Vampyr (1932)

Carl Th. Dreyer's films are always interesting (sometimes brilliant) and this is the case also with regard to Vampyr. Although formally a sound film, it has the aesthetics of a silent movie. Lines are rare, and they are never really important for the plot (if you want to learn basic German skills from this film, you can pick up useful phrases such as "ich bin verdammt!"). I was extremely tired while watching the film. My mind drifted in and out, as I awoke & fell asleep to the churning rhythm of the film. Vampyr is clearly not Dreyer's best film. It is, however, pretty entertaining to watch an early vampire film with plenty of doom & gloom. The film boasts some unnerving visual effects, including the gaze of a corpse and a strange facial transformation (signalling: this is the Cursed). In a lengthy scene, the camera creates a very claustrophobic image of a mill's machinery. We don't really get to know much about the nature of vampires, except that they are somehow connected with a larger web of evil forces (or at least there are hints of this). -- The plot of Vampyr is pretty ramshackle; nothing much to write home about. The visuals and the dreamy (or nightmarish) atmosphere, however, make the film worth watching. Shadows and weird lighting prove to be far more evocative than gorey monsters.

This must be the place (2011)

Sorrentino again! In This Must be the Place, Sean Penn plays an ageing rock musician (who talks with a lisp, and wears granny glasses), Cheyenne, who initially seems to sleepwalk through his Dubliner life. I couldn't stop thinking of him as a kind of Robert Smith-copy; a person a bit out of step with the present. In the film, Cheyenne undergoes some form of inner change, but it is up to the viewer to decide what change this really is. It is interesting that even though Sorrentino paints with broad streaks (big hallucinatory moment, deadpan jokes, breathtaking locations) he hardly ever drums a specific idea into the viewer's mind. To me, this is a virtue, even though some segments of the film become too disparate and open-ended. The part that deals with Cheyenne's attempt to find the Nazi who tormented his father did not work very well, in my opinion.

What we have here is the familiar story about an alienated rock star, but this picture is drawn into its most surreal corner and the film never dwells on celebrity. In the beginning of the film, he lives in a mansion, spending his days on frozen pizza dinners or contemplating whether he should sell his tesco shares. He hangs out with a teenage fan and also her mother (or that's who I think this woman is). His relationship with his wife is uncomplicated. The death of his father brings him to the US, and the film takes a different turn. Some reviewers have mentioned about Wim Wenders, and yes, as Cheyenne travels to America Wenders' colorful landscapes clearly haunt the film. There is even a blunt reference to Wenders through the appearance of Harry Dean Stanton (yeah!) as a man obsessed with his invention of a suitcase with wheels. But what the film - thankfully - lacks is Wenders' sentimentality. In one of the film's stand-out scenes, Cheyenne has ended up in the home of a young widowed woman and her child. The child puts a guitar on Cheyenne's lap and tells him about this Arcade fire song. No, it's Talking heads, Cheyenne insists. The man plays a quiet guitar melody and the boy sings. It was a heart-warming, gentle moment which had nothing to do with calculation (I think). Byrne himself appears in the film - in a most wonderful way.  

Both here and in Il divo, Sorrentino never lets go of the human as embodied. He has a better sense of small bodily quirks than almost any other contemporary director. I think this is what makes his characters interesting - that they are full-blown beings (their history and so on seem to have only a secondary interest for Sorrentino, and maybe this is why the Nazi hunt part of the film is a bit out of place). For this reason, the contrast between Cheyenne, who is presented as a stranger to/in the world, and his wife Jane, is quite stunning to watch.

This Must be the Place is the kind of film that I wanted to watch again as the end credits were rolling. It's a beautiul film with plenty of funny details.

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.

