Black and White (2010)

Think about directors like Rohmer. He managed to make a string of easy-going movies about everyday life - in a very bourgeois setting. I can stand his movies, well, I happen to adore some of them. But it takes a good director to pull off that kind of movie, and I'm afraid Black and White, directed by Ahmet Boyacioglu wasn't one of these films, even though it had its strong aspects, and even though its offbeat focus on ordinary life was charming, even moving at times. The problem was just that the film remained lofty, conventional - I was never overwhelmed, worried or taken aback - this film played it safe, and the effect it had on me was slight. Most of the story takes place in a bar in which a group of loyal patrons hang out, drink and philosophize about love and life. At first, they seem to be a miserable bunch, but things brighten up, and the message of the film is that life goes on, no matter how static it may have seemed up 'til now - change is always possible. After the film (screened at Sodankylä film festival) the director explained that most of the characters are based on people he knows. It is obvious that these portraits contain a great deal of affection. But for all this, the film never takes off, there is no real urgency there, no lasting images; despite his aspiration to keep the film as close to reality as possible, the big issue I had with it is that it felt too general, too much craving for stories that everybody could relate to and recognize.   

Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

If you are fascinated by Italian horror movies from the late 70's or the early 80's Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio offers you a real treat; an ironical but also sympathetic meditation on film-making, chauvinism and creative imagination. A British sound engineer arrives in an eerie film studio in Italy. A seedy film is about to be made, mostly by good looking ladies being placed in booths, where they scream their lungs out. The challenge of the Brit is to transform this into movie magic, but one problem here is that the gentleman is used to making nature documentaries and the tasks he is commissioned to do abhors him. Strickland has plenty of fun showing us how the cheesy Italian horror movies might have been made - the most ingenious tricks are used (involving an assortment of vegetables) to create just the right sound of smashed bones or mushy flesh. The contrast between the bumbling Brit and the chauvinistic Italians of course plays on cultural stereotypes, but well, this is not a tract on national characteristics. The funny thing about Berberian Sound Studio is of course that it focuses on a much overlooked aspect of movies - sounds - using images that are both offbeat and sometimes eerily evocative, even when they border on the nonsensical (I must admit that the end could have been skipped). Weirdos, you'll like this one. 

Fill the Void (2012)

I watched Fill the Void (dir. Rama Burshtein) on a rainy night at the Sodankylä film festival. Perhaps this testifies to my flawed attention, but in my view, the film was overly ambiguous, and not ambiguous in the sort of way that opens up for several readings. In this case, the ambiguousness made it hard to relate to the film. Obviously, the director sees a certain urgency in a story she wants to tell. But I was never sure what this urgency was.

The story is set in Tel Aviv among a group of ultra orthodox Hasidic Jews. From what I've read, the aspiration of the director was to make a film about this group of people from the inside. I suppose that this does not exclude the possibility of a critical perspective, and this is what makes the film interesting. If anything, Fill the Void reminds us that no culture is uniform. If it criticizes certain cultural patterns, how should this be understood, should it be understood as a distinction between the religious and the cultural, or as a distinction between limiting cultural norms and a craving for independence? To be honest, I'm not sure at all, some things would speak in favor of the opposite of the latter: faith is also a way of life, not an inner conviction. The central character is Shira, 18 years old, an age at which you are expected to get married, and marriages are arranged. Everything changes when Shira's sister dies. The sister had a husband and a child. The widower is under press to re-marry, and some grief-stricken family members see Shira as a suitable match. Shira herself seems to repress her feelings; the only thing she says is that she wants to do the right thing. And it is here that my confusion appears. Is the film supposed to be a love story, so that Shira has fallen for her sister's husband, or are we to think that Shira would rather not marry the guy, but complies with the conventions to act the role of the dutiful daughter, thus repressing her desire to marry someone she loves? In part, we get to see things from the other party's perspective, the man Shira would marry tries to elicit her "real feelings" and maybe this makes my own thoughts trail off into familiar Romance Story territory (in which the usual path is to show women who are not clear about who they are, they need a male perspective). But the ending of the film thwarts this interpretation.

