Bad lieutenant (2009)

Bad lieutenant is Werner Herzog at his most unhinged and zany. Call it post-Katrina New Orleans, a hellish city of gambling, shady police officers and coke-dealers. Nicolas Cage is up-ranked to lieutenant after having saved a man from death. Cage is involved in solving a murder mystery. A family has been slaugthered. Cage is baaaad lieutenent, vigilante-style. His girlfriend is a prostitute and when he is not taking his dose of Vicodin (a bad back) he is snorting interesting substances.

At first, I actually expected this to be some kind of mystery movie. You know the drill: a puzzle / bits and pieces of information / resolution. Well - Herzog's mind is not bent on that. Herzog is more interested in freaked-out paranoia and eerie digressions about alky daddy and a dog that needs a temporary home. This is a film about bad cop demons. You know, this is the kind of movie in which we witness an iguana blinking its eye against the backdrop of Engelbert Humperdink's rendition of Please, release me. Like that. Then I haven't said anything about Cage's acting style; it is, as they used to say, far out. In the very best sense of the term.

And I love it. Of course I do. I love it for being blizzed-out seedy. I love it for being goofy James Ellroy. This is bad-ass PULP as it should be. This film will warm my heart like, forever. Just thinking about it brightens my mood.

4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days (2007)

During the last few years, quite a few Romanian film makers have received some deserved attention. 4 weeks, 3 months and 2 days is the only film I've seen by Cristian Mungiu. It is, indeed, a good film, a film that grabs your attention and you're hardly breathing during those two hours. Mungiu made a film that doesn't compromise. It's a harsh story and the way it is told is just as hard. There are no props that will sugarcoat those gruesome images. Sometimes, hints of bleak humor can be traced, but that is quite rare. One of the things I like about this film is how unselfconscious it is. It tries nothing. No tricks, nothing.

The story is set in a wintry Romanian city during the late 80's. A college girl, Gabita, is intent on having an abortion. There is no legal way to do it. Her friend Otilia helps her. Otilia meets the grim-looking abortionist. She takes him to a hotel. There is bargain / a gruesome event. Otilia has agreed to meet her fussy boyfriend's familia...

Mungiu pays close attention to surroundings. The story, which spans no more than ten hours, transports the viewer from a drab college dorm to wintry city backstreets to a drab hotel and to the upper-middle class home of well-to-do family. What makes Mungiu such a damn fine director is that he doesn't clutter the scenes with needless "markers" guiling us into the mental sphere of "Ceausescu's Romania". In other words: Mungiu focuses on what is important. That doesn't mean that the story is a very straightforward one. In one sense it is: we follow a few eventful hours experienced by a college student who does what she can to mend off catastrophies. In another sense, "what is important" has very little to do with "progression of a narrative". For example, we see an endless bullshit discussion between folks who like to brag about themselves. In the centre of the frames: Otilia's pale, impatient face. For perhaps 1/2 hour we watch how painful waiting can be. I am not sure if I have ever seen that kind of anxious impatience portrayed so ferociously on film before.

This is just one example of how 4 weeks excel in evoking emotions and the way emotions express an understanding of a situation. But, what is most important of all, Mungiu doesn't overstate the case. The treatment of the subject is always subtle, always exploratory.

Rosetta (1999)

Asked about the focus of their cinema, the brothers once noted that when films have a working class subject matter they are labelled "social cinema", whereas films with bourgeois characters are referred to as "psychological dramas". (link)

Few contemporary film directors make movies with such moral depth as Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne. Their understanding of remorse/forgiveness/wrongdoing - but also their committment to depicting social injustice and poverty - is raw and unsentimental, yet very sober & clear-sighted. Rosetta is a case in point. If anybody else tried to make a film like this, it would easily turn into miserabilism and/or social pornography. The Dardennes' feet are nailed to the ground. They focus on things that nobody else cares about. They are not afraid of making political films. Many dislike what they do for that particular reason. To me, what is so admirable about the Dardennes as political film-makers is that they avoid showy resentment. Show/don't tell.

Rosetta lives in a trailer with her mother. They live by a busy roundabout. The roundabout, ironically, is called "Grand canyon". Obviously, Rosetta and her mother are very poor. The mother is an alcoholic. Rosetta tries to find work. In one of the first scenes, we see her being physically dragged out of a factory in which she worked but which won't give her any more work. Not because she did anything wrong. She is no longer needed there. Rosetta fights back. She insists. Two police officers carry her away. Her friend works in a waffle stand. She finds out the guy makes the waffles himself, thereby cheating his employer. Rosetta, desperate to find a job, rats on him. But of course she cannot live with having stolen his job like that, either.

