Atonement (2007)

I watched the first hour of Atonement. I am pretty sure I cannot bear to finish it. Even though the film has several well-developed themes, the style is, to me, quite unbearable. Incessant big gestures; five orchestras play music – everything little twitch of event is filled to the brim with The Ominous Feel. In the first part of the film, we see like a million moments of Repressed and not so repressed Sexuality, witnessed by a child. There are miscomprehensions, which have drastic results. Then there's the War and... Things are building up for drama big time. – But as the first half of the film is so stuffed with Dramatic Turns, I have little hope that it will get any better.Maybe the book is better than the film. Ian McEwan is a good author who know his craft, in the best sense. As a film this is not good at all.

La Soledad (2007)

La Soledad - Solitary Fragments is a very quiet film. Jaime Rosales, who directed the film, have drawn on many sources: the family dramas of Ozu, Mondays in the sun – and perhaps even ordinary life and routines unraveled in Jeanne Dielman. It is not a perfect film. It does not always manage to muster up the tension necessary for those very long takes featuring in the film. Solitary fragments is largely a film about women. When men appear, they are always in the background. Two female characters make up the heart of the story. A single mother leaves a safe life to pursue a new career in Madrid. A widowed woman has a conflctual relation with her three daughters.

The cinematography used here is curious. The camera is static. But the events are rarely placed in the very midst of the frame. Instead, they take place half-seen, blocked by doors, sometimes reflected by mirrors. The perspective created often feels unreal, but at the same time all-to-real. I think of Fassbinder and his compulsive use of frames split by objects. In many frames, it’s the same here. But where Fassbinder employs artificiality to make a point, Jaime Rosales work with a dry mode of perception, slightly disorienting, but still very mundane. And usually – it works just fine. This technique forces us to open our eyes, listen, see what is to be seen, use our imagination. As I said, there’s not much drama to speak of here. But when something happens, it comes with a shock, as a jolt in the head of the viewer. I will not reveal anything here, though, as that might destroy your viewing experience.  

All in all: it is a beautiful film that you don't want to miss. I heartily recommend it.

The Locket (1946)

We all know that many noir films have more than a hint of misogyny. Women are commonly depicted as deceptive, sneaky bastards whose angelic appearance makes men fall into their trap. In other words, women are seen as plotting spiders. In the cynical world of noir, men are rarely any better than their female companions, but it is mostly women who infect men with seeds of doubt, harden their heart - or drive men right over to the Dark Side. This is particularly true for John Brahm’s The Locket, which follows the formula step-by-step. There’s a femme fatal, and she is a cunning monster, a man-eating liar. Etc. The men in the movie are all naïve and clueless – until the woman's deceitful behavior make them paranoid or cynical. The Locket might be a lesser known noir film from the era of classic noir, but it is, regardless of its misogynistic tendencies, an entertaining movie. You have to see it for what it is; a trashy piece of pulp. Only adding to the feeling of excessive application of the noir blueprint, what we have here is a story told in triple flashback. Plus – it’s treatment of “psychoanalytic storytelling” is well … as over the top as you’d ever want it.All in all - The Locket excels in noir virtues: paranoia, cynicism and dark psychology.

The Man from Laramie (1955)

I am no fan of western. Still, I try to be open-minded. That is, I watch a western every now and then, and sometimes I am positively surprised. The Man from Laramie is one of the better westerns I’ve seen, even though it is not particularly good. Yes, it has some unnecessary melodramatic elements, but nonetheless, it is mostly a restrained film dealing with some traditional themes in the genre: revenge, loneliness, confrontation and a sudden sense of commitment. James Stewart plays the stranger who rides into a town in the middle of nowhere. He has a mission. It is clear that most townspeople consider him a bothersome nuisance, too many questions asked. The stranger sticks around. He gets into fights. His presence spells trouble – and change. It was not so much the story that I liked. I liked the airy aesthetics, the quiet scenes and how a sense of rage and foreboding was kept mostly under the surface, only to explode into your face in the very end.The best thing about The Man from Laramie is one of its female character, a strong-headed woman of a kind rarely to be seen in this type of move.

Children of paradise (1945)

I don't know what to do with Marcel Carnés Children of Paradise. It's a bucolic & tragic film about unrequited love within a group of circus artists and dropouts. But I just didn't see the point in this. I didn't find it particularly aesthetically appealing, nor did was I moved by its content. What was slightly intriguing about Children of Paradise is that it does not conform with stereotypical gender norms. Passion remains fatal, fatal, fatal and, oh, how life plays out.

