My Dinner with Andre (1981)

I can't really explain it, but I had really high expectations about Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andre. It's not really that I'm a great fan of Malle (I have seen only two or three movies of his) but I've read somewhere that My Dinner with Andre is a masterpiece in the genre of films where conversations drive the film forward. Well, even though this is by no means a bad films, it's not a particularly good one either, except for a couple of scenes. The film reminded me about another film in which existential problems are discussed in a very obvious, even blunt way - Richard Linklater's Waking Life. The problem with both films is that their attempt to excavate the mind through conversation never succeeds in actually putting into display any of the tension that real conversations contain. I might have been more forgiving, had the writing of the script been more developed or whether there hadn't been such moments of almost embarrassingly affront clashes of Two Life Principles. And what is more, intellectual-sounding discussions about the meaning of art.

Almost the entire movie is set within an upscale N.Y. restaurant. Two friends are talking about the big questions of life. One is a experimental theater director and the other is an actor. The two men are very different. For the first half of the film, the director muses about art, spontaneity, mysticism and what not. He has been traveling and tells his friend one story after another about what he has experienced. Obviously, he is self-indulgent (I am not sure whether this is the film's perspective).  The other guy hums and nods and looks at his friends with a weary smile. It turns out he has a more practical point of view. He wants to enjoy ordinary life, the comfort of his partner and an electric blanket. For the director, this is not what life is about. Life is about Presence. Well, you know, those peculiar moments.

What I liked about the movie was its simplicity and quietness. It starts on a street outside the restaurant and it ends with a few quick frames of a taxi. In the restaurant, the camera looms over the two friends, sometimes filming them so that one of them is seen through a mirror (the best scenes involve a strange waiter who throws condescending glances at the two patrons). The film tries to create the sense of real time - that everything takes place in one unbroken temporal chunk. This works pretty well, even though the whole thing is unnecessarily underlined at the very end (when the director wants us to feel that we, like the two characters, have forgotten all about time). Ebert, whose reviews I always enjoy reading, wrote that My Dinner with André is devoid of clichés. When it comes to style, I would agree with him, at least partially. But I felt that the role of conversation was not that original after all and constantly felt that the result of what might have been a long and winding writing or improvisation process was cramped, rather than the spontaneous flow of back-and-forth that conversation usually is (and I get the sense that the team wants to catch hold of that kind of flow) - that Malle and his actors tried so hard to get to the core of things that the existential relevance was lost on the way, at least in many segments of the film. One example that made me sigh was the Wally, the actor who cherishes the small joys of ordinary life is also presented as a man who elevates science - in contrast with his friend the director who throws himself into life's deep crevices without concern for how he will be brought back. Plain reason vs. Transcendence. My reaction: yawn. But then again, the intentionally rambling aspect of the conversation might be taken in another way than as intellectually unsatisfying: two friends who are too much in love with talk and who get lost in each other's stories or their own goofy existentialism. (My question: who is it that annoys me, the film or the characters?)

I want to make this clear: the major problem I had was not that My Dinner with Andre was a slice of life film that turned out too stagey. Stagey can be good (I think about the version of Uncle Vanya I watched a while ago and how much I enjoyed its fine treatment of theater-as-film-as-theater). Yes it had the mood but it was so full of itself! (For a comparison: another movie with a great mood (a sort of tenderness) and which had some flaws in that direction but worked much, much better: Smoke)

As a matter of fact, I'm a bit mad at myself for not liking this film more. I will watch it again sometimes, and maybe I will realize I my initial judgment was too harsh?

Double Indemnity (1944)

Dames with shady intentions and gullible gentlemen - even though this is a blueprint of most film noir movies, Double Indemnity is a classic that set the standard for the genre (in good and bad ways): it's elegant, atmospheric and it creates that peculiar and haunting mystique that L.A. has in these movies (driving around in cars always plays an important role) - even nature always looks artificial, bathing in white light or sinister shadows. And, of course, Raymond Chandler's writing ("I'm rotten to the heart...") provided a hard-boiled edge. Wilder is a master director and Barbara Stanwyck is not bad as the femme fatale. The title refers to a technicality in the insurance company business and it is for sure not the plot that keeps Double Indemnity interesting (even though it has its good suspense moments where you are anxious to see what will happen next). The weakest aspect of it may be the, as I saw it, very typical use of flashbacks. But maybe I say this because I have watched too many crime movies from the same era in which a dire male voice belonging to a man who slopes in a chair in some office presents his present situation and how his destiny was shaped. When you think about it - how many film noir movies have you seen which are narrated by the alluring dame?

