Day for Night (1973)

Quite recently, I re-watched The 400 Blows and was struck by how perceptive it was - an almost impeccable movie. But that is, I think, the only good movie by Truffaut I've seen and Day for Night, a whimsical comedy about the film industry didn't change my opinion on that. My immediate reaction when I start watching a film with this kind of topic is to be on my guard: will this be yet another self-indulgent ironical nod that is supposed to show off the director's capacity for witty self-reflection? In the case of Day for Night, my suspicion turned out to be justified. In my opinion, this was a quite tiresome attempt at comedy where a bunch of knotty social relations are interwoven with the messy business of movie making. The crew is depicted as a troubled family that is all the time at the brink of splitting up and everybody is having their own private or social problems. OK, one may say that Truffaut manages to create a less glamorous image of film-making and the everyday life of shooting a (in this case: terrible and cheesy) movie than we are used to but no, Day for Night doesn't really have any dirt under it's nails - in the end this world of hotels and movies sets is portrayed as quite cozy, so maybe I shouldn't complain about the lack of friction. He also choses another perspective on movie-making than Godard's Mepris, something I am grateful for (not being a fan of Godard's self-congratulatory musings - but Fritz Lang was good) - Truffaut presents a tender homage to movie-making, to the process, to the staunch work it involves. The story has its moments and some things actually are quite moving, including the cat not doing its job on the movie set. But most of the time Truffaut is involved in conjuring up a sort of nostalgic attitude: people don't make movies like this anymore, let's show how we did it the old way. In this case, I wasn't as charmed as many other people seem to have been by this movie.

Submarino (2010)

Two brothers whose lives go from bad to worse. The brothers had a horrible childhood with abusive and alcoholic parents. Now they don't speak to each other anymore. The first brother has a kid and he tries to act like he leads a normal life - for the kid. Except that he is a junkie who needs to finance his abuse somehow. The other brother has recently been released from prison. He drinks beer and works out, trying to make do in a tough world. Thomas Vinterberg's Submarino has its indubitable moments of tragic realism, but too often I feel I know exactly where it's going and, yes, it's going right in that direction. Two weeks after having seen the film, I can no longer recall more than a couple of scenes, all of which have an immediate sense of depression in them, which Vinterberg captures rather well - especially the father trying to keep up appearances. I feel like I've seen this film a thousand times: a dark film about misfortune and emotional fragility, but which has no particular perspective on this misfortune; our faces are just pressed against it. And it is also quite revealing that the two characters are men - there is a clear tendency towards male miserabilism here. Some of the actors are good, however.

Spring Breakers (2012)

I watched Spring Breakers at the local movie theater - and so did a large group of teenagers who seemed rather perplexed by Harmony Korinne's nightmarish exploration of youth culture. Having only seen Gummo - a strangely beautiful, but also depressive - film about young people in a small town, I didn't quite know what to expect. Spring Breakers starts off as a surreal rock video. Kids dancing, an abrasive tune by Skrillex, the camera spins around - the whole thing evokes instant nausea. A gang of teenagers look forward to spring break. They want to go to the place where all kids their age spend a week of partying. They can't afford it, but that's not an absolute limitation - they rob a bank and go on holiday, where one is to party and 'have a good time', whatever that means in this world which is portrayed as a sort of hedonistic hell, where everyone is trying to experience everything. Some of the girls have second thoughts, and go home. Sunny Florida delivers. The party never dies out. The girls end up at a party raided by the police, get arrested and are bailed out by a local wannabe-thug. In one of the film's characteristically weird scenes, the girls line up at a piano on the beach, where they belt out a Britney Spears tune. Gummo was a lo-fi, eccentric little movie. Spring Breakers seems to aim at the Mainstream, creating the kind of images that actually look like the thing derided in the movie: commercials, music videos, glossy sunsets - everything that is creepy and pervy about commercial culture and desires (some of the actors are brought from the Disney teen-star factory...). The camera ogles, but the result is not, I think, supposed to look alluring - it's just sad and alienated. - Yet, the problem with the movie is it's stance, that its entire idea seems flawed. What can Korinne, given the main ideas of the movie, confront us with other than faux-beauty and a world so warped in its desire for - well its not clear what it desires - that it is hard to even react to it. Is Spring Breakers just an exploitation movie with social critique as its excuse?

Port of Shadows (1938)

Port of Shadows (dir. Michel Carné), a true classic of French poetic realism, exudes existentialist philosophy, but perhaps without that philosophy's constant elevation of a sort of gritted-teeth heroism. Well, yes, it's a somber, melancholy movie, set in foggy le Havre. The main character is a grim-looking deserter. He just wants to get away, hop onto a liner to Venezuela where nobody knows him. He ends up in le Havre, where he is taken to a place where all kinds of lowlives hang out (everyone is involved in some sort of shady business). Then there's the encounter with a girl of course. She is also running away from something. There's also a tragic suicide which equips him with a passport. So will he take the girl under his wing and will they both find a sanctuary in Venezuala? No, this is not that kind of film. The cinematography of Port of Shadows is wonderful, dreamy: there is fog everywhere, but the images also have a strange matter-of-factness to them, which you might not expect from a movie labeled 'poetic realism'. The ragged aesthetic of raincoats and quays might appear like a hopeless cliché, and indeed, this is by no means a perfect films - its defaitism is on the brink of one-dimensional pessimism (love is but an ephemeral ruse etc.), but at the same time, Port of Shadows never gets too pompous. What I didn't like about the film was its predictable doomed love affair - the innocent girl, world-weary girl of 17 and the experienced and equally world-weary man. It didn't speak to me at all. The film's own perspective remains unsettled: are we thrown into a world in which people no longer believe in love, that they have hardened their hearts, or is the point that the world can't inhabit love? In my opinion, the grimness and deep-rooted gloom of Port of Shadows works better as a beautiful film noir than as a clear-sighted philosophical tract.

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.