L'avventura (1961)

L'avventura is so Antonioni. This is a positive and a negative thing. I found myself irritated about watching yet another film about alienated rich people babbling emptily and ambiguously about life and Nothingness. On the other hand, L'avventura is a well-crafted, at times haunting film with very good scenes. The story is simple. A group of young-ish people go on a merry cruise. They quibble about stuff and something seems weird early on (for example, a girl, Anna, lies about seeing sharks, making everybody afraid). They make a halt on an island. When they are about to leave, they notice that Anna is nowhere to be found. As they go looking for her, the camera indulges in the craggy, desolated landscape of the island. They don't find the girl, and have to leave the island. Sandro, Anna's playboy-ish boyfriend, hooks up with Claudia, who was also on the trip. They continue looking for their friend, but at the same time, they initiate a love affair. The film follows their erratic scout-abouts in small towns and luxurious hotels. They have arguments, meet other people and we are hardly given the impression that they are a happy couple. Anna drifts in and out of their consciousness.

Let's start with the things I didn't like about L'avventura. It's a film with many weak or unfocused scenes. This could indeed be a good aspect, and sometimes it works: the story just trods on, not being too preoccupied with "making sense". But there were moments where I simply lost contact with and interest in the film: the images just drifted past me. Another problem is how Antonioni conjures up a sense of existential emptiness, sometimes overdoing his case by layers of non-significance: soulless dialogue is combined with images of people who seems to be shells of real human beings. At some point I started to think: what contrast could there be in this film to anomie and misery? I sometimes felt drained in Antonioni's world of cynics and rich people, looking at gorgeous girls and sleek men. At its worst, both the characters and the film itself remains flat and very, very pretentious. But in some scenes, I am moved and intrigued by the sense of dread that is Antonioni's expertise. Interestingly, I thought that the conventional first segments of the film was the least interesting. As the film started to fall apart, I was more and more impressed by Antonioni's attentive eye for surroundings and space.

In one scene, Sandro and Claudio stand beside the strings of a church bell. They ring the bells and the camera pans on the strings and out on the eerie landscape. It's a typically beautiful scene. There are two twin scenes of women chased and ogled by hords of men. These scenes, too, are unnerving and very to the point (here Antonioni's fancy for good-looking girls are place in a self-critical light, almost).

L'avventura is not a mystery film. Anna's disappearance is not a mystery, but rather a riddle, or a symptom. We never know what happened to her. But thinking about it, one comes to take different stances toward the events of the film. This was a very successful move by Antonioni.

Guess who's coming to dinner (1967)

I have mixed feelings about Guess who's coming to dinner (dir. Stanley Kramer). One the one hand, it treats its themes with too obvious techniques, leaning on a sudden "resolution" that is more rhetorics than insight. On the other hand, it is one of the few American films to treat bigotry in relation to race. A young girl, Joey, arrives at her partens' house with her boyfriend in tow. She presents him to her mother who is - shocked. We are of course invited a little bit to share the mother's shock, and this is a strange thing. The man is black, and a bit older than the girl. The mother soon overcomes her initial reaction, but this is not the case with her husband, who is overwhelmed by negative feelings about the whole thing. The interesting thing here is that the father does not have to vocalize exactly what it is that bothers him. He refers to "problems" and belittles his wife for being emotional. He is presented as the liberal for whom opinions are only a facade. When it comes to a real situation, they mean nothing. This character is perhaps the most interesting one in the film. In a very late scene, we witness a case of moral change. The father has a conversation with the boyfriend's mother. She has no problem with the marriage. She accuses the father of being insensitive, of having forgot what it is like to be in love. In his reactions, he has turned away from the demands of love (another interpretation that puts the film in bad light is that he has turned away from his virile masculinity). If this were not played out so one-dimensionally, it could have been a fine resolution. As it is now, we are confronted with too many stereotypes about what it is to be black and what it is to be white (along with many, many contrives storylines). The biggest problem with the film is perhaps how class is dealt with. We are sometimes led to believe that the boyfriend is accepted because he is respectable, a doctor, an educated man, and that this separates him from his blackness. The son say, in a conversation with his father, who is a retired mailman: "you consider youself as a black man. I see myself as a man." Somehow, this sort of line has a sinister backdrop; this guy is to such a great extent presented as "the perfect gentleman" who knows all the small society rules of middle class white folks. The score of the film doesn't help one in cheering for this film's humanism. The message of the sugary tune is that love is a compromise, taking a little, giving a little. -- Spencer Tracy as the ragged father of the girl is a pleasure to watch. So is Katherine Hepburn as the sophisticated liberal.