The story: Insurance company man gets involved in a murder plot: by a cover-up, money will be paid by the insurance company. It's a dame, of course, that makes him complicit in a crime. The film suggests that people are driven by sex, money or professional honor. But as some reviewers have pointed out: the mystery of the film is that these characters do not seem interested in what on the surface drives them. I think that is correct and it opens up an interesting tangle of questions: how should the coldness of the two main characters be understood? One possibility would be to interpret the film on a par with Cronenberg's Crash, as a film about boredom and excitement and thrill as flight. Everything, eventually, will go to hell. This is a world of doom and gloom (if you look for one example of fatalism in film noir, this is a good bet). Once again, I cannot resist to make a comment about the misogyny in many noir movies: the guy is a victim of the circumstances and his own drives, while the women will turn their own lives into hell by trying to manipulate others: the temptress will be destroyed, perhaps, like in this film, with the sordid farewell by a man who holds a gun: "goodbye, baby". But the woman's destiny is only an aspect of the male protagonist's grandiose path towards final destruction (one reviewer snarls - I don't know whether it is a joke - that at least women get to enjoy seeing other women who has a lot of power for a little while). This is the formula: one manipulates, the other is being manipulated. We've seen it before: the dame acts innocent, performs the role of the little girl in need of a male protector, while she is as a matter of fact pursuing her own agenda. Or could another possibility be that the femme fatale and her counterpart, the clueless male victim of her seduction, be interpreted as a dark story about heterosexuality as a game the logic of which is the dynamic of a surface and a secret that is all the time hinted at and glossed over only to re-appear in more fatal and dangerous ways. I don't know to what extent this makes better sense of Wilder's film, but I think this casts some light on heterosexuality. And if one continues on that line of thought, the attempt to reveal a fundamental set of primary drives (the woman's and the man's) is bound to fail (a very different perspective is to ask what is going on when a person is giving in to a temptation).

Interestingly, there is also something else going on beyond the conventional crime story. One interpretation of the film is that the ending scene reveals the deep love between the insurance company man and his boss who has been trying to solve the mystery. Sadly, this dimension is not explored that much.

Duck Soup (1933)

I am quite ashamed of the fact that I have never seen a Marx brothers movie before - until now. My reason is perhaps that when I was a kid I used to hang out with my neighbors who spend idle and endless afternoons with extremely boring old comedies from the silent movie era. So - I wasn't particularly thrilled about watching Duck Soup (which is not even a silent film). Perhaps this is because of my low expectations, but I am surprised about how much I enjoyed it. Even though most of the gags were not that funny, I liked the anarchic joy of messing stuff up - there was a kind of vitality about it all which had perhaps little to do with making particular points about politics or war. The story seems quite hard to spend many words on (I must say the satire of seriousness in politics works quite well), but what caught my attention was Duck Soup's approach to comedy as an inspired and rambling form of deconstruction - it all falls apart, in a good and edifying way.

Good-Bye, Dragon Inn (2003)

Ming-liang Tsai is known for his slow and aesthetically driven movies. I must admit that Good-bye, Dragon Inn was exhausting at times, but in the end, it is clearly a movie I would encourage you to watch; as in other movies in which there is no narrative to speak of, no clear center of a story that goes from a to b, you are really forced to watch as the images are not defined in the sense that it is self-evident what you should be paying attention to. Nonetheless, I was not able to suppress the question: what purpose does this extreme slowness (Tarkovsky's movies pale in comparison) serve? How is it connected with the themes of the film? The setting is a movie theater. It becomes clear that this cinema is about to close its doors. We see a woman working in the cinema, which seems almost deserted. The static camera (tilted at a strange angle) follows her routines: heating a snack, walking down a corridor etc.. The cinema is still showing movies, but only a couple of people show up. It's raining outside, and the rain is leaking into the roof. Sometimes, all you can here is the gentle sound of the rain. Good-bye Dragon Inn patiently sits down besides or behind the neck of these last movie-goers (one of whom seems more interested in flirting with men, another pair crying while watching the movie). I am not sure whether this is a wistful homage to a dying social institution, or whether the cinema is portrayed as a place that is bound to die out. Maybe the answer is: both.

