is to get it over with, the wish that the others will simply disappear? Play and his film The Involuntary explores what happens when somebody reacts to a difficult situation by being paralyzed. 

I don't think Östlund's film makes any statement about race or black people. What he does, I think, is to look at the fears that a racist society gives rise to, and that these fears have many sides. Here, racism is connected with the fear of meeting the other, of looking her in the eyes, treating the other as a human being rather than "a black kid who probably wants to make trouble". In this sense, racism is not just some unfounded conceptions or stereotypes - it is also intermingled with attitudes, the concrete encounter and what it makes us into.

While I write this, I realize that I will probably say different things about this movie in a few months. It's a film that has to be re-thought, digested. I should also mention that the film has many problems. Its smartness is one - it creates a tangle which creates a sort of mirroring effect - one responds with the same kind of insecurity and fear that the characters express - and this effect is so contrived and calculated that it no longer can morally have the effect of self-reflection. Another problem involves some specific scenes, especially towards the end, where Östlund tries to bring home the point about behavior that seems 'decent' but that just makes things even worse - here things gets too obvious, too schemed.

Äta sova dö (2012)

Gabriela Pichler's first film, Äta sova dö, is immensely impressive. It's an important film and as a film it is very tight, very simple and uses a loose tableaux technique perfectly, with no ambition of creating a Great Narrative. The main characters are Raša and her father. She works at a factory where salad is packed into plastic boxes. But the economic crisis has hit Sweden and there will be layoffs. Raša is made redundant even though she does her utmost to keep the job: why do they fire her when they know that she is an efficient worker? The union is powerless and the union representative is made redundant himself. Pichler's depiction of Raša and her father, their common struggler for subsistence, reminds me of the Dardenne brothers - in the same spirit as the brothers, Pichler has made a movie that is both minimalist and deeply engaging; a film that opens your eyes and makes you think, feel, react, look. It's the kind of movie in which every small little detail matters, everything is a matter of life and death.

When you what Äta sova dö you get the sense that these scenes are partly improvisations. Pichler has a good ear for how people speak, how they act when nothing much is going on but when there is still lots of tension in the air. In several scenes, Raša and other villagers attend a course offered by the unemployment office. Pichler focuses on the dreary faces around the table, how they are forced to listen to a woman who doesn't believe in her own words, but who in a seemingly well-meaning way tries to do her job. Even the funny scenes never has the function of diversion. The humor is grim, and it strikes your heart in a way that has little to do with a moment of respite.

Raša is depicted as a person with a strong will. She doggedly tries to do the best of the situation. Sometimes she does not think ahead, but she moves on. Pichler does not reduce her in any way, she is not treated with gender stereotypes - she just is. The same goes for Raša's relation to her father, or the friendship between her and a boy from the village. Nermina Lukač who plays Raša is absolutely stunning.

Against all odds Äta sova dö is an extremely hopeful film - I mean, considering this is a film about unemployment and a society of bureaucratic helplessness, this is not at all self-evident. But the kind of hope Pichler and her characters offer has nothing to do with the "optimistic" official story about entrepreneurship and you-can-be-what-you-want. This film places defiance at the core of what it means to be alive; the desire to work is not reduced to an endless adaptability - work is seen not as a rosy path of self-realization but as the daily struggle of making do. And in contrast to the official blabber about the dignity of work, Äta sova dö combines its grounded hopefulness with class politics and critique of work society, the society in which even a hobby might prove that you may be a good worker, or the society in which you are useless as a worker even though you have the skills to do something well.

Zero Kelvin (1995)

Re-watching an old favorite film is a risky project. Zero Kelvin was a great film when I was 16. I was still impressed by the visually stunning landscapes and cinematography when watching it 15 years later, but well - some things just do not work so well anymore. A poet goes to Greenland to work as a trapper with two other man - a roughneck and a scientist. Immediately, problems arise between him and the roughneck, who is played by Stellan Skarsgård, who does not exactly hold back. The film revolves around the dynamics between the three men, and Greenland basically remains a backdrop for how the psychological drama plays out. This makes the film a bit problematic - the psychological points become dramatized in a way that sometimes feels cheap: arctic feelings, arctic landscapes. Love/hate, twin souls, repressed feelings, accusations, mirroring etc. The biggest flaw of the film is that the roles are strictly defined according to the three social characters: the poet (sensitive), the scientist (rational) and the wild man (wild). It is true that things happen that blur these stereotypes a bit, but the film remains at the level of crude generalizations - these characters never come out as real people - or the generalizations are not employed in an interesting way. - But still: a beautiful film.