Larks on a string (1969)

Larks on a string (dir. Jiri Menzel) is a warm and parodical film about what happened to some intellectuals in Czechoslovakia during the 1950. We see philosophers, writers and musicians consigned to a garbage heap. Rather than the usual image of slave-like labor, we see the characters playing cards, discussing Kant or flirting with female prisoners. The image we get from the film is that the totalitarian state contains many loopholes, the small ways in which characters do their best to live their own lives despite the external conditions. In this sense, the film bears a resemblance to films such as The Firemen's ball (which I have reviewed on this blog), battling a repressive system (and censors) with sly humor. It is a cheerful film with some drastically amusing scenes (a proxy wedding where a man "weds" his fiancé's grandmother, because the fiance is in prison). For all this, it wasn't a film that I found particularly interesting or striking.

Il divo (2008)

As a person not really familiar with Italian politics, many of the central events of Il Divo were not very familiar to me. Surprisingly, this did not make the film boring or confusing. Rather than being a film about the development in Italian government, Il divo is an almost opera-like tale about a man without qualities, a stone-faced politician who walks through violent political events with a fascinating non-presence. It is precisely this non-presence that seems to have been the inspiration for the director, Paolo Sorrentino. Giulio Andreotti was prime minister in Italy during a time of unrest in Italian history. He was blamed for many crimes (among them, ties to the Mafia) and was acquitted from only a few of them.

I found Il divo to be immensely funny. It's hard to believe that a film about an Italian prime minister could be so funny, but sonehow - it was. Toni Servillo, who played Andreotti, did a magnificent job in embodying this elusive character, who walks through absurd-looking corridors and halls with a hunched back. Andreotti is the bureacrat who almost never appears as a real human beings, not even in the scenes with his wife. The boring face of the main character stands in radical contrast with the lavish style of the film: extravagant camera movements, bright colors, surreal turns (in one scene, we see an otherworldly dance --- drab costumes have suddenly transformed into Fred Astairs!). Sorrentino masterfully changes from style to style: from realism to the absurd, from the violent to the mundane. He never overdoes the political agenda of the film. The soundtrack goes from pompous classical music to seedy pop. It works. If one puts aside references to Tarantino, the film that I thought of several times while watching Il divo was El custodio, a mix of Twin Peaks and societal critique. Il divo is one of the strangest film I've seen in years and one of the best to tackle political corruption.

The long voyage home (1940)

More John Ford films on the blog! The long voyage home is almost as loose-limbed as The Wagon master. The film is based on a play by Eugene O'Neill. From the perspectives of the numerous characters, the films explores complicated relationships to what it means to have a home. The setting of the film is an English cargo ship during world war II going from the west indies to baltimore and then England. Tension is created by the multitude of types aboard the ship: the philosophical type, the playful guy, the spiteful cynic etc. I expected the film to be some kind of adventure movie, but it wasn't that at all. What we have is rather an elegiac psychological drama about the turns of life at sea. In the second part of the film, there is an extremely lengthy segment in which all "action" is completely suspended. The crew has finally arrived in England, and most of them decide not to sign on to another boat. They are all intent on helping their friend Ole get to his boat that will take him to Sweden. But they settle for the seedy bars instead.... -- One of the things I like about The long voyage home is that it is so open-ended. The viewer must decide for herself what she sees as central in the events of the film. There is no grand "point", no big conclusion, no calming or feel-good resolution. We are presented to these characters and almost every one of them seem pretty lost. This is what Ford does: he describes a time and place where people have no given place in the world, where certainties are few. It is interesting that this film was done in 1940 - and it gives a very vivid image of the ongoing war. In The Long Voyage home there are no heroes, no heroism. There are just human beings who try to make up their minds about the shape of their lives. It's a grim movie - honest.

