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.

A Perfect Day (2014)

The war in Yugoslavia is ending and a group of aid workers find themselves stuck in bureaucratic structures that renders them unable to help. Their mission is to drag a dead person out from a well, so that the corpse won’t spoil the water. This is the set-up of Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s A Perfect Day, a film that tries to be rowdy comedy and social document all at once. Benicio del Toro and Tim Robbins play the tough guys who have grown cynically world-weary - they act like some kind of rock stars. As the well business lapses into a farce, it is his character that delivers the bitter lines about organizational fuck-up. Mélanie Tierry plays the newbie, the one with a working conscience. So, does it work? A perfect day is crass, but not always successful in its attempt to deliver a harshly comical image of aid work. The result is sometimes simply rather insensitive towards what it is in fact trying to do – the war that it chronicles is at times transformed into a mere background for slapstick and action - not to speak of blasting Marilyn Manson and Gogol Bordello tunes. The film's juxtaposition of the idealistic girl and the gnarly cynical male is tiresome and goes by the book in a cheap kind of way. Indeed, the cynical male cracks jokes to impress the sweet idealist girl - he laughs about getting laid and seeing his first corpse. Of course one could say that these things might exist in real life too, and that real people can be clichés and crack stupid and tasteless jokes. But the problem with A Perfect Day is that it does little to show what this reveals about aid work, bureacracy within organization or the psychological pressure of working in a war setting.

Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015)

Peter Greenaway is famous for his professed belief in an image-based cinematic language.
I am very sympathetic with this irritation with a devastatingly dominating mainstream of movie-making in which images are mere companions to words, words, words.
Sadly, Greenaway's latest film doesn't really live up to the promise of strong, overwhelming images, even though he tries hard - I mean HARD - much too hard, it seems. He tries hard to chock, to provoke, to shake us. Treating us with split screens, color changes and archive material does not make this movie come alive.
Not only is Eisenstein in Guanajuato overwrought (which could be ok) - Greenaway appears to be stuck in his ideas, re-using stuff, treating his own aesthetic palette as LEGO-blocks to play idly with.
The problem is not (not at all) that 'we don't get to know Eisenstein as he really was'. Films about existing people can be far-out and brilliant - think about Jarman's Wittgenstein. Historical accuracy - screw that, if you like.
The film simply fails to engage me as a viewer. My eyes follow the glossy tricks on display, but none of them move me.
The worst thing: Greenaway is severely stuck in his 'life consists in sex & death'-mantra. This film: sex and death - but in a detached way, as if both shrink to mere cinematic tricks.
As you might guess, this is a testament to Greenaway's adoration for Eisenstein's films. But this testament fails to do what it so passionately wants to: show the viewer a love for film, film as its own language. There are movies which have shaken my conceptions of what film is, what film can do, what film can do to you. Eisenstein in Guanjuato cannot be counted among these eye-opening films.

Farinelli (1994)

Gerard Corbiau's Farinelli is a clumsy movie with good music. Farinelli is an opera star during the 18th century and his brother writes grandiose music for him. They share everything, even their dates. When he performs in concerts, women faint and everybody are amazed by his high-pitched voice. Farinelli is a castrato and it is this aspect that is the foreground of the film. The film's preoccupation with male organs is both tedious and pompous, and the only thing I got out of this film is some director's mouldy ideas about masculinity. On the other hand, it is fun to watch Farinelli's over-the-top presence, his mannerisms and how he created a new idea about the performer. The biggest problem with Farinelli is that it is not going anywhere. It's a messy film with lots of threads and themes, and plenty of uneven acting to boot.

