Marianne and Juliane (1981)

While eagerly looking forward to watching Margarethe von Trotta's film about Hannah Arendt, I notice that I have recorded another film of hers, Marianne and Juliane, from TV. The film has von Trotta's trademark descreet, subdued look. No overly melodramatic scenes, no exaggeration. But the content itself is far from descreet. Two sisters, two visions of political change. The film's Marianne is based on Gudrun Ensslin of the RAF. To what extent Juliane resembles Ensslin's real life sister I don't know. von Trotta shifts from images of the girls' adolescent years to their grown-up lives. There is a constant tension between the sisters. Both sisters are politically active. Juliane is a feminist journalist. Marianne works for a leftist group - she becomes known as a terrorist. They accuse each other of haven gotten it all wrong. In this, the film depicts a deep split within the political left, between reformism and radicalism. When Marianne has gone underground, Juliane is entrusted with her child. Juliane decides she cannot take care of the child and he is sent to a foster family. Juliane wants to keep her distance from Marianne, who is caught by the police. Juliane's immediate reaction is to visit her in jail. von Trotta focuses on the type of relationship in which hostility is just a layer, where there is also understanding and the necessity of communication. The best part of the film shows the massive security procedures and paranoia within the prison. Juliane cannot stop caring about Marianne, even when she's dead; she makes up her mind to prove that Marianne did not commit suicide.

A problem with the film is its oscillation between psychological portrait and an investigation of a particular historical period and its political rifts (one of the themes von Trotta hints at is the way the Nazi regime keeps having an impact, keeps hauting, keeps injuring). This oscillation is never resolved and in my opinion, this is something that makes the film less acute than it could have been. For example, Marianne's death is not presented as a political question about the possibility of her having been murdered, but, rather, the mystery surrounding Marianne's death is mostly seen through Juliane's personal agony. Or is that my sloppy interpretation? On the other hand, the film shows how Juliane's quest for truth has a political dimension and that it is symptomatic that a journalist rejects Juliane's pleads to make the case visible by snarling 'that stuff is not interesting anymore, now we focus on the energy crisis instead'. I have mixed feelings about Marianne and Juliane. I would not say that von Trotta's approach is detached, but somehow I was mystified as to what the major mission of the film is supposed to be - why was a great part of the film about Juliane's early rebelliousness, and Marianne's "good girl"-behavior? Was this based on the real Ensslin sisters or was it von Trotta's own attempt to make a specific point about the relation between two political/existential attitudes? It is noteworthy that Juliane is presented much more vividly throughout the film, while some of the scenes with Marianne remains stereotypes and more than one of her lines, especially during the beginning of the film, seem almost cartoonish. Perhaps the problem is that too many problems and themes are brought into the film (sisterhood, the nature of political violence, feminism and autonomy, the legacy of Nazism, etc. - truly big topics), so that none of them are really explored at depth?

Dillinger Is Dead (1969)

It's hard to describe what goes on in Dillinger Is Dead (dir. Marco Ferreri), one of the weirdest films I'v seen in a good while, with a straight face. Yeah.... it's about this guy - in his day-job, he designs gas masks - who makes a late-nite dinner at home, he listens to some otherworldly pop music on the radio and then he eats and watches a couple of home movies and meanwhile he, um, fixes up an old gun he accidentally found in a messy closet. And every now and then, he goes into the bedroom to check on his wife (which means do cruel things to her) who sleeps deeply after having taken a few sleeping pills. No story. No obvious character development. No logical denouement. Or maybe, yeah, in some sense. I watched Dillinger Is Dead late at night. The house was asleep. My head was spinning after a long day. This was the perfect setting for this strange little film. I will readily confess that at times, this is an awfully boring film. Hell, you are watching a guy making dinner and disassembling a gun! But I continued watching, and somehow, I was pulled into this dreamy world of druggy pop music (good choices of tunes) and tasteless yet fascinatingly odd home interior design. At the same time, I am completely aware that the director is an asshole who throws in a bunch of frames with nakes woman parts just for the titillation of it. Ferreri directs like an Antonioni who has kept his penchant for good-looking alienation (the first minutes could be a scene in Red Desert), but who has thrown all notions of radical politics (at least I don't see any) and 'good taste' into the bin-bag. The film is over the top, it is a bit pervy and it makes the oddest choices. In some ways, Dillinger Is Dead is beyond good and bad. It is what it is. In other ways, that I say that might reveal a personal flaw of character. I could, as one reviewer put it, say that this is a film about 'corrupt responses to a corrupt world'. I could also say that it is a sexist and self-indulgent heap of trash. Another reviewer says that the film is a direct cinematic translation of Marcuse's ideas about late industrial society. Well, maybe. Along with a gun that the gas mask designer paints red, with white polka dots.

