Tokyo-Ga (1985)

Tokyo-Ga, Wim Wender's documentary about Tokyo, features some stunning scenes. One of them takes place in a pinball parlor: glaring colors, rattling machies and faces hardened with concentration. In another scene, we follow the manufacturing of the wax food-imitations that are then paraded in restaurant windows. Most scenes are quiet, reduced to a registering camera, while other scenes are connected with the film's mission, told in voice-over by Wenders. He states his admiration for Ozu, the great director of, among other films, Tokyo monogatari. Wenders goes to Tokyo, full aware that Ozu's films are from another time. Japan underwent radical changes and Wenders finds very little that reminds him of the scenery from Ozu's movies. But sometimes he does. In an early scene, we see a little kid and a parent in the metro. The kid refuses to take another step. The parents drags the kid along. A great portion of the film comprises interviews with people who worked with Ozu; a cinematographer, and an elderly actor. It's a shame that these interviews are so short. A shortcoming of Wenders film is that it lacks focus. Why the hell would I be interested in watching a dull conversation with Herzog (in which he delivers a slew of platitudes about civilization) in the Tokyo tower? It's even a bit unclear what exactly it is that fills Wenders with such melancholia. His film attests to a type of romanticism, a longing for some kind of purity and more simple forms of life, that I find a bit too much on the escapist side.

Gazon maudit (1995)

The most interesting fact about the cozily humorous Gazon maudit is that upon its release in the US and A, it was R-rated (in Sweden, 11-year olds could go see the movie). The reason is, obviously, that the story involves love between a pair of women (one of them married, to a man). I have a hard time understanding what made the American censors think that this is a film that corrupts the minds of the young. It's a film about relationship constallations, sexism and also, different standards in the way male and female infidelity are seen. It's not a particularly good movie, though. There's a lot of shouting and door-slamming, but at least the film is not obviously sexist.

Arven (1979)

The setting of Arven, a Norwegian film directed by Anja Breien, might not be very original; rich familly member dies and old quarrels and difficulties come back to haunt the rest of the family. But Arven turned out to be a good movie, even a funny one, granted you are not a stranger to black humor. Kai Skaug was a successful owner of a shipping company. He leaves a big inheritance for his family to fight over. This does not sound like a very nice story, but Breien creates a full-blown neurotic family tragedy about greediness and contempt, against the background of a very subdued Schubert piece. Anita Björk as the resentful matron Märta is simply magnificent. So are the rest of the actors. Breien has a good ear for pitch; how people talk, how people keep silent.
Arven revolves around small-mindedness and petty secrets. But it is also a film about stuff. Skaug Sr. lived in a house that was almost a chateau. His relatives quarrel about his belongings. Breien ironically focuses on furniture, bric-a-brac, carpets, art - to introduce us to the tensions within a family. In one priceless scene, we see two women fight over an ugly pillow. They both grasp the pillow, exclaiming, "It is mine!" It is almost as if these things (and, god, the money!) consitute the only reason why family members communicate with each other at all.
What makes Arven such a delightful movie is the close attention it pays to facial expressions. The story is not limited to the dialogue; it is inscribed in the character's faces; grumpy, alarmed, aloof, worried, haggard.
You can watch the film here.

The quiet American (2002)

The quiet American, directed by Phillip Noyce (based on a novel by Graham Greene) is one of the films I found more tolerable upon second watching. This is by no means a great film, but it makes some interesting points about colonialism and the events and power nexuses leading up to the Vietnam war. The problem is perhaps that the political aspect becomes little more than an element in a thriller (I should read the novel: I like Greene). Some of the scenes chronicling the political attitudes of the "American", Alden Pyle, a humanitarian aid worker, were awfully non-subtle (the American promenades into a post-explosion scene and what does he do? He calmly wipes blood off his pants. This moment, and another one, where we see him talk Vietnamese (which he is supposed not to know) gives us clues to see that he is not the person he pretends to be. OK, I get it. The most interesting aspect of The quiet American as a political movie is Pyle as a character; ignorant, "idealistic", with shady intentions that are perhaps not clear even to himself.