Ulysses' Gaze (1995)

When I was 16, Ulysses' Gaze (dir. Angelopoulos) was a great film. You know, profound. Re-watching it a bunch of years later proved to be excruciating (and very, very boring). Oh. My. God. This film tries so hard to be deep, to be pensive, to provide an overarching story about Europe, the fate of Europe, and the nature of man, grief and love and loss and memory and ... well, post-communist regimes looking for a path. Angelopoulos' film is spelled EPIC and that's part of the problem.  Harvey Keitel tries his best, and Erland Jospehsson is sympathetic, it's just that the film's grandiose aspiration is bound to fail. And it fails. This is not to say that all scenes fall flat - the image of the gigantic Lenin statue drifting on a barge is beautiful. Most of the time the dialogue is heavy-handed, the sweeping and slow cinematography seems derivative and the perspective of the entire film appears to be quite self-righteous - a film about the magnificence of cinema, the mystery and enigma of the moving image; but I never feel that I grasp anything essential about cinema - what happens is that I get annoyed by the pretentiousness and self-indulgence of the film (which has not to do with its being slow or inaccessible). The story has several levels. On the concrete level, it's about a guy who travels from country to country looking for a few reels of early cinema. But the story is also about the fate of the Balkans, Greece, nationalism, war, the past. // It is easy to think of directors who have the skills and power of attention to create a stunning scene out of a seemingly haphazard or commonplace situation. Angelopoulos works in the opposite direction. His scenes are composed to the extent that they appear stifled. There is no life left in them, they are weighed down by the desperate quest for MEANING. Roger Ebert awarded the film with one star. "A director must be very sure of his greatness to inflict an experience like this on the audience...." // This is the kind of film where EVERY SINGLE female person is attracted to this elusive main character A (as in Angelopoulos) - after two minutes in the company of this man who moves around like a zombie and talks in quasi-poetic mumblings, all of these women's hearts start throbbing for this guy; everywhere he goes, women's secret and innermost emotions are unleashed. zZzZ.

Metropia (2009)

On the level of narrative and character development, Metropia (dir. Tarik Saleh) was a thin affair. The story is a simple one. The oil reserves are drained; Europe is now connected via a metro line spreading all over the continent. Festung Europa is strengthened and in the most popular game show, a lucky bastard is awarded asylum in Europe. A multinational company has developed a shampoo that contains surveillance antennae. The usual dystopian vision: ordinary Joe gradually understands that he is being monitored by Big Brother, and in dealing with this situation, he has to re-evaluate his entire life. What sets the film apart from the thousand other Orwellian sketches is the film's eerie animations - yes, this is an animated film. The film provides funereal images of an unsettling cityscape, bathing in darkness and gloom. Many scenes take place in the metro system and it is in these scenes that the film manages to engage me despite its overall flaws.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)

I am a viewer who is rarely troubled by a film's story being confusing. If I don't understand the windings of a plot, I easily settle with the thought that the idea is not to "understand" in the sense of getting a perspicuous representation of what is going on. This may of course make me patient with the seemingly random turns of some narartives, but other times, I am unnecessarily lazy. I don't know what to think about the myriad events that make up the mysterious Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I can't say I was engaged by it on the level of "solving a puzzle" - even though the film clearly required an attentive viewer with an interest in comprehending the story - but for me, it was not the "complicatedness" that made this an outstanding film. However, I do think that this is a film that benefits from a second viewing. Alfredsson and his crew groove on details, and it takes time to pay attention to all of that. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is NOT James Bond (confession: I haven't seen any James Bond film whatsoever.) It's a slow-paced, detailed drama about human relations and institutions during the heat of the cold war.

I was worried I would be bored by this drab, European spy movie (based on a novel by le Carré), only to be surprised how intrigued I was by this cold and clinical film. Tomas Alfredsson directed the film and he made a glorious job creating the anonymous settings of the film. The whole thing is brilliantly enigmatic, from the characters, to the locations and the cinematography (sometimes a grainy quality of the images conjures up the sense of absolute clandestince presence). It may be mad to say this, but Tinker... was a pleasure to watch.

The story revolves around the betrayals stemming from an event in which an English spy in Hungary tries to track down a mole. In the sinewy narrative unraveling, we are introduced to a group of English Intelligence service officers (and ex-spies) who all look on each other with a suspicous eye. The tension of the film: spies spying on spies and the notion of "being on our side" becomes very unclear. Through flash-backs and one of the main character's investigation work, the mystery of the mole is gradually resolved. The world Alfredsson creates is one of paranoia, betrayed love and super-secret dealings.  

