The Help (2011)

I watched The Help when it was broadcast on TV and even though the film is perhaps not a disaster (I mean, it is well meaning to some extent, whatever that means), it does not have the guts to deal with the topic it has chosen: racism. The question here of course becomes how a director is to navigate when depicting racism during the sixties in the South - self-righteous images of how everything has gotten much, much better abound, and it is tempting to please the audience with a story about sound and safe social development. Even though the theme is relevant (and contemporary - this is a film about domestic labor), and some of the characters hold up OK, the film gives in to so many temptations, some of them quite unforgivable. One thing that disturbed me was the use of humor as a safety net once things get too serious or bleak - let's throw in a joke so that the audience can relax for a while. And many of the jokes tend to be of the kind that makes one wonder what the agenda of the film really is (how is it funny that a black woman imagines that a white man might shoot her?) Another thing was the film's quite self-important presentation of its white do-good leading role, Skeeter, the girl who wants to be a journalist and who sets out to interview maids who work for white folk about racism, labor and family life. The film takes place in 1964 but the film does not distinguish itself in its image of the political upheavals that took place then. In the end, The Help choses the path of Uplifting Story, the kind where you are supposed to feel edified and uplifted afterwards and nobody is to feel ashamed or offended. Even though some scenes do reveal some interesting aspects of rage and/or resilience, the film never takes time to explore - it is to busy to churn out quite stereotypical image of southern racists and stoical oppressed people. Hopefully, there will be other, better films about domestic labor and racism. Sadly, The Help keeps haunting my mind and I didn't realize how outrageous it was until I started thinking about it afterwards, mulling over some of the "jokes" and "uplifting turns".

Je ne suis pas là pour être aimé (2005)

Jean-Claude is about fifty years old and he is not happy. He leads a lonely life, visiting his elderly father every Sunday (they play Monopoly and have a hard time enduring one another's company) and going through the horrible work routine - he is a court official whose job it is to evict people from their homes or seize their property. From his office, he sees a tango studio. He decides to attend a class himself. There he meets Francoise who is about to get married and whose pushy mother and sister have everything planned for her. Not here to be loved (dir.: Stephane Brizé) may not be an extra-ordinary film and the theme it tackles breaks no new ground. Then again, this is a good little slice of life drama that does not try to much; it focuses on the types of human problems most of us encounter: loneliness, distance between parent and child, the difficulty of love. Patrick Chesnais who plays Jean-Claude is perfect as this dreary man who is at a loss of what to do with his life. The film succeeds in the small details - an awkward encounter in a car, an evasive glance, an apartment that looks lived-in but still desolate somehow - and it never resorts to the worst kind of will-they-or-won't-they type of relationship drama schmaltz. As a film about the fear of openness, the fear to reveal who one really is, Not here to be loved is a good and unsentimental attempt to show the tension between ingrained habits and new possibilities that one has to deal with somehow.  - - I am happy that this type of simple films are still done.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)

From the first frame to the last, Jiro Dreams of Sushi (dir. David Gelb) is an absorbing documentary. OK, stylistically, the film may not have excavated new territories, but its presentation of the main character, sushi maestro Jiro, was exquisite, thrilling, even a bit unnerving. I disagree with those reviewers complaining that the film reveals too little of the human drama and the rifts between the members of the family; for my own part, I must say that I liked the quite strict focus on work, the routines, the learning and the future of the business. Jiro is a man for whom life is work and work is life. His small and seemingly - but only seemingly - unpretentious restaurant (drenched in Michelin stars) is a stage for this man's calling: to make the perfect sushi. He is 85, still active, still trying to achieve his goals. For him, the perfect bite of sushi means an almost-Platonist attempt to reach an ideal, or to materialize an ideal. This requires hard work. Jiro is hard on himself, and he his hard on everyone else, too. The film crew follows Jiro, his two sons and their apprentices. We are taken along to the fish market, where we learn what a good fish looks like. We see the crew in action, preparing the delicacies (just watch watch the kind of effort the ... massaging of a tuna-fish requires. It's quite unbelievable if you haven't seen it.) For Jiro, ten years are nothing. To become a master takes time, a bloody amount of time. Repetition is the essence of how he presents work - that, and attention.