Fill the Void is a film that tries hard to evoke emotions, feelings that do rarely come to the surface, feelings that can only be hinted at. Ambivalence is all over, and it is painful for the characters to bear. In this, the film is rather successful, especially in how it focuses on the awkward meetings between two people who have been chosen to be a good match for each other. On the downside, the film is at times too overblown, so wrapped up within these mixed emotions that it is hard to navigate - where exactly are we heading? The excessive use of certain stylistic devices (shallow focus, soft edges, close-ups, emotional music) also felt a bit contrived.

Wadjda (2012)

If I got it right, Wadjda (dir. Haifaa Al-Mansour) is the first film entirely shot in Saudi Arabia. And the director is a woman. What is more, Wadjda is clearly a feminist film about gender and power. Despite some unfortunate choices where the crew opts for conventional narrative solutions, this is a powerful film with a strong story told by means of simple and effective cinematic devices (one reference could be Samira Makhmalbaf's The Apple, a similarly sympathetic and focused film). Wadjda is a kid whose big dream is to buy a bike. Her mother consider it out of the question: a girl would never ride a bike. Wadjda is stubborn. She enrolls in a Quran competition where she can win a decent amount of money to buy the bike herself. The film follows Wadjda's struggles with a conservative society. There are no good and bad people here, just people being afraid of being different, or opening themselves to others. These fears are disclosed not through some extra-ordinary events but in the day-to-day life comprising family struggles, urban living and the school system. The merit of the film is, as I said, it's simplicity. It follows the sneaker-clad Wadjda on her way to school, on her interaction with other pupils, with her friend Abdullah or with her mother. Her unwillingness to comply with collective patterns rarely gets a sugar-coated heroic tone - she is a person who reacts and acts (the Dardenne brothers' Rosetta comes to mind). Many scenes contain an interesting ambiguousness, such as a very moving scene in which Wadjda is reading a section from the Quran, a section she has chosen herself; this scene contains no stereotypical critique of religion as being conservative as such. Another aspect I liked about the film is its close attention to the urban surrounding in which Wadjda spends her day-to-day life. The film abounds with urban non-places as well as images of hectic street life. And this all is interesting because of the film's content. The city is both a place of limitation where certain things are forbidden but it is also shown as a space for play, creativity and defiance.

Goodbye, How Are You? (2009)

I watched Goodbye, How Are You (dir. Boris Mitic), a film comprising 25 (or how many were they?) sardonic jokes, or maybe aphorism would be a better word, and my constant reaction was that I did not get the point. These jokes were grim, sarcastic, dark - I could sometimes get a glimpse of what was supposed to be subversive or funny, but the film remained elusive to me. The film takes on many themes - history, wars, violence - and it often lands in the absurd, the skewed. A voice-over drones on, telling us these stories while the images shown often juxtapose the journalistic with the almost surreal. As a collage, this works well, and it is perhaps a film I should give another chance.

Play (2011)

In my opinion, Ruben Östlund is perhaps the most interesting movie director making films in Sweden today. His films explore social situations and the viewer is put in an as uncomfortable position as the protagonists, but this is not to say that Östlund makes some kind of social pornography of the type that we are supposed to take a lot of pleasure in looking at other's misery. One of the recurring themes in Östlund's movies is how fear is handled in encounters between people. He investigates how fear is transformed into a persistent will to make everything all right, to act as if nothing happened, as if the uncomfortable things can be mastered somehow. These topics are also apparent in Östlund's latest movie, Play. It is a difficult movie but not in the sense that it is difficult to follow the story or that it contains a lot of violence. It's difficult to watch because it forces you to think about what all of these situations mean, how you react to them - Östlund's films feel personal in how they seem aimed not at an idealized, statistical audience ("this is what people normally want to see"). He puts some acute questions in front of you, and it is your responsibility to think about what you see. But like Michael Haneke, I am not always sure whether Östlund's films express a moral clarity. As you can probably guess, his films have an open-ended character. They never conclude in clear-cut solutions or narrative resolutions.

Some reviewers and debaters accused Play of being racist. Even though I can see where that worry is coming from, I don't feel that does justice to the film. The question is there, however, what does race mean in the film, in what way is being black important or not important here? But this is not the only questions. There is also another story, a story about reactions that have a racist structure to them that the film reveals as an aspect of a tangled situation.