Varasto (2011)

I was positively surprised by Varasto (dir. Taru Mäkelä). One might see it as a light comedy with streaks of sitcom-TV logic, but it is also possible to see the film as a critique of class society. The film might have a humorous tone, but the image of the working class in contemporary Finland is very harsh. Anyone can be thrown into the fringes of society. Rouska and Raninen works in warehouse section of a paint shop. The job bores them and they kill time by playing darts. Rousks has an on/off affair with Karita. To earn a few extra euros, he makes under-the-table business with supplies from the store which he sells to a cynical communist. Rouska lives the ordinary bachelor life (eating meatballs directly from the package) until two things happens. Karita gets pregnant and the boss starts looking into the inventory in the shop. The tone of Varasto is sometimes just as cynical as the persons. Trust isn't possible; one always has to keep one's eye open so not to get screwed. The characters do everything to drive home their interests, at the workplace but also in private relations. The film does not take the perspective that this is how life has to be, but rather, that a specific economic situation is imprinted in people in the form of self deception. One might complain that the characters in the film remain one-dimensional stereotypes, but to be honest I didn't have that problem. Varasto is a good example of how a comedy can treat societal issues withiut becoming too preachy. In this, it has much in common with American screwball comedies from the thirties. 

The Fountainhead (1949)

The only thing the name Ayn Rand conjures up in my mind is the image of a Republican kid who considers himself an intellectual. From what I've heard about Rand, she seems a very extreme author, famous more for her freedom-loving ideas than her literary style. But you don't have to align with the intellectual world of Ayn Rand to be confused by The Fountainhead (dir. King Vidor). It's just such a strange film. The story, of course, revolves around the way freedom, individuality and creativity stands against collectivity and the People. The main character is an architect who designs buildings which are not always popular among the common people. His buildings are too "modern" for the common man, whose taste in this film is represented as a hodgepodge of different classicist styles. The architect struggles and struggles. Unable to find any clients, he works as a laborer in a quarry. There, he meets a journalists who admires his work as an architect. In a long, strange scene, we see their first encounter. For a good five minutes, the camera cuts from the architect's laboring, swelling muscles to the gaze of the journalist. The music of drills and machines embellish this romantic scene. After this follows scenes in which the journalist tries to lure the architect into her bed, but he mocks her, then rapes her. The rape scene is done in a way to let us believe that it is the journalist's desire to be raped. The story continues along two threads, that of the "romantic" windings of the relationships of the two characters, and the struggle of Roark the architect to get through with a new grand project in a way that in no way compromises his genious. We learn what happens when the great Artist is confronted with compromises from greedy and collectivistic businessmen. We also learn that a great Artist's eloquence can acquit him from the crime of having blown up a building.

The strangest aspect of the film is the last scene, which could without much alteration work as a part of any Riefenstahl film during the Nazi era. It is an understatement to say that Fountainhead is pompous. It is so over the top that it almost becomes funny. The film's notion of freedom and creativity is so bizarre that it is hard to connect it with the usual idea about market individualism. I think it is hard to find a film that is more hostile to "society" (which is here tantamount to vulgarity) - the basic premise of the story is that there are individuals whose ideas should not be compromised in any way by what other people may want or need. It is not evident what the conclusion is. A form of aristocracy perhaps, where some people are allowed the space for action and limitless rights (to blow up ugly things, for example), whereas others are doomed to laboring.  -- Even though this is a through-and-through crazy film, somehow, it was interesting to watch it.