I liked the film because it provides no interpretation of Jiro's work ethic. You have to look and judge for yourself: how could this sort of dedication be understood? Is it about work? What does work mean here? Is it mania? And what would you say about Jiro's stern striving for perfection?

I would not like to work for a guy like Jiro, nor would I like to eat at his restaurant (the waiting list is three months): I can't imagine what it is like to eat those bites of sushi while you are scrutinized by Jiro's eagle gaze. This is nonetheless a documentary that held me in its spell and raised some important questions about work and dedication to work.

You Can't Take It with You (1938)

Even though I am not crazy about Frank Capra's populist movies, You Can't Take It with You was a surprisingly enjoyable movie experience - a nice comedy with a few funny quirks; I couldn't help being a little charmed by its lively and light take on tough stuff like property and class (the only red flags in this film is one of the characters who though it would look nice to print a few red flags). Capra's films are usually not filled with ambiguous plot developments and in-between characters: right is right and wrong is wrong (and alienated labor is exemplified by a man sitting in a boring room engrossed by an adding machine). This is the case also here, even if the good side comprises a crazy bunch of people who would much rather play than work. And perhaps this was what I liked about the film: at least here we have an all-American film with no particular enthusiasm about work morale. The message, one with which I would not take issue, boils down to this: dancing and crafting home-made fireworks is much funnier than hunting for a business contracts! (But of course one could point out that the contrast between business on the other hand and merry, creative activities on the other are very typical.) I'm not sayin' this is Thoreau or anything like that, but You Can't Take It with You offers one or two healthy handfuls of scepticism towards what is usually considered Serious Adult Stuff. Then again, one can interpret the message of the film from the point of view of one of the goofy characters, who has made up his mind not to pay income tax - one should be allowed to do whatever one pleases, shouldn't one? oh well. One reviewer remarks that the film could be a critique of capitalism for its colonization of utopian spaces. That kind of makes sense here. In this film, there is no innocent acquisition of money, no good capitalism. But the film is confined to a individualist perspective: you should do what you like. If your job is boring, why do it?

Ulysses' Gaze (1995)

When I was 16, Ulysses' Gaze (dir. Angelopoulos) was a great film. You know, profound. Re-watching it a bunch of years later proved to be excruciating (and very, very boring). Oh. My. God. This film tries so hard to be deep, to be pensive, to provide an overarching story about Europe, the fate of Europe, and the nature of man, grief and love and loss and memory and ... well, post-communist regimes looking for a path. Angelopoulos' film is spelled EPIC and that's part of the problem.  Harvey Keitel tries his best, and Erland Jospehsson is sympathetic, it's just that the film's grandiose aspiration is bound to fail. And it fails. This is not to say that all scenes fall flat - the image of the gigantic Lenin statue drifting on a barge is beautiful. Most of the time the dialogue is heavy-handed, the sweeping and slow cinematography seems derivative and the perspective of the entire film appears to be quite self-righteous - a film about the magnificence of cinema, the mystery and enigma of the moving image; but I never feel that I grasp anything essential about cinema - what happens is that I get annoyed by the pretentiousness and self-indulgence of the film (which has not to do with its being slow or inaccessible). The story has several levels. On the concrete level, it's about a guy who travels from country to country looking for a few reels of early cinema. But the story is also about the fate of the Balkans, Greece, nationalism, war, the past. // It is easy to think of directors who have the skills and power of attention to create a stunning scene out of a seemingly haphazard or commonplace situation. Angelopoulos works in the opposite direction. His scenes are composed to the extent that they appear stifled. There is no life left in them, they are weighed down by the desperate quest for MEANING. Roger Ebert awarded the film with one star. "A director must be very sure of his greatness to inflict an experience like this on the audience...." // This is the kind of film where EVERY SINGLE female person is attracted to this elusive main character A (as in Angelopoulos) - after two minutes in the company of this man who moves around like a zombie and talks in quasi-poetic mumblings, all of these women's hearts start throbbing for this guy; everywhere he goes, women's secret and innermost emotions are unleashed. zZzZ.