Waltz with Bashir (2008)

An animated documentary might sound like a contradiction in terms. Well, it will appears so if a very shallow notion of documentary is employed. The first time I "watched" this film, I was at a friend's place. It was late at night. I was tired. They had a very small TV, and I could not see the subtitles. I understood nothing of the dialogue, but was stunned by the visuals. I still am. Waltz with Bashir succeeds in what has proven an impossible task for most directors: to evoke the space of imagination, dreams and memories. Ari Folman works with haunted images where not too much is shown. In this light, the ending scenes are all the more powerful. The questions the film ceaselessly poses is: what does it mean to "see", to "witness", to experience and be aware of? There are not epistemological questions, but rather, the director ignites these issues from a moral perspective.

The story begins with a sense of confusion. Folman tries to understand why he is unable to remember a specific event during the invasion of Libanon in 1982. Waltz with Bashir is an exploration of the past-as-trauma, reconstruction of memories and fuzzy dreams. It's a difficult film. It is also a very serious film. We see no traces of garrulous recollections of adventures. The film's images, in sickly yellows, reds and browns - ooze dread, fear and a dreamy sense of dislocation. A sense of something being all-to-real, too real to handle.  Of course, it is also a political film. Folman's trauma is not an individual one. His film seems to get at the more or less willful repression of memory, amnesia as an evasion of responsibility. But there are no pointing fingers here, or very few ones. The dialogue is quiet, and sticks to the concrete, to the level of experience rather than general conclusions. Questions about guilt and responsibility are not solved - but they are addressed. It is a very important film.

Murderous instincts (1964)

Watching Murderous instincts in a slightly befuddled post-op state might actually have been all for the best. This is an experimental film with very little plot. I am not sure if I liked it or not. On the one hand: it is the type of movie that puts its female characters through misery and degradation, while the men in the movie are portrayed as pathetically jealous and cruel. On the other hand, cruelty, rather than being fetishized by the director, is situated in the struggles of social reality. This is not a film that glorifies family life, and it doesn't romanticize "traditional roles" either.

Shohei Imamura, by whom I have previously only seen The Eel, is not known for making light comedies. Murderous instincts is visually stunning. In some scenes, the camera twirls around the setting, while in other, it remains coldly static. I was impressed with how Imamura builds most frames around some "disturbance". The human face is very rarely the centre of the image. Imamura, like many other directors of that time, explores the changes of modern society. Here, as in many other films from that period, the train grows into a symbol of a society which is not what is has been.

I am aware that I can't do justice to this film right now. It's a film that requires several viewings. So much is going on. The use of narrative & the style of cinematography is thought-provoking, and there are some scenes that I'd like to watch again to let them sink in.

Solaris (1972)

Re-watching Tarkovsky’s films never fail to be a rewarding experience. All of his films are rich enough so that new thoughts keep occurring in my mind on every single viewing (discussing them with others help). Solaris is one of his best films. This is not to say that it lacks weak moments. As an aesthetic experience, Solaris is, I would say, very hard to criticize. But when one starts to disentangle its themes and point of view, it’s easy to come upon bad solutions, half-thought material and unnecessary vagueness. What is the main thrust of Solaris? Is it a critique of contemporary (Soviet) scientific ideals that turn nature into an anthropomorphic mirror? Is it a story about love and conscience? Or is it, rather, a film about consciousness and memory? Or are we taking metaphysics here, we are all trapped in Illusion, we are all inhabitants on the space station of the film? Or ... God?

Well, all of these themes are present. The relation between them is not always clear, and this makes, in my opinion, interpretation quite difficult. Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, is sent to a space station that circles around a planet, Solaris. Solaris is covered with a mysterious sea. The sea has a strange influence over the crew on the space station, some of whom have disappeared, some have committed suicide and some are on the verge of insanity. As Kelvin boards the space station, he learns that it is haunted by “visitors”, materializations of memories. Thus, he finds his dead wife, Hari, in his room. Throughout the film, it is unclear how we are to view Hari. In many senses, the film asks us to see her as a human being; she is a human being in the light of Kelvin’s concern for her. On the other hand, we are challenged to view her as a manifestation of the allure of science, the utmost mirror of human desire. Is Hari a representation of Kelvin’s bad conscience or is she a human being? The film, the ending in particular, doesn’t really provide an answer. All I can say is that the film sometimes fall into the trap of muddled dichotomies between Love versus Science but other moments it does not work with dichotomies like that at all.

What is most confusing of all is how to understand the very ending of the film. Is it a tragedy - or a story about redemption? I am torn between different intepretations here.