I am convinced that the film would have been a completely conventional affair, had Alfredsson opted for a more straightforward presentation of the story, or had he chosen to make a "thriller" instead of the present low-key drama. The merits of Tinker..., tackling a difficult theme in a completely innovative way, could be compared to Sorrentino's Il divo, even though Alfredsson's movie is far less lavish. In both films, the director makes the character a part of the locations, and the locations express the characters. This is a useful dialectic form.

The actors are mostly great (with some embarrassing exceptions). Gary Oldman is GREAT.

A Dangerous Method (2011)

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

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.

Taking sides (2001)

István Szabó's Taking sides is what most would call a chamber drama. The number of characters are reduced to a minimum and most scenes take place in one room. Despite several moments of bad acting (most of them Havey Keitel's interpretation of an obnoxious, aggressive American) and despite the poorly written dialogue ("I am an artist and I believe in art"), Taking sides deals with quite interesting questions concerning art, responsibility and what it is to say that one "does not engage in politics". The film revolves around Steve Arnold, an American army major, who investigates the case of conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. Unlike some other musicians, Furtwängler didn't flee Germany. Rather, his career seemed to have been supported by the Nazi élite. When interrogated about his collaboration with the Party, Furtwängler downplays his political responsibility. He does this by appealing to a separation of art and politics. Arnold shows no understanding for Furtwängler's attempt to absolve himself from responsibility; his interrogation style oscillates between earnest questions and outright abuse. (Does Arnold have an agenda? That remains unclear.) One of the points Arnold makes is that sometimes you are involved in politics, whether you want to or not.
The film is not pretending to solve the question about responsibility. Instead, it poses some questions and holds up the kinds of answers people have to these questions. What form these answers take express something about how a specific person understands herself (and what we, as viewers, are inclined to think). Is Furtwängler a naive person? What does it mean to call him "naive"?
A flaw of the film is, however, that it doesn't go far enough, but it lets its character slip into the conventional caricature trap.

(PS: Istan Szabo has made one of the worst films in the history of cinema, Sunshine. It was a good thing that I didn't know this while I sat down to watch Taking sides.)

Modigliani (2004)S

Sometimes, it gives one a certain sense of inner satisfaction to have one's prejudiced opionions confirmed. In other words, I sat down with a greasy dinner to watch a film about an Italian painter called Amedeo Modigliani. The film is called, surprise, surpise, Modigliani and it was everything I expected it to be. I've seen many films about self-centered artists before, but this about takes the biscuit. Yes, it was about drinking & pride & women & artistic poverty & mental asylums & old masters & hallucinatory fever dreams. Of course, several moments of gun-waving were included. What else. Sorry, forgot. Toiling to finish THE MASTERPIECE.

It had melodramatic lighting and lots of smarmy music. I am not exaggerating, even the lighting was terrible. In a film like this, it is only appropriate to have all actors speak English with a horrendous "European" accent. (Except the flashbacks of Modigliani's childhood - for authenticity value, the actors spoke Italian) The funniest thing about the film is that Gertrude Stein is of course played by a woman who does everything to hammer home the point that Stein was a VERY MASCULINE WOMAN.

But really. This kind of movie is a bit fascinating, after all. Not because of its content, which is conventional, but because of the strange & overwrought way in which it is done. It is not supposed to be comedy, but for all that, the dialogue is so bombastic and corny that most anything these "artistic spirits" say showcase the art of accidental comedy. Actually, if this film would have been just a tad bit more trashy (and it WAS trashy) then I might have actually liked it.

You guessed it; I didn't finish this film either. But I watched half of it. Modigliani is, of course, one not-so-honorable example of the not-so-honorable Europudding type of production.

A question to which I have no answer is why there are so many films about art and artists, but almost none of them is any good. The only examples I can think of, where a film about some sort of artist/writer is not a piece of self-indulgent crap, are Jane Campion's Angel at my table, the film about Truman Capote and, a third one, Derek Jarman's Caravaggio.