India Song (1974)

Before I watched India Song, I didn't even know that Marguerite Duras was also a director of films. If you expect the typical literary film, talky, with a very slight attention to the medium of film - think again. India Song is something else, a hypnotic masterpiece of slow motion bourgeois decadence (but the decadence does not look alluring). There is no dialogue in the typical sense of the word. Instead, the film fuses dreamy&slow images (repetition is often used) and polyphonic narration. Sometimes it is easy to combine the voices and the images, but at times the relation is not straightforward (non-synchronous sound), nor is there a clear linear story to follow. It's a beautiful movie, but what kind of beauty is it? Duras' brings forth a world that is more dead than alive, real life only intruding as an outsider, a sudden rupture. India. Sometimes during the 1930's. A string of men pursue a bored consular wife. A big mansion. In several frames, the camera approaches the mansion from the outside. It looks abandoned, decaying. Desolate surroundings. Are the people we see in the film dead? There are hints of death, suicide, but it is not clear. People dance. Sometimes we see them through mirrors. A piano is playing. The same song, over and over and over again. The camera shows the piano, but nobody is playing it, but we hear the music. The effect is eerie. People lie on the floor. Perhaps they have had sex. They look like puppets, very, very still - they look dead. A man expresses his love for the woman. Voices explain it. A sudden rush of emotion shatters the numb and languorous atmosphere of the film, his desperate screams haunt the group. There is also another story, a fractured story, but it is important: we hear a beggar woman. We never see her, but we hear her voice, and her story is told. I suspect there is a connection between the beggar and the consular wife. The characters' world is a narrow one. They seem locked up within these strange social patterns, they seem locked up within their bodies. On some level, this is the kind of story one comes across in Graham Greene novels: the alienated colonialist, at home nowhere.

The visual style and idiosyncratic storytelling of India Song have some similarities with the films made by Resnais, perhaps, most of all, Last Year in Marienbad (and yeah, the connection is not accidental, Duras wrote Hiroshima, mon amour). These films are enigmas, but they are not films that make you engage in the kind of work where you are supposed to reassemble fragments into a coherent story. India Song defies that kind of intellectualistic approach.

L'Argent (1983)

L' Argent is considered to be Bresson's last great movie. And yes, it is very much a Bresson movie: it has Bresson's economical, even serene, approach to film, acting without emotional expression and it contains themes that are familiar to people having watched his earlier movies (including letters). The story of L'Argent (based on a short story by Tolstoy) seems to have a sort of inevitability to it - it is a story about evil surfacing through a series of coincidences which have a disastrous effect. The film begins with two boys trying to buy a frame with a forged note (one of them acts from the need to pay back some money he owes to a friend), and then the note is knowingly passed on to other hands, among them a fuel trucker, who ends up in court, where he is not believed, loses his job, turns into an acomplice in a robbery, ends up in jail - where he learns that his wife leaves him. From there, things get no better. He is released from prison and then goes on what can be called a killing spree. Being asked to justify one of the murders, he calmly states: I enjoyed it.

No character in the film is seen mulling over alternative paths of action. People act with a sort of disastrous immediacy (made all the more striking in the hands of Bresson's dispassionate actors) - if you are familiar with Pickpocket, you know what this sort of destructive choreography might look like from Bresson's point of view. Bresson shows how different actions have an effect on each other, creating a situation in which goodness does not appear as a possibility - there is deceit, lies and violence. It is tempting to describe the story of L'Argent as an innocent man who, through unfortunate external circumstances and no ill will of his own, becomes another man. Somehow, this seems wrong-headed. Maybe it is the circumstances that makes me think about this (watching Bresson on Good Friday): L'Argent seems to be about original sin and evil as lack - a downward spiral changed only by a sudden change of direction, a sort of radical grace

