Little Red Flowers (2006)

Little Red Flowers (dir. Zhang Yuan) is, I suppose, a critique of totalitarianism and especially a totalitarian form of discipline. A parent takes his son to a kindergarten. It's the kind of kindergarten where the kids stay for a long time, not meeting their parents very often. The film is set, it appears, in the 1960's. The film doesn't tackle the subject of ideology directly. Instead, we see a small boy who is doing everything wrong: he is crying, he cannot dress himself, he pees in the bed, he won't submit to the kindergarten teachers. The children are awarded with small flowers if they are "good". This kid is not, and he is often punished. The film ends with a sense of disillusion: the whole society is like the kindergarten. Even though this is not a perfect film in any way, it was interesting to see the ways in which children conform or don't conform with the attempts to make them compliant and dilligent citizens. It was also interesting to see how every function of life was made a part of routinization: pooping, eating, sleeping, dressing, answering. (Of course, this is a dimension of every child's life almost - but this was a radical example.) -- Not sure how Chinese censors reacted to this film; was it ever distributed in China?

Sunset blvd. (1950)

Watching Sunset blvd (dir. Billy Wilder), I couldn't stop thinking about Fassbinder's Veronica Voss. In my mind, the two films were almost completely inseparable. In reality, of course, this is not the case, even though both films feature a scary ageing film diva living in seclusion. In the present film, we are introduced to Norma, a silent film star who is now living in a weird-looking mansion with her stiff butler (but of course there is a s-s-s-ecret...) Max. It so happens that a b-movie writer turns up at her doorstep. The star needs somebody to keep up the illusions. The poor writer is happy to indulge in luxury (and thereby he upholds an illusion of his own). It also turns out that the butler (played by silent film director Erich von Stroheim - brilliantly!) is not who he appears to be, and there we have a third example of self deception. In a typical noir fashion, Sunset blvd has a cynical and hard-boiled voice, but it also has a sad heart that makes the film ambiguous. We have the usual fatalistic drill, but also something that points in another direction, so that we ask ourselves how people become like this, how deep illusions can go.

Every now and then, I tried to imagine what a film about a male Norma would look like. The focus of the film may not be Norma's wrinkles, but her being stuck in a world that no longer exists. We are led to believe that no beauty tranformation in the world can make her eligible for a contemporary place in the sun. She has lost it. Gender issues are of course still present, especially in the way the relationship between the actress and the writer is developed: for him, dependency is humiliating; he is sometimes presented as a male prostitute, contented with being precisely that, enjoying the easy life. But the emphasis is rarely placed on gender here, even though we have the typical "femme fatale" who puts a man under her spell. Illusion and disillision - the main themes of the film (I don't know what to say about possible meta-filmic ideas in Sunset blvd.).

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.