The Captive (2000)

Chantal Akerman made a Proust movie? I had to watch it (Jeanne Dielman is one of those movies I have on my mind all the time). I guess you will get something out of The Captive if you have actually read Proust, as some of the plot quite subtly hints at certain tensions that are not explored in the movie. Proust wrote two fat volumes about the catastrophy that was the relationship between jealous Marcel and 'secretive' Albertine. In the film, Albertine is Ariane and Marcel is Simone, but the theme is still there: poisonous jealousy. From the first few scenes onwards, we are thrown into the world of a stalker. But what does that stalker want?  What does he want from Ariane? Why is he so fixated with 'telling the truth'? Proust lets us into the world of this outrageous character, but he provides no comfortable psychological answers, and nor does the film. The film has a simple structure: the camera follows Simone in his pursuit of ... whatever. We see him walking restlessly around his big apartment, spying on his girlfriend and her friendds, interviewing people about Ariane's possible Vice. Even though Akerman doesn't follow Proust all the way (who could in a film like this?) The Captive still occupies a place pretty close to the text. I have to confess that this film did not blow my mind. Still, it was a good film about obsession - and a certain form of corrupted love where love is based on fantasy so that the only relationship the lover has is with a fantasy, not a human being. What made me a bit hesitant about how the film developed was that it made the 'mystery' of Ariane into a slightly different issue than in Proust's book. Did Akerman want to conjur up the image that we 'can never know one another, no matter how much we try'? If so, the film would fall flat. The big question is exactly what meaning it has to say that Simone/Marcel can not 'have' Ariane/Albertine.

Still life (2006)

I am trying to get rid of my prejudice about Chinese movies as big-budget boosting about ancient emperors. Still life (dir. Jia Zhangke) has nothing to do with this genre: no action-fuelled fighting, no pompous praising of China, no glossy images. The story of the film is a simple one. A man and a woman are looking for their spouses in the area where the three gorges dam is built. We get as much involved in the personal stories of the two main characters as the landscape in which they move about: demolition, demolition, flooding. Millions of people have been evicted from their homes. This is a world of almost post-apocalyptic measures, just throw in one or two sites of capitalist luxury in the midst of destruction. The film doesn't preach, it shows. Some have pointed out the links to Italian neorealism and Antonioni - which makes complete sense. This is a realistic film in a world which has stopped making sense. One of the characters takes a job while he looks for his wife. The other character meets her business man husband only to tell him that she has fallen in love with another. Their stories are told through understated scenes and silences, rather than big gestures and confrontations. Well, there are a few moments of confrontations in the movie, but not of the kind you expect. In one scene, we see a group of workers attacking their boss for irresponsible behavior - scenes like this, were political material seep into the story about family member, keep the film alive. This separates Still life from almost every other family drama. The film does not approach the family as a closed unit, a little world in itself. Here, our characters are all the time a part of an evolving, open-ended world. Jia Zhangke pays attention to details and not only the big patterns. He makes drama out of mobile phone ring tone, the facial expressions of ferry passengers or a sweaty performance in front of happy workers. Odd elements - UFO:s! - swoosh by in some scenes, and to me, these elements made it all to clear that this is realism but not realism - what the hell is realism in a world like this one?

One of the things that impressed me about this movie was its attention to place. The demolition areas and the grandeour of new projects were put on a par with the space of the home. The way the director keeps alive these both dimension made the rootlessness of the main characters all the more terrible to watch. - Even though the cinematography is elegant and beautiful, I never got the impression that the film aesthetisizes the wasteland shown in these images. 

If you have the opportunity to get a hold of this movie - watch it!