The sci-fi part of Solaris is not very important. Yes, the story is based on Stanislav Lem’s novel. The novel is not very good. The film is far better than the book. But what makes the film so appealing is not the sum of narrative twists and turns.

What is interesting about the film is not the “science fiction”. And maybe it is the wrong approach to talk about Tarkovsky’s films in terms of being “interesting”. He is a religious director, rather than a philosophical director – what I mean by this is just that if we want to understand what drives the films, the religious themes are all-important, the level of “thoughts” and “ideas” less so. There are many, many stunning scenes in Solaris. In one of them, we see a car drive through a futuristic landscape. Dissonant, eerie noise/music enhance the feeling of uncertainty. Where are we going next? Those moments of uncertainty, of the unknown, are what has made me return to Solaris over the years. On the level of aesthetics, Tarkovsky is a good interpreter of something that appears as absolutely Other/Unknown (the sea on Solaris). When transformed into ideas (science tames & domesticizes the Unknown, turning it into an alluring, but dangerous mirror – the Unknown strikes back) the film is less convincing. 

PS: Don't watch Soderbergh's version. It's crap.

Riten (1969)

Riten is one of Bergman's lesser known film. The story is Kafkaesque: three acors are interviewed by by a judge. A multitude of conflicts mar the relationship among the actors. The crime they are accused of is having made an obscene play. Although this is a hodgepodge of Bergmanian themes - weird sexuality, the conflicts of matrimony, religious quandary, mental breakdowns - this is far from his most successful film. Bergman works with eerie angles, minimal sets, explicit sexual scenes and, you know, a general sense of the unhinged experimentation. In one sense Riten is fun to watch because it lacks the restrain and traditional we expect from Bergman. This is .... something else. For a while, I played with the idea that Bergman might have made a parody of the typical Bergman film. But then I was reminded that Bergman is perhaps the least person we expect to indulge in self-mocking. Bergman is rumoured to have called the film an act of fury directed at those critiquing his work - if we take this in mind, to say that the film is tongue-in-cheek is an understatement (what happens in the very last scene). We know that Bergman is quite capable of making comedies. If this is a comedy, it is a rather black one. The Rite explores the role of art in society. The main point seems to be that art always is an autonomous sphere, and that it has to be that way. When think about Bergman, and how Bergmand talked about art, the only thing this film does to me is to put a big grin on my face: it is so OVERBLOWN.

The Island (1960)

Films such as The Man from Arran and Nanook of the North make great pains to show the hard life of Primitive Society; ceaseless toil, brute necessity, life/death. The Island is, in some ways, an exception. Arguably, the director, Kaneto Shindo, did say that the film was intended to show work as an eternal struggle against nature. But in contrast with the two films I mentioned, work, here, is portrayed from what I would call a religious perspective. The film never idealizes hardship. We see the contrast of the life on an island, and the life in the town, but this contrast bears no trace of judgment. The director does not say that work in the old days was honest and uncomplicated – far from it. Work is not a mere “struggle” against some physical obstacle. The perspective on nature in The Island is much richer than that. Nature is not just a passive object; it is a part in a relation.

The two protagonists, a man and a woman, work with the discipline, but also the solemnity of ritual. Together with their two children, they live on an island. They are the island’s only inhabitants. The film silently follows their routines. Summer, winter, spring, summer. They fetch water for their crops with a row-boat. The water, carried in buckets, is laboriously dragged along a dangerous-looking track that leads to the top of the hill. The water is then meticulously distributed. The camera patiently waits for the water to absorb into the soil. One scene in the middle of the film contains a shocking disruption of the calmness; the episode, in tandem with a few other ones in the film, has the effect of a jolt in the viewer’s mind. There is no dialogue in the entire film. 

The slightly mournful score of the film is a perfect match with the quiet unfolding of routines and errands. The music captures the sense of repetition in the protagonists’ life. Yet this is not dull repetition, but the repetitive sequence of two persons going up the hill is transformed into an adventure every time we see the event taking place (and we see it almost in real time…). Some little detail is always different. Sometimes the camera tracks the events of nature; the movement of the sea; a crab’s lazy movements on the beach, the struggle of a fish, the blossoming of a tree, the sound of rain. That the director manages to breathe so much life into the images is simply impressive. It is not surprising that every scene is carefully arranged, so that there is a fluid transition of movement and stasis, of the island and the town, of long shots and close-up of faces (these actors are very good at conveying a wide range of emotions with a very, very restrained facial expressions and overall demeanor). The Island is a breathtakingly beautiful film.