Holy Smoke (2000)

I was surprised how disturbed I was by Holy Smoke the second time I watched it. This is one of the purest examples of films that depict gender injustice as an eternal, seemingly insoluble power struggle. The war between the sexes: man wins, woman loses, woman wins, man loses. Here, we see the power dynamics played out between a young woman and an older man. The girl has been coaxed home from India. Her mother is worried that she is exploited by a cult. The family has contacted an American “expert” who is to deprogram the poor girl. For most of the film we see these two, the girl and the man, trapped in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. He has his agenda. When he thinks he has “gotten through”; mission completed, the situation turns back on him. The girl uses her sexual allure and – WHAM! – She has got the man, the big, macho man, under her thumb. Now it is HE who is in bad need of deprogramming. MEN AND WOMEN WOMEN AND MEN MEN AND WOMEN – and so on in all eternity. OK, I disagree. 

(Yes there are redeeming things to say about Holy smoke, too. Let's begin and end with Harvey Keitel.)

The Social Network (2010)

I was a tad bit sceptic about watching a film about .... Facebook. How interesting can that really be, I thought. Oh well. David Fincher made an entertaining film about a ruthless, antisocial world from which "new social media" evolve. It's an interesting contrast, and a scary one, too. What makes the film a little bit creepy is that it takes place in the present. We get a story (I'm not really interested in how true it is) about how Facebook evolved from idea to multi-million network. This has happened in a very short time. Nobody knows what Facebook will become and it is hard to spell out its meanings. Even though The Social Network did not make an eternal imprint on my heart, it was told gracefully so as to create the right kinde of surge. And David Fincher has an impeccable sense for surroundings and scene construction. The major problem is perhaps the dabblings with psychology. What was it that drove Zuckerberg - really? The Social Network is dangerously close to saying: well - it was because of a girl.

What is more, The Social Network does not buy into the glorified image of creativity and the self-made entrepreneur. At least: an American movie that does not celebrate "the business opportunity" and that does not serenade the virtue of being ambitious. "We have to expand" is here depicted as a rather uncanny catchphrase. We have to expand because we can ... and we must ... for some reason.

Marie Antoinette (2006)

What sets Sofia Coppola apart from other directors is her perfect grasp of atmosphere. She showed it in Virgin Suicide, Lost in Translation excelled in it and Marie Antoinette provided further proof of how attentive she is to those aspects. Does this mean that her films lack substance? I wouldn't say so. Even though it is a masterful excercise in style, costumes and hair-dos, Marie Antoinette is also a film about loneliness, youth and the idle yet shallow life of the rich. This makes it a far better film than the conventional costume drama tends to be. Coppola both fetischizes a certain historical period and screws with all common ways of how to go about when treating "historical material". What I like best about Marie Antoinette is its lack of reverence. No, true, it is not a film about political history. But it doesn't attempt to be one either. As I see it, it's a film about leisure, the leisurly class, the occupations of this class. The best scenes convey the meaning or lack of meaning of ritualization and distribution of roles: inherited roles, expectations, scolding, tolerance, role-playing - and revolt. Sofia Coppola brings out many aspects of roles, which is a virtue of a film like this.

This film should be taken for what it is: a mood pic. I see nothing wrong with that.

Satan's brew (1976)

If you think that RW Fassbinder was a serios guy who made bleak films about human alienation, think again. Satan's brew is wacky, in the spirit of outlandish, ebulient dystopia. In some sense, it also aspires to be a film that treats serious topics (self-delusion, masochism, contempt, anarchy/fascism). If you have a slightly obscene sense of humor, it is also a funny movie. (As a matter of fact, I might have enjoyed this a little bit more than I should.) But hey, Fassbinder also wants to say something about the origins of totalitarianism, so I might be excused.