There is almost no frame in this film that Rosetta is not in. The film stalks her around; she runs across a busy street, she runs through the woods, she is chased, she chases somebody else. Rosetta is not only a very bleak movie, its rawness is all over its cinematic technique. The film progesses in restless, anxious movement, of the main character and of the camera. We are not always sure what is going on (oh, she's fishing, that's what). As a matter of fact, most actions are tracked from over Rosetta's shoulder. It's a weird angle to shoot from, but of course there is a point about making the film in that way. There is a conservative dualism that the Dardennes break with. It has to do with how "subjectivity" and "objectivity" are normally put into pictures. Subjectivity is usually the point-of-view shot. We see what the character is defined to see. Objectivity, of course, is conventionally hinted at using long shots ("we see the whole scene"). The Dardennes fucks with these kinds of stereotypes. The peculiar visual style in Rosetta evokes a more complex point of view than crude definitions of subjectivity and objectivity. That everybody talks Bresson in relation to this movie is no surprise. Like Bresson, the Dardennes are interested in a very material dimension of moral reality. (I think that Simone Weil would have appreciated this film*.)

You may complain: but come on! The use of hand-held camera and the way it trades on "authenticity" is just as problematic! I would protest by saying that the point is not to depict the grimmest, waffle-snarfing place on earth and betoken it with Social Reality. The film seems much more ambitious. So where is the "inner life"? Well, it's all there: Rosetta's attempts to land a job is an example of capitalist reality as a psychological maze: a normal life / an unbearable situation / nothing makes sense, you do what you can / it is not the job that matters, but really, it is, or it isn't.

It's hard to describe what makes Rosetta special. Some have claimed it to be a gloomy evocation of social determinism. That interpretation is off, way off. Nor do the Dardennes dapple with something that some older film reviewers would call "European humanism", at least not if that label is to be understood as a elegiac bemourning of the human condition.  One thing that strikes me about their film (those I've seen, that is) is how observantly they register a very everyday sense of surrounding. In Rosetta, it's the roundabout, the myriad paths of the camping spot, drab corridors, the waffle stand. I have a very strong feeling that these things are not there as mood props, just to make it hit home: Rosetta is poor. Rather, by looking at the details of her surroundings, how she moves about there, what she does, what things limits her, we get to understand something about who she is and what kind of life she leads. Not only do Rosetta evoke embodied experience (wrestling on the grass, drinking a glass of water, listening to bad music, to give only three examples), but the film pays a very close attention to the surroundings as lived - and that is why the shabby look of the places hit so hard. I am repeating myself, but let me say it again: the Dardennes' approach is marked by a very un-dualistic tendency.

And that is one of the things I admire them for.

*BTW: Luc Dardenne studied philosophy!

Le Mépris (1963)

I have a principle. Now and then, I try to watch movies I don't like. This is not yet another pang of masochism (or not only that). I want to learn stuff about film. This implies watching films that I, for different reasons, "don't like". Godard, of course, is a director for whom I have not-quite warm feelings. I try to suppress those reactions whenever I watch yet another Godard movie, but with faint results. His films are interesting, but they bug me.

And here we are; Brigitte Bardot's well-shaped ass; sarcastic meta-comments about women's asses on film (soooo conscious of how women are objectified in film); meandering, never-ending conversations (do you love me / no / yes / I despise you / forget what I just said); beautiful scenery; Men and Women, Women and Men, homme & femme; some tricky effects, ha, ha, get it; snazzy (anti-)culture references; snazzy references to trash culture & high art; art-ificiality (a blue screen! music that stops and continues and stops! intentional 'errors'! film-in-film!); blue-eyed, ominous-looking statues (great shots). Beyond this - beyond everything: Fritz Lang. If Godard had filmed F. Lang doing random things (including quoting Hölderlin) for 1 ½ hour (no shit about women's asses) I would have adored this film. Lang's performance was top-notch and saved this from bugsville. Lang was fun.

BTW: the only essential question posed about this film: "Doesn't Prokosch look like David Hasselhoff?"