Through a very sophisticated series of techniques that play on psychological responses, a group of boys makes another group of boys handle over all of their valuable. It all starts with the first group telling one boy that he has just the same kind of mobile phone that has been stolen from another boy's brother. Can he prove that he didn't steal it? The boys bribe, play good cop/bad cop, they talk and persuade, they use force and elicit fear. Among themselves, they are not at all a coherent group. One of them is beaten up for acting differently. The other group of course try to flee from the situation, they try to make all of this end so that they can continue their day in the normal way. Their actions express insecurity, and this is exploited. The other boys persist. Slowly, some of their resistance starts to wither away. They get tired. They submit. They react spontaneously in ways that make them play along. The situation is a perpetual state of social bribery. At one point, they all "cooperate", but in the next scene, it is back to the mix of resistance and lack of defiance.The black kids play with racial stereotypes: the gangsta, the dangerous black, the unruly youth, the victim. The other gang are confounded, they don't know what to do.

The digital camera remains static. It is usually placed far from the actors. We see the situation playing out against the backdrop of urban non-places: a shopping mall, a tram, a train station and in one scene the group has ended up seemingly in the middle of nowhere. I think of Östlund's short film about a robbery, another one, in which he uses a security camera, or the style of a security camera. Östlund juxtaposes the apparent neutrality - the observational camera - of the image with its almost violent non-neutrality - these images are in no way neutral. My own reaction oscillates. Is this a mere artistic trick or does it have a good point?

Some have interpreted the film as a movie about political correctness. One plays along because one fears that otherwise one will be complicit in racism. I think this makes sense. But the film also ties in with Ruben Östlund's other films - in what way do people react to oppression or threats by a form of passivity, so that the only wish is to get it over with, the wish that the others will simply disappear? Play and his film The Involuntary explores what happens when somebody reacts to a difficult situation by being paralyzed. 

I don't think Östlund's film makes any statement about race or black people. What he does, I think, is to look at the fears that a racist society gives rise to, and that these fears have many sides. Here, racism is connected with the fear of meeting the other, of looking her in the eyes, treating the other as a human being rather than "a black kid who probably wants to make trouble". In this sense, racism is not just some unfounded conceptions or stereotypes - it is also intermingled with attitudes, the concrete encounter and what it makes us into.

While I write this, I realize that I will probably say different things about this movie in a few months. It's a film that has to be re-thought, digested. I should also mention that the film has many problems. Its smartness is one - it creates a tangle which creates a sort of mirroring effect - one responds with the same kind of insecurity and fear that the characters express - and this effect is so contrived and calculated that it no longer can morally have the effect of self-reflection. Another problem involves some specific scenes, especially towards the end, where Östlund tries to bring home the point about behavior that seems 'decent' but that just makes things even worse - here things gets too obvious, too schemed.

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)

Distant Voices, Still Lives (dir. Terence Davies) is a musical, of sorts - a very peculiar one - that takes place in Liverpool during the forties and the fifties and it is also one of the most moving films I've seen in a while. Before you click yourself away from here (a musical!), let me tell you this is not the run-of-the-mill chirpy romance in which music provides a sense of comfort and escapism. Distant Voices, Still Lives has collected the saddest music in the world - this is music of nostalgia and commemoration. Or no, this is a film in which even the most cheerful little melody is transformed into a hymn about memories and losses.

When you think about family tale you think about epic narratives with many characters and where one generation's fate is contrasted with another generation's. Davies' approach is different. He skips the grand scope and opts for something altogether more impressionistic and fractured. The material of the movie is taken from the director's own life. In the first section, the theme is fear. There is the fear that a violent partiarch evokes and there is the war-time fear. The second part mostly takes place in pubs. Family members gather and sing, thinking about their pasts, but also doubting their future lives.

Colors are mostly toned down to hushed sepias, and I must say this does not strike me as a cheap effect. The fluid camera-work is structured around space so that time also is fluid, we see a hallway, the camera moves, and suddenly we are thrown ten years ahead. Films about memories abound. Actually showing how we remember things - in the sense where memory sometimes blurs with imagination - is a much rarer achievement, and Davies' film operates so well because it is not pretentious; instead of being engrossed in knotty mental paradoxes and warps, the film reminds us of how memories are also emotions.