The leading role is played by Kurt Raab, one of my favorite Fassbinder actors. It's just that in this movie, Raab's role is a little bit .... different. His acting style is, to say the least, outrageous. He's the anarchist poet, Kranz, who needs GELD. Geld! He lives with his wife, whom he hates, and his brother, whose major interest is flies. Kanz wanders from mistress to mistress, copulating & trying to secure some money. A mousey admirer follows him around. Kanz starts to realize that he IS the romantic German poet Stefan George. But wait, then he must be gay!

If you can stomach a John Waters' film, you might appreciate this. And if that subtle analysis of totalitarianism passes you by, and if the Nietzschean one-liners leave you cold ("That is the finest humiliation: to expose oneself to an inferior.") what you can learn from this tutorial film are many useful German invectives.

But how the HELL did Fassbinder raise money for this film? The idea for the film must have appeared quite bizarre.

L'Intrus

Claire Denis' film L'Intrus is a confusing experience only if you stick to certain expectations about what a film should be. Say good-bye to linearity and reality/non-reality. The film is dedicated to a book written by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, a book in which Nancy talks about having survived a heart transplant. The heart transplant is also the node of Denis' film. As elusive as this film is, it is hard to say anything about characters, story and so on. It is, however, clear that the film has a focal point, a central idea, or should we say a central cluser of images: an elderly man's heart and one a more metaphorical level, the alien heart as the intruder.

In the first part of the film, we see some relatively straightforward scenes that follow the man's dealings with his dogs, a lover and an antagonistic son. But these scenes are intermingled with far less explicable ones. A murder, dream-like arctic landscapes. During the second part of the film it is far less clear on what level of reality we are moving. The man travels to South Korea to have his operation. After that, he goes to Haiti, apparently on a quest for finding his son (oh wait there was something about a cargo ship, too...!). We see a dying man, now an intruder in his own right, haunted by consience.

It might be a cheap interpretation, but it is tempting to read the alien heart as the intrusion of conscience.

Denis knows everything about how to work with images. Sometimes I don't know what's going on, but I still find myself gasping for air: what a scene! What combination of movement, colors and sound! To be honest, I cannot spell out the exact relation between a woman driving a pack of dogs across an Arctic landscape, a corpse buried under the ice, the christening of a ship, a silent looong take where we simply gaze at the sea - but in the movie as a whole, I can look for certain threads, certain contrasts, associations. But I should pause here to say that if you like clever movies - don't watch it. If you like clever, dig somewhere else.

I would say that Claire Denis is one of the most important film-makers today. Few, if any, of her colleagues challenges the viewer's imaginative faculties like she does. My second reason for saying that is that few directors have such a physical grasp of what film can be about.

Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999)

American comedies tend to be ... well, not so funny. Drop Dead Gorgeous has its moments. What it does best is to portray teen culture in a very cruel setting, without sugarcoating the cruelness. Yes, femininity is something to die for... Or, something to kill for. Usually, American movies made between 1995-2010 nurse gender roles from the McCarthy era. In that respect, this film is different. It has a clear feminist agenda.

Rosa Luxemburg (1986)

Margarethe von Trotta's Rosa Luxemburg tells an interesting piece of political history, but it is regrettably tepid film. Stylistically, it is conservative, and I never get the feeling that the grasp of Rosa Luxenburg departs from the very, very traditional image of woman-AND-politician/scientist/adventurer. It's a shame, because this could have been an excellent movie, had von Trotta taken a more adventurous path. von Trotta's depiction of Rosa Luxemburg as a person and as a political agitator (we do not see the philosopher) is not one-dimensional. In that respect, the film has its merits. The problem is rather that very few images transcend the story, the written text. Apparently, making films about political history is not an easy task. von Trotta's film shows us why. Indeed, it has a political message. But that message is told too crudely. I am sure there must be better examples of films that have come to terms with this task better than this one.