La cérémonie (1995)

Reasons for calling a film "weird" may be of several kinds. Some films do their very utmost to appear smart & weird. Others are weird in spite of their fairly straightforward agendas (well - watch Point break....). It's hard to say whether Chabrol's La cérémonie fits any of these categories. On the surface, this a film that doesn't take radical measures with film conventions. We have a fairly uncomplicated story: a girl acquires a position as a maid in a rich family's household. We find out she is illiterate. She does everything to hide it. The girl, Sophie, becomes friends with a woman who works at the post office. Her relations to the family she works for becomes more and more strained.

But afterwards, thinking about the film, it's really hard to come to grips with what the film was about. And it's even harder to say anything about in what spirit the story was told; was it a comedy, tragedy, social critique? And even though the details of the story seemed quite easy to grasp, it is hard to tell why a certain scene is important for the overall story. What is the significance in the film of Sophie's illiteracy? Why do they show the daughter fixing a car when nothing in particular seems to have been revealed in that skill of hers? Or, more to the point, the film seems to lack an "overall story". This is where I am starting to think that the film is less the result of a careless script than it is a conscious play with expectations. In a conventional film, we expect scenes to provide us with certain pieces of information and/or emotions and/or twists that result in character development. La cérémonie takes liberties with all this. Nothing seems to make sense even though, on the surface, there is no real mystery either.  In each scene, in some sense, we seem to "know" what is going on; the patriarch has a fit of anger; Jeanne talks about her son; Sophie watches bad game shows on TV. And, for Christ's sake - the film is based on a Ruth Rendell novel! How hard can it be? And on a primary level, it is not even the ending, the acts of sudden and shocking violence, that makes me say that La cérémonie fucks with my sense of sense. Because haven't we seen that kind of violence a thousand times before? What is so troubling to me is not the inexplicable acts of violence, but the schizoid approach of the film.

There are too many anti-climaxes, overstatements, (intentionally?) mannered acting and eerie blind alleys for this to be interpreted as a clumsy attempt at thriller-comedy. When looked at in this way, the film actually gets kind of interesting. But isn't that quite strange: the film is so pointless that I start thinking that there must be a point on some other level?  - This, again, is related to the many ways in which a film might be said to be pointless. I am not perplexed by a Jackie Chan film being, in some people's eyes, pointless. The strange thing is that La cérémonie in quite brutal ways cuts short the viewer's quest for meaning. And that was, to me, both disturbing and interesting.

71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls (1994)

Watching too many Michael Haneke movies: TV makes me queasy in the stomach. 71 fragments have lots of queasy TV moments. Repeated images from the news, dead bodies & Michael Jackson's ghostly face; a TV is blaring in a room, a TV is streaming images but noboby is watching.

It's not the first time I watch 71 Fragmente. It doesn't hit me the way it did. I cannot resist comparing it to other films. I find the fragmented technique too heavy-handed. The emphasis on chance doesn't really work. I don't know what bearing "chance" is supposed to have on my viewing of the film. Ok, ok, get it, the film fucks up the notion of "chronology". So; I'm getting used to how Haneke is messing around with cutting techniques. I'm getting used to the black screen in between scenes. I'm getting used to detachment/alienation/viewer nausea. It doesn't surprise me the way it did when I watched this film without having seen the earlier ones (The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video). Last time I watched it, I saw some depth in 71 fragments. Now, I find too many cheap solutions, too many empty spots, a few clichés.

The most aggravating question that pops up in my mind is: should I take Haneke's social critique seriously? Haneke's films are cluttered with metaphors about seeing. But the essential question is how his films affect the viewer and what picture of human relations Haneke's films express.

This said, the scene in which a young man is playing ping pong by himself is still superbly multi-faceted. Haneke manages to throw in an entire world of relations/concepts/associations into that seemingly static and uneventful scene.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976)

Really - right now, I should  watch no films more depressing than Pass it forward. But of course I do. Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is not exactly the most optimistic film of film history. But it is one of the most ambitious films ever made. This piece of feminist experimental film-making revolves around a tightly knitted set of themes: work/labor, routines, time and space. Chantal Akerman, largely overlooked by the canonization-controlling, unhinged admirers of male crooks (did I say B---------, ok maybe I did), has made one of the most interesting films I have ever watched. Why is it so good? To answer that question, it is necessary to look into how Akerman works with images.