Only a very few lines are spoken in the film. Ming-liang Tsai strips down cinema to its bare bones, at the same time he is showing patrons in a huge non-crowded room looking at bustling scenes on a screen - they are in fact watching a sword-fighting movie. This juxtaposition between film as engrossing viewing pleasure, as a flight, as a place for lonely contemplation, as diversion and as attention works pretty well, and I never thought that the result gets too self-conscious (we are not watching a Godard movie) but the risk is there. The eerie beauty of the film is rooted in everyday things, but at the same time the whole place is somehow cut off from reality (the entire film takes place within the cinema theater). I don't know whether I have seen any film in which the place of movie-watching is as nakedly exposed as in this film, where desperation intermingles with sadness and loneliness - and nostalgia (Aki Kaurismäki would perhaps like this stylized movie about the pleasure and strangeness of cinema).

So how does this work? I mean, the odds are small against a film that has no story, where the camera remains static and where we now next to nothing about the people we see. It still works. It's wrong to say Good-bye Dragon Inn is more style than content, but it is impossible not to mention its colors and its grasp of movement (even if these movements themselves remain at a snail's pace). If you've watched films by Wong Kar-Wai you know what I'm talking about (their cinematic sensibilities are somewhat similar).

Did I mention this is a funny movie? You might not believe it, but somehow, it is. If you've experience the dreadful company of popcorn-munching movie-goers, maybe you will get the kinds of jokes the film quietly deals in.

The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

The Grapes of Wrath is an extremely important film and if there was one director who could pull off an adaptation of Steinbeck's novel onto the big screen, it was John Ford -  a director not particularly famous for his leftist sympathies. This film, however, has its heart to the left. It's hard to imagine this film project would have been realized ten years afterwards; even though some aspects of the book are toned down, the film's message and vision is still uncompromising in its outcry against dispossession of the poor - The Grapes of Wrath is one of the very few American movies that in an unsentimental way tackles issues about social justice and capitalism. What can I say, it was a harsh world then and it's a harsh world now - Ford's movie has a lot of things to say and reveal about our world and the economic system that human relations are intermingling with and that structures people's lives.

The story is simple and merciless. Tom Joad is on a parole from prison (he has killed a man in a drunken fight) but when he arrives home, the village seems deserted. Instead, he finds the local preacher, or the man who used to be a preacher. We learn that the family has been chased away from their land by the banks and the big landowners. They are going to California to pick oranges and the film follows the Joads' from camp to camp, increasingly pessimistic about their future. Everybody is looking for a job, and this is something that is both a result of and a means for capitalist manipulations. 

Directors like John Ford may be known for their films about independent, self-made man. The American dream, harsh but true. The Grapes of Wrath is a story teaching us about fragility and an overwhelming system. The America that comes to life here is not the land of freedom and fantasy and endless exploration: its a land that has a history of violence, where borders are staked out again and again, and where land = property. Ford does not portray evil capitalists, but he shows how society is torn up with people representing different roles and where many institutions have a shady place (such as the police and the state authorities). He focuses on people who are dependent on each other (in good and bad ways), people who succumb and who try to survive in a society that pushes them away, or invites them only in order to throw them out again. What's the answer? Instead of the run-of-the-mill sentimental individualism, The Grape of Wrath invites us to think about collective action and political and defiant organization. The film ends with a - OK it is too overwrought and calculating - political speech that makes the message pretty clear.

I should also mention the role of landscapes in the film. They are not reduced to a beautiful backdrop, a beautiful scenery on which to relax the eye in an otherwise tough story. Ford conjures up a world, a world of both promise and horror, violence and solidarity. The style is direct, but it also contains a form of subdued poetic side, and it is the poetry that speaks both of sadness and of rage. 

Hævnen (2010)

What drives people to revenge? This seems to be the central question of Susanne Bier's recent film Hævnen (In a Better World). Even though serious moral questions are placed at the core, this is not a completely satisfying film (would I have liked it better as a novel? Maybe.). Two conflicts play out, one in Denmark, and one in a refugee camp (in Darfur?) and the point seems to be to shed some light on violence, how violence is sparked or how it could be rejected. Bier refrains from providing one overarching idea. Instead, one could say that she tests our reactions (I am inspired by this reading of the film.) A prominent temptation is to present moral problems as given questions to which universal answers are to be provided: "is it right to....?" Well, is it or is it not? When these type of questions are set up, one starts to imagine a situation as comprising a bunch of facts. Then the task is to churn out the optimal solution in accordance with a principle or a standard. Moral problems then seem identical with problems in engineering, it's just that principles mess things up with their fact-value fuzziness. (If you read moral philosophy, you are bound to bump into this understanding of what moral problems are.)