The Caiman (2006)

I liked Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room quite a lot, so therefore I was excited about watching another Moretti movie. The Caiman turned out to be very different from the aforementioned film, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I remember The Son's room as a serious film about grief - serious, but not sentimental. This film might be serious as well, but it is a far more whimiscal affair. A producer of B-movies has not been making any movies for a long time. Now he should be making a film for the big audiences but that doesn't happen. In this precarious situation, he gets involved with a project the political dimension of which he has not realized. The problem with the film is that it is plenty of things at the same time and that everything seems to be done a bit half-heartedly (in this case, the film-within-the-film trick doesn't work so good, because there is no real tension between the two segments). Yes, the film's satire is sometimes funny, but somehow making successful satire based on Silvio Berlusconi is a challenging endeavour, as the man seems to be a parody of himself. The Caiman has the heart in its right place but as a film - it doesn't really happen.

Greed (1924)

Sadly, the original 9 hour version of Greed (dir. E von Stroheim) was destroyed in a fire. We watched a 4 hour version that comprises original moving images as well as reconstructed stills. I read reviewers who claimed that this version is of interest for expert only. I believed them - well, how interesting can it be to watch a bunch of stills? Yes it can! It was surprisingly fascinating to look at these stills, that were zoomed in and out so as to be kept more "lively". I wasn't bored for even a minute: the film grabbed me by the guts even in this 'technical' version. Greed is an impressive film in many ways. Yes, one can complain that the story is overly dramatized and didactic (some of the characters are shamelessly one-dimensional). But to me, that didn't matter. The film's experimental, eerie approach to editing and images was simply stunning: the last scenes, set in Death Valley, two of the main characters chained to each other with handcuffs, are some of the most beautiful/desolate images I've ever seen on film. Overall, Greed is a dynamic affair. It goes from dreamy to realistic and back again. Especially the exploration of urban scenery managed to convey a realism-before-realism. It is not only moods that swing in this movie; in a very successful way, the story shifts from neutral account, to comedy (the intertitles are often very funny), to melodrama and then horror story. Greed certainly has it all, and doesn't lose its coherence in the course of these stylistic and emotional transitions. And do check out the colors - the use of coloration along with the addition of gold in some dreamy frames of gold coins and moving, scary fingers.

The story is a simple one. A poor miner, McTeague, learns the trade of dentistry from a charlatain. He opens his own practice. There, he meets his friend's darling, and falls in love. He makes a deal with his friend, and the girl is his. She wins the lottery, and here all hell breaks loose. Their world starts to revolve around money: to have it, not to have it, to gain it. The wife is portrayed as a greedy devil who takes any measure in order to get more money - she is even willing to sacrifice her husband. The husband, in his turn, is corrupted by his life, as he loses his practice (after he has been revealed as a charlatain) and hits the bar for consolation. - - A few more turns of the story, and bad turns into worse. On a psychological level, the film paints a gruesome portrait of how some unplanned events set others in motion. The film's only representations of goodness are a couple living in the same boarding house as McTeague. They are an elderly gentleman and an elderly woman who have been living in adjacent rooms for a lengthy period of time - and for many years, they have been in love with each other, without taking any steps to reveal it to one another. At last, they confess their feelings. This humble love is shown as simple and unproblematic - a striking moment of the film is the rendition of their mutual bliss in full color.

I have a hard time imagining what contemporary movie bosses thought of this movie. This is not exactly a pro-American cheery movie about the happy rich people with the future in their hands. This must be one of the darkest depictions of money ever made (of course it may matter that the money appeared in the characters' lives 'out of nowhere' but I am not sure how to interpret this.) The film has no happy end nor does it give any redeeming image of money (the carefree elderly couple seem completely uninterested in money.)

If you decide to watch a silent movie - give Greed a shot. The story might be dated, but the style is a thousand times more innovative than any 3D blockbuster produced in these days.