The film centers on activities that are rarely expressive in the normal sense (where a character's typical behavior is revealed or established in a couple of quick scenes). Instead, Davies lets us see the daily activities of the family members. A woman washes a window, a group gathers on a porch and a small celebration takes place in a pub. There are weddings and funerals, life goes on. But Davies also shows how the ordinary is broken up and torn apart: like few other movies, Distant Voices, Still Lives conjures up a sense of terror and violence that have a horrendous explosive force. (Some of the scenes have a nightmarish quality and in some of them, inexplicable uncanniness is intermingled with something perfectly ordinary - look at that scene with "uncle Ted"!)

Every frame of this film felt real - I mean, it's quite surprising that it does, given how fond the director is of family portrait-styled images. Not in the sense of factual correspondence, but in the sense that this is a work of engagement; the characters are not treated with contempt or with a shallow need of generalization.The film shows lives coming together and drifting apart, and through all this, there is the music, the singing - I've never experienced singing that is at the same time so mundane and so heartbreaking. There is no hint of contrived cynicism in how the music shapes the film. Distant Voices, Still Lives contains an affection for life itself that never falters.

I'vegotonewordtosaytoyou, or three: WATCH THIS MOVIE!!!

Few of Us (1996)

Let's be honest. This film tried my patience.
That's a psychological remark, and it says nothing about whether Few of Us (dir. Sharunas Bartas) was a good film.
What happens when you take away almost every element of what is usually considered a fiction movie? In the best case, you are immersed and you develop a new form of attention. In the worst case, the film gets so static that it stops to mean anything. In the case of Few of Us, I'm not quite sure what category it falls into. I can't say that I was overwhelmed by it, nor can I say that the film was pretentious and dull.
If you like film by Bela Tarr, this might be your cup of tea.
Bartas works with grand landscapes, but these landscapes are never beautiful in a traditional national geographics-sense. The film takes place, I think, in Siberia. What little there is of human interaction, it is left mysterious. A young woman arrives in a helicopter. She arrives in a small village in the woods. It is not clear what the purpose of her visit is. We see her sitting in a room, smoking, with an elderly man. We also see her at a party. There is music. And then there's a fight, a knife, and violence. The woman leaves. She has a lover, it turns out.
The film contains almost no linguistic exchange. We see glances, faces, how people feel the presence of one another in a room.
Then there are images of nature where human beings and animals are almost swallowed up by the incomprehensibly vast landscape. The camera is static, and often it requires some attention to perceive any movement at all in the frames. You don't quite get the feeling of Herzogian themes (nature is unruly and grim) but nature seems completely autonomous from humans. Humans are small, nature is majestic. The composition of the frames, movement and non-movement, never compels the viewer to indulge in nature. There is nothing to indulge in. The only way I can depict the approach of Bartas is to say that the camera lingers so that we notice every aspect of the terrain, the lighting, the shapes, the tiny, tiny hints of movement.
The people the young woman meet are poor. Several times, I worried that Bartas exoticizes them, turning them into mute, harried creatures whom it is impossible to understand. One example where I got this feeling is in the mid part of the film, where we see an extreme close-up of the elderly man's face. The eyes blink. But we see no expressions. I don't sense any Levinasian gesture in that picture. The only thing I see is the man's face transforming into a landscape, just as incomprehensibly vast as the Siberian woods and mountains. But what kind of perspective is this, what kind of approach, what kind of attitude?
Few of Us may be taciturn (except for the sound of hooting birds, splashing water and galloping horses, even a few moments of non-diegetic music - sound is used impressively!) but my problem with it was that it never lets me in - I have no issue with the pace or the static camera, but what kind of world does Bartas want to invite us into? Even depicting the atmosphere of the film is difficult.
So called "contemplative movies" have been accused of exemplifying a general flight from the political - the world is stripped down, cleansed of the kind of tensions that everyday life is filled with. Generally, I find this charge quite ridiculous, but in the case of Few of Us, this argument actually started spinning in my mind. So far, non-conclusively.
I visited Jakobstad a few years ago. There, of all places, I bought a copy of Corridor, another film by Bartas. I haven't watched it yet, but now I feel quite up to it.