In my opinion, Bier does not open up that kind of approach. One of the stories are about two boys who have made up their minds to blow up a man's car. They have both witnessed the man hitting their father, twice. One of the boys start to question the plan, but the other boy insists that they have to go through with it. And so they do, and irrevocably bad things are about to happen. Was it right to do it or does the film instead show that revenge is always bad? That would be to simplify what is going on.

In many films, vengeance is portrayed as an unstoppable force, an ineluctable expression of human nature. A temporary equilibrium might be reached, but these films always hint at the inevitable moral functioning of human beings. - This is not at all Bier's point of view; some of the best scenes involve the tension between the two boys. One of them tries to talk the other out of it, to make him change perspectives. The boy persists, and persuades his friend to be complicit in the crime. One of the boys is blinded by rage (we learn that this rage is deeply rooted in him). The other boy loses his clear-sighted reaction. - - It is important that these descriptions in terms of 'blinded by' or 'clear-sighted' is my own reaction - it is not a matter of neutral judgments.

The problem with Hævnen is that too often, it resorts to conventional, soapy drama where one tense situation is followed by another, one problematic relation is put on top of another. For this reason, many aspects are dealt with superficially. The scenes in the refugee camp, for example, risk being swallowed up by the moral drama in Denmark, so that this story about vengeance and medical ethics is reduced to a mere shadow of the central story about the two boys and their plot. And this type of juxtaposition also comes close to the pitfall the film otherwise stays clear of: vengeance is a part of human nature, it is a universal phenomenon and no good intentions can stop these destructive chains (Bier's attempt to portray reconciliation is not that convincing as it follows too many film conventions - the whole thing appears half-hearted).

Darling (1965)

John Schlesinger's Darling is, if anything, a moralistic story. And my hunch is that his moralism has a misogynist aspect. The main character - played by an icy Julie Christie - is a girl who knows what she wants, at least in one sense. She wants to be famous, she wants to succeed, she wants to get to the top. She seduces a string of men, leaves one after another behind, and when she ends up at the top, married to an elderly Italian aristocrat, it's quite boring up there, at the top. The old story: fame&wealth do not add up to much if one has lost whatever makes life worth living. If this was all there was to the film, it could have been an insufferably self-important affair (even though, of course, a bunch of good movies have been made about this theme - Jack Clayton's Room at The Top comes to mind).

It's just that Darling is a quite good film after all. It shares the light touch of other British films of the era, the snappy dialogs, great pacing brusque cinematography. You know, everything that A Taste of Honey had going for it. Darling inhabits its spaces just fine, and those spaces are not limited to sassy parties, decadent beaches or fancy apartments (but these abound!), but Schlesinger also has his own eye for ordinary life, even within this crazy-luxurious world, so that even those places have an air of drabness. The ending scene, located at a scabby-looking airport, works just great.  

I, You, He, She (1974)

Even though it was a film I barely feel I could say anything intelligent about, Chantal Akerman's I, You, He, She turned out to be a quite haunting movie experience, even though the film's point partially eludes me (and many scenes seem unnecessary, especially in the beginning of the film where nudity is used in an extremely tiresome way). It starts with a girl (played by Akerman herself) in a room. The room is furnished with a mattress, a bureau and a chair. And a mirror. The girl has trapped herself in the room. As one scene ends and the next begins, a voice-over tells about the girl, but these are bare facts that we can see ourselves. The narration and the images are not as out of sync as they are in Marguerite Duras' India Song, but they are not altogether congruous either. It's an interesting technique that makes the whole thing full of tension. The girl shifts positions. She eats sugar. She writes a letter. She is trapped in the room. Then, suddenly - and within this film this is a dramatic turn of events - the girl leaves the apartment. We see a grim-looking junction (I've noticed a few Belgian directors' fondness for that type of ugliness - what's going on?). The girl is picked up by a truck-driver. They go to a bar, and they continue the journey. The truck-driver talks about his life. He is bored with his family, but at least he can meet a woman in his car whenever he feels like it. The girl gets out of the car. She knocks on a door, and is let into an apartment. We realize that the person who opens the door is her girlfriend. Although the girl is told she cannot stay, the two end up in bed. // The film is shot in gritty surroundings, using a sharp b/w palette. Sometimes the images are grainy. Like in Jeanne Dielman, actions typically play out in real time. It's harder to say anything about what the film tries to say. We see the girl doing almost everything compulsively (eating, writing, moving stuff around, drinking, having sex) and even when she is at rest, she looks restless. When she is in her department, she looks like a person who has decided to give up on the world. Time seems to have stopped, become irrelevant; days seem to go by, weeks even. Then she leaves (and it feels like a dramatic thing when she does), but inside that truck, or in the bar, she looks lost, and with the man, she does what she is told, and she is quiet, listening to the man's horrible story. She is not welcome at her girlfriend's place, but somehow, she is allowed to stay, and she does, eating sandwiches, being the one who is fed. How should this, along with the prolonged intimate scene, be interpreted?