The film's attempt at love story is one hell of a mess - I am unclear as to whether this is good or bad. But there is a political aspect of the film's portrayal of a romantic triangle. The quiet American seems to allude to the image of the Oriental woman: obedient but cunning, aloof, a beautiful secret. The woman in the film, Phuong, is depicted almost as a possession, over the right to which two men, a British reporter and the American humanitarian aid worker, fight. But there are also moments when this picture is smashed, whe Phuong is presented as a real person, not just a projection of two men's desire. I suppose these two men's "desire" (for what?) is discussed critically in the film, but there are, I think, relapses into conventional and sexist film language (depicting sex, for example, and the way the camera zooms in on Phuong's body).The question is: is the ambiguity that surrounds Phuong's role in these men's life intentional (that we are supposed to see variations of power: colonial, gendered, economic) or is it an instance of blurry thinking? I don't know, but I opt for the first.

There is little to be found in terms of inventiveness in The quiet American. For the most part, it's a film that follows the rule-book (how love is depicted, how violence is depicted, the structure of the film, etc.).The rule-book showcases plenty of examples of sepia-toned cinamatography and elegiac atmospheres.
But, on the other hand, Michael Caine & Brendan Fraser are rather good in this.

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.)

Les parapluies de Cherbourg (1964)

I decided to watch a film starring Catherine Deneuve. Obviously, Les parapluies de Cherbourg is considered a classic. I didn't know much anything about it, so I was initially a bit flabbergasted by its form - oddball musical. Do they sing all the time? Yes they do. And those quite ordinary-sounding lines are not usually what you expect from musical numbers and those numbers are hardly "songs" anyway. As I am not a fan of musicals I wondered whether I could sit through this. I could, and, for all my suspicion, I enjoyed it! The story is pure melodrama, of course. Girl meets boy. Girl is pregnant while boy is sent off to war. Girl meets another man. Etc. I liked this film because it was unexpectedly weird. Jacques Demy plays with colors and contrasts and he (along with set designers & the cinematographer & maybe even choreographer) is really successful at that. For example, bright & extravagant pastel colors lend an almost surreal feel to the interiors which makes the effect of the icy blueness of some of the outdoors scenes or the desaturated grayness of the images towards the end of the movie even more striking. Props and locations are used in a really inventive way to create what ultimately becomes a sort of shaky fantasy world (Jaques Tati's Mon Oncle comes to mind). Everyday objects are allowed a role that is very unusual in conventional movies - I think of things such as wallpapers, tea pots, covers.
Everything about this film has the ring of artificiality. It's artificial to the extent that I start to look for political subtext, but maybe that is going too far. Anyway, I'd like to watch some Douglas Sirk movie soon if only I can get hold of one.
I finally decided that this is a good film when even the ending frame was ambiguous in plenty of ways. I expected something more conventional. All in all, there are tons of amusing details to marvel at (ordering white wine when fleeing one's misery in a debaucherous drinking binge).

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.

Adama Meshuga'at (2006)

The setting of Sweet mud (2006) is a kibbutz in Israel during the 70's. The theme seemed interesting and I tried to watch it. I haven't seen that many Israelian movies, so that was one more reason for trying it out. But actually, I couldn't finish it. The cinematography was sweetly nostalgic, but the story was not. So what do we learn about life in the kibbutz? Well, mostly that it was a place for weirdos who deceive themselves in thinking that they represent an openminded and democractic lifestyle. The fact that one of the first scenes involved a boy witnessing a man's sexual feelings for a cow is quite revealing as to what kind of picture of kibbutz life the film tries to sell off.

Muraren (2002)

Stefan Jarl has made many good documentaries (the Mods-trilogy, the film about Ricky Bruch, another one about Bo Widerberg etc.). Muraren is 95 minutes of Thommy Berggren, actor, talking about his father, his working-class background, and some episodes from the world of theatre and cinema. The scene in which he recalls how he wouldn't listen to Ingmar Bergman's directions ("Ni ska sitta som på dagis!") is hilarious (for some reason most anything that relates to Ingmar B in real life is hilarious, even when, especially when, Ingmar B tells the stories himself). It's a good documentary.

(Speaking of Thommy Berggren: Elvira Madigan is one of those films I hated while watching it but now I cannot really remember why.)

Le goût des autres (2000)

Agnès Jaoui's film The taste of others is a relatively conventional psychological relationship drama that by connecting a bunch of stories about middle aged people attempts to drum the alienation of modern man into our heads. But this film has one character, a businessman, that is hard not to suffer with. His name is Castella and he falls in love with his personal English teacher, who is an actor. Castella is completely out of step with what is considered to be high culture. He does not seem to understand what is embarrassing and what is not. He is a mess, but somehow he is also a person that undergoes important changes. But beyond this character, this movie is not very interesting, even though the themes of it (self-understanding & understanding others, change) are promising. It's very, very French.