Chocolat (1988)

France grows up in colonial Cameroon with her mother and father. The father is often away on trips. Mother and daughter befriend Protée, who works as a servant in there house. As the story progresses, we understand that their relation transcend or subvert the boundaries (these boundaries are visible and invisible to use a metaphor one of the characters suggests) set by colonial sociality. To the child, Protée is a dear friend, a conversation partner, a person whom she trusts. For the mother, Protée may be more than a friend, but this aspect of the relation cannot be revealed and when it threatens to get too close to the surface (for example by being articulated by a third party) things get bad. Chocolat (don't mix it up with the cutesy film with Johnny Depp) revolves around sexuality, but also friendship in a country in which you are at home but where you are expected to act as an outsider, as a French person - one interesting aspect of Chocolat is that the child's home is placed as it were in the middle of nowhere. The camera focuses on vast landscapes, and the small space occupied by this French family. The frame of the film, where the child is a grown-up, provides a good illustration of what this mean. France gets a hike from a black American man. He assumes France is a French tourist; it does not cross his mind that she may be at home there. Denis skillfully attends to the tensions that remain unspoken, but characterize an entire way of life. Already in this early film, she works with the visual, rather than the normal proceeding of storytelling in which every scene is carefully designed to give away a specific piece of information. Expressing what you see in the different segments of Chocolat will also require interpretive work, it will reveal how you understand the relations (as power relations, and how you see power, the limits of power etc.).

Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995)

Of course you remember Happiness, the film that made Todd Solondz famous - a strangely tender film about misfits and all sorts of trouble. He made Welcome to the Dollhouse a couple of years before that and it is a much more ramshackle film, but just as outrageous. Let me add: in a good way, at least if you, like me, think that John Waters offers unassailable glimpses into the human soul.

You have seen plenty of films about every sub-species of Daddy's girl; the girl who does what she is supposed to, dances through life and is irresistable (?) in general (from the point of view of boring ideals, that is). Our main character is in 7th grade, wears glasses and the wrong clothes. School sucks. The kids are mean and the teachers bully her. Her parents adore her sister and brother, who do everything right (striving to get into a decent college for instance, even though it might take becoming a member in a garage band). She falls in love with the older guy (a Fabio-esque asshole) who plays in her brother's dorky rock band - the guy is to be hers, period. At the same time, she practices kissing with the guy that officially bullies her. Heather Matarazzo is great as Dawn, the kid who suffers cruelty and responds with more of the same. I can't recall when I saw a film about the world of adoloscence that felt this unadorned and well, kinda honest about how things can be in that age: hell and more hell. This sounds grim, and it is, but funny, too, in a darker-than-dark kind of way. Welcome to the Dollhouse kicks you in the stomach and offers you the most unappealing image you can imagine of what the so called social game is like, the game in which you are to pass, to succeed, to be, as a teacher tells Dawn, dignified. With regard to its non-existence positive messages (yeah, it get's better, at least they don't call you names to your face...), it's weird that such a movie is so comforting. But don't get me wrong, this is not a film in which you end up in a cute little collectivized cheering to the be-yourself. What Welcome to the Dollhouse does is showing us that it is not at all clear what we do when we say that somebody should 'be themselves'. Maybe its Dawn, resiliant, never conforming, always fucking up, but also constantly doggedly convinced what she has to do. Welcome to the Dollhouse is not cynical, it just demonstrates that even though there is no guarantee that stuff gets better, life is best faced equipped with a big fuck you to sociality: don't-try-to-be-adorable. I loved everything about this film and YOU should watch it if you haven't.

Neighbouring Sounds (2012)

The starting point of Kleber Mendoca Filho's Neighbouring Sounds is fascinating: his film takes us to a community in Recife, a city in North-East Brazil. We meet a bunch of people living in the neighborhood and we are also invited into a world of sounds and architerture (gates, fences, streets, apartments). Urban sounds and urban architecture, revealing something about the state of present capitalism, class differences and fetischized security. This approach feels fresh, and I wish the director would have taken it further, rather than crafting a typical story with elements of drama and thriller. The very first scene with a girl on rollerskates is promising, and the first segment has its thrilling moments, but the whole thing feels contrived. The film had potential (one reviewer depicted it as a weird soap opera without a plot - I like that), also in its visual style, but in the end I wasn't impressed. The best scenes were the weirdest ones: a sudden waterfall of blood, two young people in an old building that used to be a cinema, a repeated nightmare. Here, Filho shows that he has something to contribute. Something that bothered me was a rather sexist view of women (how the camera focused on female bodies gratuituously, without it adding anything to the movie). If the film would've stuck with those sounds - rumbling noise, the yelping dog, footsteps and sirens - instead of repeating a story about macho men, I think I would have liked Neighbouring Sounds a great deal.