According to Wikipedia, Akerman was upset when a gay film festival screened this film. Reportedly, she said that she would never allow any of her films to be shown on a gay film festival. Having seen I, You, He, She that declaration astounds me.

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

I can imagine that some would say that Grave of the Fireflies (dir. Isao Takahata), an animated film about the horrors of WWII that has now become a classic, is sentimental and that it relies too much on metaphor. I did not react that way. Instead, I would say that beauty was not used to relieve the horror shown within the film, beauty was not mere decorum. The story is set at the end of the war. Japan is bombed and people suffer. The main characters, two children, are orphaned and they have to find somewhere to live and food to eat. Grave of the Fireflies follow them from a relative's home to a desolate bomb shelter by the river. The animation (which a film like Waltz with Bashir is somewhat indebted to) works brilliantly to capture the children's world of gloom but also moments of magic. Strangely, Takahata insisted that the film was not anti-war. This is extremely hard to understand, considering the film's extremely bleak exploration of the ruins of Japan during the war. The film - at least as I interpreted it - also focused on the accusations and false images of heroism that war breeds. The message? No heroism, just people who survive or do not survive.

Beyond the Hills (2012)

Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days was a  rollercoaster of a film: it gripped me by the guts and didn't let go. His latest film, Beyond the Hills, may not be as direct and strong. It is also more complex, and mostly I think this complexity deepens the film. That said, Beyond the Hill is a challenging movie, one which I do not regret having seen. Clearly, Mungiu is a director that has things to say. Here, he explores a story in which religious frenzy, a non-existent welfare state and a sad love story are complicit factors in the film's evolving tragedy - no easy solutions wait around the corner and there is no comforting consolation that everything will be alright in the end. Mungiu's approach is harsh and it remains harsh, but that doesn't mean he is cynical.

Alina comes back from Germany to go visit her friend/lover Voichita who lives in a small monastery. They both grew up in the same orphanage. Alina has resolved to take Voichita with her away from the monastery, so that they could live together. Voichita oscillates between different solutions and as the story progresses, they both live in the monastery. Alina is seen as an outsider, a threat to the order. That is also what she becomes. One horrible thing after another happens, not as a result of one action, or one person's malice. Things get out of hand, and Alina gets desperate. And desperation is also the theme here, and people's responses to it. Voichita pleads for her friend: they must take care of her in the monastery, they must let her stay and they must help her, because nobody else will, they cannot throw her out on the street. In this way, the film connects several aspects of a situation that goes from bad to worse. Mungiu looks at how decisions and attitudes evolve within a bigger context, a context of insecurity and vulnerability. I don't think the film bashes religion itself. Rather, the monastery is placed in a specific society, a specific state of poverty and social problems. It seems quite true to the film to emphasize its character of tragedy: Mungiu takes a step back and looks at the big picture, how a truly sad chain of events unfolds from a messy background story involving many levels of lack of support but also attempts to help and understand.   

Mungius combines wide-angle shots of the grim landscape surrounding the convent with the much more crammed images of urban life - and in a similar way, the film shifts from silence to the piercing noise of the city. His steady attention works just as well when he focuses on the ordinary life of the nuns as when he takes his characters to the labyrinthine hospital. Nothing is romanticized, there are no spaces of relief. This makes the film quite exhausting, and I must admit that in some scenes towards the end we see more than we should see and not just the life of the characters but also this viewer's capacity to digest the harsh violence on display starts to deteriorate. I no longer know what to think about what is going on: would I really call all this a matter of good-hearted yet clueless attempts to 'help'? Well - - -. My thoughts start to poke around in darkness. But on the other hand, the very last scenes are terribly well crafted and powerful. I would say that what makes Beyond the Hills a good film is that instead of accusing, it poses a series of important questions about the meaning of responsibility and the different ways we are weighed down by a requirement to act.