I must admit that my feelings about this films were a bit mixed. Altough I do admire Bresson's approach to film-making, along with his harshness with regard to ideas, I did at times find myself at a loss of what to make of L'Argent, a film where Bresson very ingenuosly tells a story that only partially happens in the frames. What kind of inevitability does the film depict? Or should it be called inevitability, from what perspective? I do not crave more input about the inner workings of the main character, the fuel trucker. That would make for a completely different, and non-Bressonian, film. It's just that the chain of events move so quickly that I sometimes lose track of what is going on, and this risks making me care less - one gruesome thing happens, and then another, just as inexplicable. Watching the first part of the movie, I started to think that this would be a film about the power of money, but after a while, that stopped making sense as a more overarching theme. But heeellooo, the film is, as a matter of fact, called "Money". At leat this is another take on the destructive impact of money than I've seen before, even though it is of course possible to make connections to a film like Greed - but there seems to be a distinction in terms of fundamental ideas about what an obsession about money does, what kind of havoc it wreaks, and what kind of world it corrupts (or were we already corrupted? When is money a motivation, when is it a symbol for something else for Bresson?).

The theme may be tough to the extent that I have a hard time not attempting to domesticize or putting a false meaning into this chain of events which do not seem to reveal an inner meaning? So maybe the problem is not the film, but the problem is in me, in my limited capacity to understanding Bresson's perspective (and also this time, I have the feeling I'm getting it wrong by talking about 'capacities'!)

If I would think some more about this film, I would perhaps try to elucidate why the story seems to fall neither within the category of causes (it is what it is, it drives) or reasons (trying to make sense of why somebody did what he did) - Bresson seems to evoke an altogether different point of view, and it is this I have trouble grasping. Which leads me to an important question: what does it mean to say that one does not grasp a religious perspective? It is not as if there is something very specific my thoughts are unable to reach, as in the case where I have trouble understanding how the machine of a car works or why Molly chose to invest her money in this type of stock rather than that one. What I want to say is that I feel like I can't decide whether I should say L'Argent is a flawed film, or whether I should say it is a film which I do not understand. Or to state my worry in a blunt way: couldn't the kind of unintelligibility and distance that L'Argent presents to us (forces on us?), where we are not allowed to make judgments, or try out intepretations, evoke a hazardous perspective: YOU SIMPLY CANNOT UNDERSTAND! But that is not really what I would like to say either (as if the contrast we have is: we make judgments or things are unintelligible - hm). L'Argent made me think about some questions in the philosophy of religion I haven't been thinking about in a long time, questions that I have no clear answer to, but questions which are pressing nonetheless.

(Religious themes in films, books etc. are often treated as dangerous because they risk making a work of art didactic or that its openness is closed down. Bresson's film, and this one in particular, is a counter-example; one could talk about openness, but not in the sense that everything is possible, that the work of art exists in an autonomous sphere in which our super-free interpretations keep swirling around in a state of easy co-existence.)

This is a film I should watch again, as I realize that I missed many details when I watched it the first time.

Bashu, the little stranger (1990)

Bashu, the Little Stranger (Bahram Beizai) turned out to be a pleasant surprise. The story follows a young boy from the south of Iran. He is orphaned in the Iran-Iraq war and flees to the north. He ends up in a small village. Perching in a wide field, he first encounters Nai and her two kids. They are first suspicous (among other things, they have no common language), and he is afraid. Gradually, however, he becomes a part of their family. The villige treats the boy with hostility - the film depicts a cruel form of racism. I liked several things about this film. Stylistically, it was a wonderful film comprising long, languid takes of nature and ordinary chores (the scene on the bazaar was extremely well crafted, very simple but very striking). The film's treatment of the relation between the boy and Nai appealed to me in particular. The boy becomes a part of her life, and she cannot help taking care of him, of taking responsibility, of seeing him as somebody to help and shelter. Trust is often seen as a process where people prove themselves dependable (trust as reliance). In this film, it is perhaps tempting to say that trust is earned, but that would be misleading. Nai grows to trust the boy, and the boy grows to trust Nai, and this is an interdependent form of trust which is not at all about proving oneself worthy. Here, we rather see how the villagers or Nai's absent husband presents a temptation: the boy is a burden, is there any reason that he should be there at all? Does Nai really have any obligation to look after him? We see how this temptation is dangerous, but also how it loses its power and how that perspective slips away.