We follow Jeanne Dielman doing chores in her apartment, which she shares with her teenager son, and in shops and institutions in an anonymous-looking Brussels. We see her making beds, preparing dinner, cleaning the dishes and having mostly silent meals with her son (when she speaks, she reprimands him for reading while eating). These chores nonewithstanding, we get a glimpse into Jeanne's other job: once every day, while the potatoes are boiling on the stove, she receives a john. The film is divided into three days. During the first day, Jeanne's routines are new to us. During the last two days, we have already learned to discern patterns and moments of repetition. As the film spans 3 hours and 15 minutes, we are given some time to ruminate over these things.

It is this sense of repetition (but, as I will talk about later, ruptures) that is the heart of Jeanne Dielman.

Jeanne Dielman is a very restrained movie. All sounds are diegetic. If we hear a snippet of music, be sure it can be tracked to a radio. A large range of everyday sounds are heard; rushed steps, doors closing, the hum and odd screetch of kitchen machines, rattling dishes. In many scenes, we follow an action - almost always Jeanne's - in real time. Even the humdrum event such as peeling the skin off a potato is allowed the time to unravel without cuts. But Akerman does not work with long takes only. Sometimes the rhythm of takes follow the rhythm of the action portrayed (sitting down, silent) and in other cases a longish series of events are broken off with a sudden cut so that we really get only a blurry idea of what is really going on. Where are they going at night, Jeanne and her son? As others have pointed out, the rhythm of the film changes as the story changes. In some segments of the film, the abrupt cuts have an almost humoristic effect (I can tell you, this might be the only traceable element of humor here). Those particular scenes, of a claustrophobic hallway, lights constantly turned on and off, made me think of the great Resnais film Last Year in Marienbad, in which Delphine Seyrig (Jeanne Dielman) also acted (!). It is evident that Akerman is very interested in different notions of time and how time intersects with place and movement. The cinematography of Jeanne Dielman has nothing to do with a conventional sense of "conveying information" (what is 'information' anyway?, and so on).

The camera work enhances the detached style of the film. Almost all frames are long shots, the camera resolutely motioneless. If you hadn't guessed it already, what you may mistake as a shoddy "place the camera and SHOOT" reveals a stern sense of composition (just look at how Akerman plays with the reflection of a blue neon sign on the living room wall - esp. in the last ten minutes of the film. As the kids are prone to say, OMG!).

As in the early films of Michael Haneke (who was perhaps inspired by Akerman?) we see a minimum of emotional expression. For a while, this tempted me into dualist thinking: what's going on inside them? But of course, that leads us on the wrong track. I would say that if we are to take films like Akerman's seriously, we must somehow agree to seeing everything as taking place on the surface. That's not behaviorism (cf. Wittgenstein). Rather, Akerman challengus the viewer to scrutinize minute details of expression. With the long takes of everyday routines and short takes of Jeanne's running from room to room, working through her day as a housewife (what's up with on/off thing with lamps?), the film poses a question, what role do the routines have in Jeanne's life? What do we see of her in them? Or, more importantly, what does she become in them? 

As I said, the viewer gradually sees patterns in Jeanne's routines. During the second and third day, something is changed. There are small lapses and mistakes. She washes one plate, puts it into the rack, changes her mind, and re-washes it. She drops something on the floor. A shop is closed. The coffee is bad. In all this, it is as if the stern logic of her existence reveals some subtle cracks, only to be completely disrupted when Jeanne, to our horror and surprise, kills one of her johns. Life will not return to normal. At the last segment of the film, Jeanne is sitting in the living room, quiet. The only thing that moves is the reflection of the neon light. 

The denouement of the film isn't restricted to shock value. It calls for re-watching and re-thinking. What did I see earlier on? How did I view Jeanne? What happens in the film and what kind of change - is it a change - does she undergo? In most films, the role of change is very obvious: a "character" is built and gradually develops through what s/he experiences. In Akerman's film, change is a question mark. It is not a shallow one, either (it has to do with what it means to perceive somebody as having changed).
It is possible to interpret this film in fairly conventional ways (taking account of some strands of /radical/ feminism in the seventies): Jeanne is the typical housewife, trapped in a life as a Woman, trapped in an apartment, confined to the execution of mundane routines. But there is reason to believe matters are not quite that simple. Akerman has no vision of "another life". As my friend says, she does not portray Jeanne as a misunderstood artist who is not given to chance to express her creative spirit. One could, instead, say that Akerman takes a deeper look a domestic space. Space, for Akerman, is not just rooms inhabited by human beings, chairs and perhaps a set of crockery. Space is portrayed as an order (or perhaps dis-order) of things. In this sense, space is not just something that in different ways makes things possible or impossible in a physical (or metaphorical) sense. Here's the thing: we see Jeanne's apartment, her furniture, the lamps, the radio, in connection with what Jeanne does, in connection with her routines and almost-theatrical performance of habits. In the beginning of the film, Jeanne seems to be master of the space (despite and because of her feminine role). She runs from room to room, she makes things happen in an orderly way. There are no unforeseen events. And, then, something has gone askew. Jeanne's apartment is no longer the space of uninterrupted routines. Chance - and, later on, - action come to the fore. (Maybe I should put the blame on Akerman, but you see how it is; I am totally overpowered by Arendtian conceptualizations!)