Edward Munch (1974)

Clearly, Edward Munch (dir. P. Watkins) aspires to be as artful as the painting's of the artist in the title. I am torn between regarding some of the segments of the film as preposterously pretentious and appreciating the film's sense for rhytm and adventurous stylistic jumps. One at least has to admit that this is not your common biopic trodding along the familiar path of an artist's life with predictable emotional peaks. Interestingly, the film has a a mostly Norwegian cast but the narrator is English. The life of Munch is contextualized by means of a dry voice enumerating historical events during the relevant years. Sometimes this technique works, at other times not at all (I am still not at all clear about what the director aims at here, what kind of contextualization). I was not familiar with the ouevre of Peter Watkins before watching the film, but now I would surely like to see his othe films (about the Paris commune for example, or The War Game). At least, Edward Munch fights against conventional cinema - it tries to rely on the cinematic form to create a new style of film, a new way of assembling material. Does it succeed? Sometimes. Some of the films convey how different forms of art intersect: it is fascinating to watch Munch scrape away at the canvas, you even hear a very detailed world of sounds in Munch's work on his paintings. - The film manages to capture the texture of the paintings in a way that was both thrilling and interesting. The lopside of the film is predictable enough: emotional artist who gains recognition late in life, but who stoically bears the spite of the reviewers and the audience. And: sexual frustration, always sexual frustration in the artist's life that is then of course transported right onto the canvas (one image: a girl's body from the point of view of the male gaze in coitus, yesyes).

Rusalka (2007)

Rusalka (dir.: A Melikyan) is clearly a film that follows in the footsteps of Lola rennt: restless cinematography, quirky story about fate and love - and a punky girl with odd hair (Amelie also came to mind). This is not really a complaint. Even though the story of the film is nothing to write home about, I was entertained (but not moved); it is fair to call the film a type of fairy tale (references to HC Andersen). Aliza grows up in a small town by the Black sea. The girl loses her capacity to speak and attends a school for the mentally handicapped. Her mother takes her along to Moscow and there she meets Sasha, a rich, self-destructive man with a flashy job. She decides that Sasha must be a part of her life. Aliza thinks she has a personal power to make wishes come true, so why not this one? It is the vivid documentation of surroundings that make Rusalka a memorable film. First, the breeziness of seaside Smallville, then the big, cruel city. The camera pans along anonymous skyscrapers, vibrant streets and traffic jams, only to keep returning to commercial texts all over the city. If we look at the actual content of the film, things get more shady - much more. The lively girl Aliza saves the guy's life two or three times and reminds him that he has a heart as well. You know the story: the simple girl and the rich boy, full of himself. The meaning of the end is puzzling, and I am worried that if I mull it over too much, I will like this film less (the big question: is it a terribly cynic ending or is it a critical gesture?). The film contains enough memorable scenes to make it a good film, despite some disappointing erratic scenes. Even though there are plenty of gender stereotypes here, the main character is surprisingly elusive and unusual - she is not our ordinary heroine. I hope I get to see more films directed by Anna Melikyan.

For 80 days (2010)

I must confess that I liked For 80 days (dir. J Garano), fully aware of how bad the plot was, and how primitively the characters sometimes were developed. One of the reasons to like it was the forceful acting of the two leading actresses, who play a pair of friends that meet in a hospital after 40 years. One of the women visit her daughter's ex-lover at the hospital. The woman's husband is a quiet, demanding man. The other woman is a teacher at a conservatory. We come to understand that these two had a sort of fling going on when they were young, but the fling was never expressed or acted on, even though it was somehow acknowledged by them both. In their sixties, they are different people, but they are still attracted to each other. So, basically, For 80 days is a love story about people who haven't seen each other for many years. It's a sad tale about people who want to reach out to each other, who fumble and try to find the right words. Regrettably, the film often choose to take a conventional road in telling the story, so that the film ends up with creating exaggerated and simplistic scenarios along with characters, at least some of them, are so one-dimensional that it is hard to take them seriously. For all this, the film has some beautiful scenes and it is good to see a film about lesbian love that is based on other types of characters than the chic, career-minded adventurer in New York. Had the script been worked on in a different way, this could have been a beautiful film about love and hope.