Eyes Without a Face (1959)

Plastic surgeons are creepy. Everyone knows that, and Eyes Without a Face (dir. G. Franju) confirms it. If you are looking for a horror movie with no cheap effect - this might be a good pick. Prof. Genessier has specialized in transferring tissue from one person to another. We learn that his daughter's face was demolished in a car crash and the professor himself drove the car. The professor now tries to apply his skills on his daughter (most of the time, we see her wearing a mask) - the living tissue, of course, comes from somewhere. Eyes Without a Face plays with open cards. This is not really a suspense movie. From a very early stage, you know what is going on and how things will play out. Young girls will be picked up (by the prof's lover - his only guinea pig on whom the experiment succeeded; her face is handsome, yet there is something scary about it) and lured into the prof's laboratory, and they will probably not survive. This does not make the film less interesting; what holds my attention throughout the film is the eerie question of what it means to have a face - I mean, what would it mean to imagine that you would have a different face, somebody else's face? Franju's film may not be a philosophical tract on a par with Levinas, but for me, it worked well enough - it's a genuinely creepy film, and it takes some thinking to settle on what is so uncanny or dreadful about all this. It's not that we haven't seen cruel and mad scientists before, but Professor Genessier is not ravingly mad; the camera focuses on his methodical work, the sweat on his brow, his worried gaze. Perhaps it is the absence of typical horror movie conventions that makes this a good film (Franju knows how to handle weird camera angles!), it's lack of suspense, instead playing on a form of ambiguous seeing (when we cannot stop thinking about what is under that mask)? (Horror as seeing what was there all the time, underneath...)

Äta sova dö (2012)

Gabriela Pichler's first film, Äta sova dö, is immensely impressive. It's an important film and as a film it is very tight, very simple and uses a loose tableaux technique perfectly, with no ambition of creating a Great Narrative. The main characters are Raša and her father. She works at a factory where salad is packed into plastic boxes. But the economic crisis has hit Sweden and there will be layoffs. Raša is made redundant even though she does her utmost to keep the job: why do they fire her when they know that she is an efficient worker? The union is powerless and the union representative is made redundant himself. Pichler's depiction of Raša and her father, their common struggler for subsistence, reminds me of the Dardenne brothers - in the same spirit as the brothers, Pichler has made a movie that is both minimalist and deeply engaging; a film that opens your eyes and makes you think, feel, react, look. It's the kind of movie in which every small little detail matters, everything is a matter of life and death.

When you what Äta sova dö you get the sense that these scenes are partly improvisations. Pichler has a good ear for how people speak, how they act when nothing much is going on but when there is still lots of tension in the air. In several scenes, Raša and other villagers attend a course offered by the unemployment office. Pichler focuses on the dreary faces around the table, how they are forced to listen to a woman who doesn't believe in her own words, but who in a seemingly well-meaning way tries to do her job. Even the funny scenes never has the function of diversion. The humor is grim, and it strikes your heart in a way that has little to do with a moment of respite.

Raša is depicted as a person with a strong will. She doggedly tries to do the best of the situation. Sometimes she does not think ahead, but she moves on. Pichler does not reduce her in any way, she is not treated with gender stereotypes - she just is. The same goes for Raša's relation to her father, or the friendship between her and a boy from the village. Nermina Lukač who plays Raša is absolutely stunning.

Against all odds Äta sova dö is an extremely hopeful film - I mean, considering this is a film about unemployment and a society of bureaucratic helplessness, this is not at all self-evident. But the kind of hope Pichler and her characters offer has nothing to do with the "optimistic" official story about entrepreneurship and you-can-be-what-you-want. This film places defiance at the core of what it means to be alive; the desire to work is not reduced to an endless adaptability - work is seen not as a rosy path of self-realization but as the daily struggle of making do. And in contrast to the official blabber about the dignity of work, Äta sova dö combines its grounded hopefulness with class politics and critique of work society, the society in which even a hobby might prove that you may be a good worker, or the society in which you are useless as a worker even though you have the skills to do something well.

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.