I would say that habits and routines are understood in a more complex manner in Akerman's film than, for example, in Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent. Haneke (in my opinion) seems to have relied on the notion of an underlying dread beneath the safe pattern of familial- and work relations. (Really, I should watch the film again to have more back-up for saying this.) But as I said, I am very unhappy with saying that there's any "beneath" in Akerman's film (or?). Routines are not rendered with the simple meaning of being "mundane" ("but she could be so much more..."). Jeanne's routines are her life. Throughout the film, the viewer battles the question of what this life is about; what meaning it has (and what is this question?). More and more, I am inclined to talk about Jeanne's routinized life as a sort of compulsion that is not only external (the concrete chores normally expected of the housewife) but also something Jeanne strives to impose on the world. Why? That is a question that haunts me throughout the film.

Akerman's study can be read on quite a few levels; as a study of ethnography, as social critique, psycho-analysis, feminism - even a sort of phenomenology of habits. I would say Haneke does not have an eye that is as compellingly observant as Akerman's.

END NOTE: A large part of the staff that worked on this film is female.

Pandora's box (2008)

Pandora's box is a very good, yet flat-out difficult, film. No, it's not what you think. This is not a film that is difficult to watch because of some screwed-up sense of logic or trying to make sense of five-minute takes of watching a guy eat ice-cream. Rather, this is difficult in the way it is difficult to think about certain memories or the difficulty of being present in a situation. Yeşim Ustaoğlu's film revolves around three siblings living in Istambul who take care of their ill mother after the latter having suddenly disappeared from her home in the mountains. We see the siblings, and their mother, dealing with the situation, and the inevitable tensions arising between them. One strand of the film is the relationship of a mother and her teenage son, who doesn't really feel at home at his mother's place. Surprisingly, he develops an understanding with his grandmother, who doesn't seem to know who he is.

Ustaoğlu works with understatements and capturing a sense of everyday disorientation. Lots of the scenes are quiet. In this way, she* doesn't place the Alzheimer-afflicted woman in a world of her own, ontologically secluded from everybody else. Instead, Ustaoglu seems to emphasize the ways in which we become estranged from the world in many different ways and that we react differently to many things (one scene: the elderly woman makes an attempt to release herself on the carpet, one of the sisters angrily scolds her brother for laughing). Therefore, this is not really a film about Alzheimer's. It's a film about openness and rejection, grief and memory - about the realization of a shared predicament and a shared future. There are a few unnessecary scenes, the omission of which would have made the film a slightly more cohesive affair (how the son is presented). Ustaoğlu's shares an interest in the ugly-beautiful alleys, ports and apartments of Istambul that Nuri Bilge Ceylan so impressively conjures up in Uzak.

Afterwards, googling, I realized I had seen another one of Ustaoğlu's movies, Journey to the sun.

* Shame on me! Before doing some research, I assumed the director was a man...

The Grudge (2002)

The Grudge reminds me of why I don't watch too many horror movies. The reason: very few "horror movies" have anything interesting to say about fear. I can mention a few that do (The Shining) but mostly these films don't belong to the horror movie "genre". The Grudge works with very traditional themes: the haunted house. The aesthetic is also very traditional: the viewer is to a series of stripped-to-the-bones scenes, almost all of them punctuated by a horrendous frame at the very end. And even though this film can boast two or three frightening images, the fear never goes deep. By the way: most of the effects in this movie (and other films of similar style) rely on eerie or sudden camera movements. It's not really about what we end up seeing, but rather the visual confusion or suddenness involved in seeing it.

Ordet (1955)

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