Daisies (1966)

Daisies (dir. V. Chytilova) take an anarchistic approach to the process of film-making as well as the topics (or can we talk about topics here?) the film explores: gender and sexuality. This is yet another film in which two girls (they are both called Marie) are friends in a mysterious, hilarious and inexplicable way. This stereotype about the unintelligible nature of girls' friendship worries me. But this film is surely not stereotypical in an ordinary sense: instead of showing two girls wrapped up in their private games that exclude the surrounding world, creating a little private sphere of their own, Daisies conjures up a much more subversive image of play and imagination. These girls are not innocent and in the process of "growing up" to become mature, responsible women. No, no, no! These girls have grander schemes. Constantly at play, they mock ridiculous gender patterns, they play with a world of architecture and "tasteful things". The girls world don't end in maturity and child-rearing - no it ends with a grand finale of food throwing and general fuck-up. These girls are part of the situationist international, rather than a private party of two confused girls in need of some adult guidance. The film shows that sometimes girls have to disrupt the logic of being cute and cuddly beings for men to caress - sometimes girls have to indulge in a spree of causing mayhem. We need to talk about the style of the film. This is surreal stuff, one of the most experimental films of the Czech new wave, but it is (I think) not that famous among movie buffs. The aesthetics of pop art blends in with twisted little scenes of social critique - it is an aesthetics of performativity that is all the time rooted in a sense of how weird the contemporary "tasteful" world of men and woman (involved in "tasteful" mating games) really is. The colors of the scenes are constantly changing, only sometimes to erupt in fantastic little swirls of shapes. Daisies is a fun, wacky and experimental film. You should watch it.

Don't look now (1974)

Few horror movies succeed in being scary; most of these indulge in gore and blood without evoking any emotions deeper than the kind of sudden shock elicited by an unexpected sound or violent image. In that sense, Nicholas Roeg's Don't look now is an example of a more visually profound, character-driven horror movie, one could call it psychological drama with some supernatural overtones. It is partly the editing technique that makes the film something out of the ordinary: instead of ordinary plot, the film creeps upon you with loose threads and unexpected turns, along with strange connections. An English couples has lost their daughter in a drowning accident. They go to Venice, as the husband has business there (he reconstructs churches). If you are used to James Bond-styles lush Italy, think again. This is more Death in Venice - foggy, haunting images of a city that seems to dwell on many secrets. Roeg uses colors to great effect here, how the dead child reappers just as a color: it is a certain hue that evokes her. The general style of the film is also quite minimalist, no lavish special effects are thrown in for entertainment value. The film, from its initial scenes onwards, builds on premonitions and feelings, rather than concrete events. Don't look now takes place in the realm of guilt and memory - Roeg shows how ordinary life itself seems to bear elements of the supernatural, the ghosts within our minds and the associations and dreams that mark visual perception.

Father and son (2003)

I watched Father and son in a state of half-sleep, after a long day of champagne and sun. This, I think, is the ideal state of mind for this movie. Even if my mind had been less foggy, I think I couldn't make much of the story. The film opens with a long, erotic scene in which a barely clothed father comforts his barely clothed son, who is having nightmares. The erotic tension between them continues. There is jealousy, fear of losing the other. The son is going through military training. The mother is absent. The boy has met a girl but we only see her through a window and standing on a balcony. It is the father-son relationship we see, and it seems to be all about quasi-religious bonds, depicted in religious language (a father must crucify his son! Tough love. I had a hard time developing a religious interpretation of the events in the film, even though there were clearly references to be picked up.) We see father and son at play on a rooftop. Their neighbor joins in - he wants to become them to form a trinity, but the others hesitate. The locations and the cinematography (a strange, soft light) of Father and Son are stunning, as always in Sokurov's films (esp. Mother and Son, to which this film is connected). The same can be said about the use of sound: Tchaikovsky, static noise, electronica. (I have read that Sokurov's own explication of the movie is all about rejecting homoeroticism and explaining how the film can provide a sense of moral edification.) To call Father and son opaque is an understatement. Still - it was a pleasure to watch it.