Waterloo (1929)

A silent film about Waterloo (Karl Grune) and political intrigues? That sounds rather dull, but when I watched this politically extremely fishy (pro-German agenda) film at the film archives in Brussels with live piano music, the experience turned to be quite interesting. It's a busy film, despite the fact that some of the time the action takes place around the negotiation table. It's also a long film and it is also a film that hammers home its message without worrries about subtlety: the battle scenes are stylized and from the get-go, good guys are good guys (= German). In the end, Waterloo is also a not very successful attempt to combine historical drama, war movie and romance - it all falls together, even though some scenes are saved by the director's attention to pace, some fun segments where split scenes are used along with some dreamy, humane scenes.

The Cameraman (1927)

I watched The Cameraman, a Buster Keaton comedy, accompanied by a live orchestra. The experience itself was, of course, magnificent, but I must say I am not crazy about this type of comedy, not even the classical ones from the silent era (OK, I can't say I have seen that many). The Cameraman is what Vertov's cameraman is not. Where Vertov shows a world where technology, society and the human being are all tossed into the same well-oiled machinery, the machinery of Keaton the cameraman does not work at all. The funny moments of the film grow out of the disastrous and bumbling cameraman who messes up every situation he is thrown into. Yes yes yes it's a fine film the innocence of which we can marvel at etc. (as I heard somebody say, and it striked me as awfully cynical to say such a thing) but still - I wasn't very amused by it, despite all the self-referential jokes about movie-making and some interesting points about photography.  

Bastards (2013)

Bastards by Claire Denis was screened at the Cannes film festival, and afterwards, she made some changes. I am not sure whether the version we saw in Sodankylä was the final one but be that as it may, Bastards didn't convince me, something I can't even blame on the fact that I was seated too far from the screen to pay full attention to the movie. I have watched quite many films by Denis, and never before have I reacted negatively to the elusive and dizzying nature of some of her films. Here, however, I had the feeling that Denis did not quite know what she was up to and that there was even something fishy about the whole miserabilist thing. A couple of scenes works pretty well but my overall impression was that the structure doesn't work. Denis works with actors that have performed in her earlier movies. Some of them are impressive - especially Michael Subor whom I remember from L'Intrus. The film opens with a suicide. Police investigators. A naked woman is running around, her body covered with blood. We learn that the man who committed suicide, Jacques, was deep in debt and the brother of the widow is now trying to help out. The brother lives in the same house as the man to whom Jacques owed money. They start an affair. And then there's the woman whose naked body we saw, she's the daughter of Jacques... This sounds complicated? Yeah, it is, and I don't feel Denis succeeds in tying together questions about money, abuse, sex and family relations. The tangles remain, as it were, in a knot that never opens up for me. When the film ends in the big Revelation, I cannot help feeling that nothing at all got clearer, that Denis relies on a form of mystification that titillates, allures, nothing more (even though, admittedly, hers is a very peculiar form of titillation - this is not exactly a dazzling film, except for the Lynchesque ending scene). Everything is rotten, but Denis makes it quite seductive in a strange way, and that's my issue here. Mystification is particularly troubling here as the film hints at one of the main characters being a victim complicit in her own violation. I wish I could admire the style of this film, the gray light, the chopped-up scenes, the lack of reasurrance. But I have no clue where the film is going, or what it wants from me, so - no, I am looking forward to Denis' next film.

Trouble Every Day (2001)

In Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel wrote about desire as a form of eating. Perhaps that is what Claire Denis had in mind when she made Trouble Every Day, a horror movie that is unlike most other horror movie in dodging silly effects for a strangely haunting story about sexuality. I watched the film a couple of weeks ago, and it's still hard to shrug it off, especially the score by the wonderful group Tindersticks. So what to expect? Trouble Every Day is one of Claire Denis' more open-ended movies. It's quite a task even to describe what the main themes are. It's a film that disturbs and subverts but at the same time it's a strangely alluring affair.

When you think about Paris, do you think about wonderful little alleys and cozy cafés, romance and sunsets? Forget all this, Denis throws you into a gray, cold landscape. Remember what Nicolas Roeg did to Venice in his eerie horror flick Don't Look Now from 1973. Denis film has much in common with that film, it digs and digs, layer after layer, and its digging process requires all of cinema's aspects: how frames are designed, use of close-ups, colors, editing (if there's one dimension of Denis' films I would say are easily overlooked, its how different scenes are juxtaposed in a way that defies linear storytelling). 