The Sundowners (1960)

Fred Zinnermann's The Sundowners is the perfect Sunday afternoon movie: a cozy film opting for character development rather than a winding story. However, you have to stomach a bunch of Americans emulating Australian dialects - this is a Hollywood production set in the vast lands of Australia. The film explores the clash between nomadic forms of life and the urge to settle down. This clash takes place within a family. Paddy is a sheep drover and his wife Ida would like nothing more than to buy a farm and lead a quiet life there. The son is on Ida's side. Paddy tries to take on the role of authoritative Patriarch, but all along, we know that his heart his not in it. Paddy takes a job as a sheep-shearer and in lengthy, fine-looking scenes the film explores the details of everyday life. When they have earned a little money, Paddy spends it on booze and gambling. The son starts to race a horse so that they earn enough to buy the farm. The merit of the film is that it never leaves this sense of the ordinary but at the same time it shows a type of dramatic conflict that is never really articulated. I am never completely sure what Paddy's nomadic desire is all about and the film captures well the kind of stunted conversations family members often have where serious matters are dealt-with with off-hand gestures so as to reduce the tense, but the tense is still there, it just moves to another level. It focuses on the tensions of family life without leaning on the big Revelation or the big Fight. Instead, it shows a sort of quiet affection between the characters in a way I think is quite unusual in this type of Hollywood setting.

Well, I don't know - I really liked this movie. It's beautifully filmed and it doesn't try to be more than it is: a story about what one considers important. What is more, Robert Mitchum is great as the unruly wanderer. His acting rarely falls into stereotypes. His character all along has a sort of tenderness that he also tries to repress, trying to convince himself that he is the ragged wanderer. In other movies, much of the material of The Sundowners would turn into schmaltz. But here, even the sheep-shearing contest turns into an existential journey with Mitchum sweating like a pig.

But OK OK maybe I was seduced by the film in problematic ways. I does romanticize Australian outback life a great deal (even though it also shows its hardships). But I couldn't resist the drastic shifts the film is toying with: a jolly seen is turned into unsettling ones. Some reviewers complain that the film is too haphazard and that too much random stuff is going on. Well, that is precisely what I liked! (At the same time I know that some of the things that takes place happen too quickly, and I know that if I were to show the film to one of my friends, with whom I always have deep disagreements about movies, would exclaim: BUT THEY ARE SO STUPID! Well, sometimes people are.)

Ivan the Terrible (1944)

It's hard to tell whether the first part of Ivan the Terrible (dir. Eisenstein) is to be considered as a Stalinist propaganda film or whether it provides a critical account of power. And the interesting question is, of course, what this kind of judgment could be based on, what kind of judgment one is making when one says "this is a propaganda film rather than ..." Apparently, the Soviet élite enjoyed it. Regardless of what the answer is, Ivan the Terrible is a film full of cinematic pomp. It starts off with the coronation of Ivan - he is to become the all-powerful Tsar. Interestingly, it takes a good while before we even see Ivan's face. Instead, we see all the glory of the ceremony: the clothes, the attributes of power. But it becomes clear that Ivan's power is challenged by the rich boyars who, when Ivan is lying on his death bed after a battle, immediately start plotting about the follower. It seems as if this type of plotting makes Ivan the leader he is (we see this pattern twice): he rises from his death bed and makes some drastic changes in the administration; traitors are kicked out and men of the people are hired. Ivan is a dramatic and paranoid man. Eisenstein always films Ivan as if he is an entirely different creature than the rest, his pointed beard and dramatic posturing underlining the Tsar as performativity dependent on external attributes but also as some kind of strange inner power. And the ornate costumes! I have rarely seen a movie where so much focus lays on the costumes (Jarman's Wittgenstein comes to mind); in some scenes, the extreme costumes take up entire rooms, making the people within them almost disappear.What is more, don't forget to admire the eerie and artificial-looking set design - brilliant (for example - look at how the doors are often so small that the characters look like giants). The viewer is thrown into a messy world where angles and Eisenstein's play with distance create an unnerving claustrophobic space.