Nanook of the North (1922)

I tried to watch Man of Aran but I gave up soon enough because I found its depiction of the struggle of man against brute nature waaay to romantic for my taste. The perspective Robert J Flaherty adopted in his earlier documentary, Nanook of the North, in which his crew follows a group of inuits in the icy surroundings of Hudson bay, is not radically different. Romantization of "brute necessity" appears here, too. The inuits appearing in the film are described as strong, noble and simple people who are completely at the mercy of the forces of nature.

Even though Flaherty makes it look as if he is following the group's unchanging way of life, this is not an ethnographic film - some argue that it is not even a documentary. Instead, the events in the film reflect Flaherty's own agenda. Evidently, he tries to evade all references to modern life, for example by making the characters use other tools than guns when hunting. "This is what their lives has always been like." This makes watching the film problematic, even though the viewer's aim is not to dig out THE TRUTH.

This is not to say that the film lacks fine scenes. There are plenty of them. In my favorite scene, Nanook, who is the main characters, attempts to drag a giant seal from a hole in the ice. For many minutes, we follow his perseverance. But even here, I am worried about the way the film opens up a certain way of viewing the on-screen events. The man struggles with the big mammal - but we are expected to extrapolate from him, to the Human Condition.

There were still plenty of things that impressed me. The cinematography, for example, was used brilliantly to convey the vastness of the arctic landscape.

PS: The film was funded by a fur company.

Buried (2010)

The concept of Kammerspiel is a familiar one. Many directors have used it, often to great effect. Buried takes the concept to its conceptual limits: the entire movie takes place in a space of 2,3x1x1 meters. What makes this film fascinating to watch is to a great extent connected with its limited space. As a political thriller, it is a little bit too thin to make an impression. As a character study - well, it's not about that.

Paul wakes up in darkness. He finds himself lying in a wooden coffin, with a mobile phone and a lighter. Paul is a civilian contractor working in Iraq. He was taken hostage while driving a truck in a convoy. With the mobile phone, Paul tries to reach the outside world. This is the most fascinating part of the story, the total reliance of the film on technology. Other characters are mediated by a telephone line. The mobile phone suddenly turns into a possibility of survival, but from other perspectives, a political threat (Paul is asked to record a video of himself in the coffin - American authorities desperately try to prevent that scenario from happening). In the film, the mobile phone occupies the role of THE outside world and that is something that one can, if one wants, read stuff into.

Buried could have been a much better film had it not relied to such a great extent on traditional elements of the thriller genre; the director should have trusted the core themes more, that they are interesting enough, that the viewer do not need dramatic moments of "what will happen next".

Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (1972)

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, one of Fassbinder's best movies (though I haven't seen all of them) is stuffed with odd moments and bleak dialogue. A designer, Petra, lives in an apartment with her slave-like servant Marlene. Marlene, to whom the film is dedicated, hovers over the film with her silent presence. We see her tending to Petra's every need, we hear her typewriter. At crucial moments, Marlene's statue-like gaze is a necessary contrast to the animated behavior of the other characters.

The film's characterization of human relations is, to say the least, bleak. At first, Petra is the one patronizing others. Then she meets beautiful Karin, with whom she has a relationship of dependency and self-depreciation and -glorification. Karin, on the other hand, is dependent on Petra's business reputation. The story is beseal by the insight that a turning away from the strict rules of dependency will have drastic consequences.

Everything in The bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is stylized, from Petra's apartment to the outrageous clothes all characters are dressed in to the mask-like facial expressions. Some have criticized the film for being to melodramatic. But within this formalized setting, the melodrama becomes something else altogether, less a psychological prop than an attempt - I suppose - to turn away from a certain grasp of what psychological realism is supposed to look like. "Psychological realism" might contain some not-so innocent presuppositions about how human life is to be depicted. Fassbinder's films, by turning to the intentionally overblown or formalistic or stylized, resist the temptation of false naturalization.

But I don't know. This is how I understand Fassbinder and this is also the reason why I appreciate his work.