Trouble Every Day has the structure and geography of a nightmare, the sort of nightmare when things and places are several things at the same time - that's another reason why the film is so hard to pin down, it doesn't really seem like a film that you could reassemble into a neat package of ideas. A newlywed couple arrives in Paris. The guy is obsessed with looking for a doctor with whom he has collaborated (there are references to unorthodox experiments but we don't know much). A woman coos a string of lovers - and devours them. She is married to the doctor the American man is looking for. The doctor has locked her into his house, but she finds ways to escape. What's going on between these people? There's little dialogue, and plenty of mood. It's rare to see sex depicted so gloomily as it is here: sex is killing, or a desire to kill, to feed on the other, but it is also related to affliction and disease. It's not fun to watch Trouble Every Day, it's not in any sense entertaining (the performances are flat, there is no plot and the violence is not supposed to look cool). But what sort of carnal being are on display here? As in other movies, Denis explores the body, and what she finds there in this film is a strange and sometimes repulsive site for urges, but not urges int the sense of elusive psychological drives - Trouble Every Day leaves almost no room for psychology. At the same time, however, it's also a film about our relations to each other, about fear of hurting one another. But where does the film end up in displaying erotic relations as involving a deep sense of horror and an eerie dimension of pleasure? I was surprised by my reaction to this movie. Instead of being appalled, or shocked, I was moved by the melancholia that the images and the music conveyed. 

 Agnés Godard's cinematography is masterful, as always.

35 Shots of Rum (2008)

Claire Denis is famous for making sensual and enigmatic movies. In this sense, 35 Shots of Rum is not a typical Clair Denis movies - even though it would be wrong to say that she makes only one type of movie; actually Denis is a rather versatile director. However, 35 Shots of Rum is characterized by something that is typical for all Denis' film: lack of sentimentality and a refusal to mold a film in accordance with familiar patterns.

A widowed train driver lives with his daughter, who is a student. They are close, even though there are also some tensions. From the get-go, we realize that these two people have a deep love for each other. The film follows the daily rituals and habits of these two, and the neighbors with whom they socialize. Here, habits don't evoke static repetition, but rather, we see people doing things in the middle of life where subtle changes and sometimes even drastic decision take place. Agnés Godard's cinematography works wonderfully here, focusing on movement not as going from A to B but as spatial dramas (watch the beautiful images of trains at night or the scenes with rice steamers) - this aspect is similar to other Denis movie, Beau Travail in particular (where movement becomes choreography). 35 Shots of Rum is not an abrasive film, but it works with concentration - everything is important. In this film, the nature of particular relationships are never spelled out verbally - Denis trusts us to look and see, as the relationships are established through various scenes in ordinary life, rather than as conflicts and confrontations. The relation between the two main characters and one of the neighbors, a taxi driver, is particularly haunting to watch. Denis manages to convey very subtle emotions, grief and loneliness, intimacy and a need to let go, without retreating to scenes in which everything is supposedly explained and resolved. I really feel that this movie invites you or immerses you in an extremely rich world - a world of spatiality, sound and emotions (and the political is always present, but in a quiet way, in this domestic drama). There are turning points, yes, but as in real life, their meaning is excessive (the scene in a small café is fantastic). As a portrait of a family reaching crossroads, 35 Shots of Rum is remarkable. The director herself talked about her admiration of Ozu and here that really shows.

And yes, Tindersticks made the musical score, and what an amazing complement that turns out to be!

Child's Pose (2012)

If you've been following Romanian cinema during the last few years you know that there are several directors working with realism in a way that feels fresh and compelling. Child's Pose (dir. Calin Peter Netzer) offers a chilly glimpse into the life of the ridiculously rich; the film discloses a country deeply marked by class differences, and it also shows a certain group of rich people so indulged by their easy lifestyle that they are alienated from reality - they can bribe their way into any project they take on, even when these projects comprise human relationships. Netzer's take on family drama is a dark and raw one, focusing on how affection intermingles with manipulation and blackmailing. A mother desperately tries to help and assist her son, who is to blame for a car crash in which one person was killed. The relation between the mother and the son is a catastrophe, and throughout the film, the mother tries to reach out to her son, but this hardly comes out as the pure love of a mother. Corruption abounds, on several different levels (social and personal). What I like about Netzer's approach is that the film rarely gets preachy or indignant, even though the portrait of the upper class contains many satirical moments (some of which relates to the characters' attempts to appear culturally sophisticated or as "being in the same boat as everybody else"). At the same time as this is a film about class, it's also a film about grief, a subject the director takes just as seriously, even though he tackles it with his own peculiar clinical cinematic style (all shots, even when they are busy, bear the feel of a penetrating glance).

I also want to mention Luminita Gheorghiu's performance - she acts the role of the mother, and I can't recall when I've seen such a complex display of iciness and emotionality; Gheorghiu really lets us take a stand on what we would regard as a matter of emotional bribery and what is to be considered as a spontaneous reaction.

On my way (2012)

Emmanuelle Bercot's On My Way is a lighthearted road movie, a sympathetic drama/comedy about family relations and reconciliation. It's not a masterpiece in any sense, but I found the film quite entertaining, even though it's not the kind of movie that will remain in your mind for long. Well, it seems fair to say that On My Way is a harmless film that has its good moments (if you can stand the clichés), most of which stem from Catherine Deneuve's sweet acting. Deneuve plays a restaurant owner who's had enough. She hits the road and of course she delves into several adventures. The denouement of the film plants itself in the middle of every expectation you may have about what a French movie should be like.