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Wes Anderson makes good-looking and quirky movies about, well, people who do not walk along the common route of life, or people on a quest for oddballsy reconciliation. Even though I like his style, I appreciate his sense of humor, I like his visual world, and perhaps even more importantly, his cheerful-melancholy take on outsiders with a Mission, I can't really say that any of his movies have really resonated deeply with me, or what it would mean to say that his movies could do that. But they are inventive, touching films nonetheless. Moonrise Kingdom looks good, it sounds good (Hank Williams - all the time!) and this sad story about coming-of-age is as off-beat and subdued as ever. But somehow, when I was watching the film I came to feel that the whole thing is so self-aware, so concerned with how it appears that nothing much is left. It's a sweet story about two kids (who are labeled as problem children) running away from the strange society in which they live, and away from aloof and sad adults, hoping for a life in the woods. Or at least, they hope for a summer away from the normal routines and restrictions. They bring camping gear, a few books, records and a cat. But in the middle of the film the ideas seem to have run out, and the rest of the material, to me, is too detached - the whole thing stops being a magical adventure and actually becomes a tad bit boring as I get lost within quasi-action scenes. Moonrise kingdom is something of a one trick pony, however with a truly marvellous use of artifice. But yeah, it's not a bad film, and there are some scenes which got through to me with a strange and tender interpretation of how humans interact with each other. I called it self-conscious, but then again, I never felt that it is contrived or false. Plus, the wonderful ranger telling us about the history and geography of the islands on which the story is set. And - do I need to point it out? - Bill Murray is Bill Murray.

Nobody Knows (2004)

A bunch of kids are left at home while their mother goes off to work. She is gone for several weeks, and then she comes back for a few days, indulging the kids with presents and funny games (or coming home drunk, encouraging her sleepy kids to eat sushi in the middle of the night). After that, she doesn't come home at all. The kids don't go to school. They are told not to leave the apartment, but of course, it's impossible to live that way, so soon enough, they venture out on adventures of their own. The arc of the film is that of tragedy,  but the film rarely leaves the kids' own world - the story is told from their point of view, immersed in their world, in their understanding, or lack of understanding.

Hirokazu Kore-eda is a director with a voice and an eye of his own. I've written about several of his films here, and they all have made an impression on me, and from them I've learnt much about the possibilities of film-making. An important aspect of Kore-eda's films is their attentiveness to how we experience the world with all of our senses - his movies evoke smells, touch and sounds. The stories he tells are situated in a Japan that is not romanticized. Street junctions and non-places are usually given a prominent role - it is often in this kind of mileu that the characthers' lives play out. This is the case here as well. The cramped, solitary, increasingly messy apartment is contrasted with the bustling world outside: streets, a grocery shop (where a kind clerk gives them something to eat now and then) and a park with real flowers and soil.

Nobody knows does not seek out the sensational. The tragedy of the story never flies in your face - what we see is rather hints of despair, loneliness and disorientation. The abandoned kids are not presented as mere victims. Instead, Kore-eda conjures up their desperate attempts to fend for themselves, to make do, to survive. Gradually, they become aware of their gruesome situation - but to an equal extent, this is a narrative about phantasy, about dreams and ways to escape. What is most striking is left for the viewer to ponder on her own: why did things turn out this way? Why did nobody intervene, why did no grown-ups acknowledge the severity and impossibility of the situation? This may be a political film about lack of responsibility, but Kore-eda chooses subdued images rather than a shrieking appeal to THIS IS A TRUE STORY!!! In this way, moralism is dodged and the film is all the more troubling as a result. Even though the camera sticks close to the kids, their small adventures or their idle moments, Kore-eda's approach is not suffocating or intrusive (he is not Ken Clark). The main character, Akira, the kid who, in being a few years older than the others, has to take care of and protect his siblings, is a character who remains quite mysterious. We see his sadness, his worries and his caring manouvres, but the director stays at a distance from him. This is not to say that the film creates no understanding of the kids. What I mean is rather that Kore-eda is not interested in an all-encompassing psychological perspective. This makes his film-making unique: he treats kids as human beings, not as stereotypes equipped with one-dimensional characteristics or a bundle of cute quirks.