My Night at Maud's (1969)

A guy stands with his arms crossed in a bedroom. He looks serious and he's talking. A woman lies in a fluffy bed. She wears a sailor's shirt and she is listening:
- Women have taught me a lot, morally speaking... I know 'women' sounds....
- a little vulgar
- Yes. It would be idiotic to generalize from individual cases, but each girl I met posed a new moral challenge that I'd been unaware of or never had to face concretely before. I was forced to assume certain attitudes that were good for me, that shook me out of my moral lethargy.
- You should have concentrated on the moral and ignored the physical.
Says the girl, who lies in the bed. But we only hear her; the camera sternly focuses on the guy who stands in a slightly different position than before, his arms behind his back looking both relaxed and awkward.

This is a typical scene in Rohmer's My Night at Maud's, one of his early films (even though the director was in his fifties when he made it). Rohmer is famous for the easy-going tone of his movies, despite the constant appearance of philosophical discussions. These sometimes are no more than intellectual prattle that says more about the situation than a sterile philosophical argument. Usually, I'm quite fond of this approach but for some reason My Night at Maud's annoy me instead of thrilling me or sharpening my attention. Also here, discussions about belief, love, and conventions whirl around, and these are always rooted in a particular relation, but somehow I am never engaged in this film. I am irritated by the film's portrayal of the two main male characters. They think about Women and their past Adventures and the next move they are going to make with a girl - yes they analyze it by means of Pascal. The two main female characters merely react to these male 'philosophers'. Yes, one is a free-thinker, an atheist who sees through muddled thinking. But still, everything she does is seen under this aspect of femininity and there is always flirtation in the air. The film is about these two men and their existential problems. The women may talk back ('I prefer someone who knows what he wants!'), they may be well-educated and articulate, but this film is never about them, and somehow, they are always reduced to being Women, playing their part in the sexual game that this film is so tightly involved in.

But maybe I make the classic mistake of disliking the movie because I have difficulties with its characters? I don't find my feet in their endless blabber about Pascal, choice and marriage, but they don't seem to know themselves very well either, and one of the things I must admit I admire about the movie is its way of observing how people open up, start revealing who they are to another, but then they get scared, and start talking about something practical, they draw back, only to open up later on; Rohmer has an eye for this type of dynamic. The main character (do we ever know his name?) has finally found his Blond Girl. They talk. He has made some tea (he's an expert, he says) and they talk about choice. He says that choice for him is always easy. The camera is following their tea drinking ritual - Rohmer is always emphasizing the rituals of everyday life - while the girl says that choices can be agonizing, but not always. And it goes on in that vein. It's just that all of these discussion, all the dramatic turns, leave me cold: I know this is a 'good film', at least many think it is, by my own response was not so enthusiastic.

Ratcatcher (1999)

Lynne Ramsay is one of the most interesting contemporary directors, or so I think. I was impressed by the strangeness of Morvern Collar and her latest film, We Need to Talk about Kevin was both disturbing and eerily beautiful. When I start watching Racatcher - on an old, wheezing VHS-tape where the image is both grainy and unstable .... - I immediately recognize her style, her use of colors and her approach to film characters. Be prepared for a movie that is almost oppressingly bleak. Glasgow. Early seventies. A young kid plays with his friend by the canal, and the friend dies. The boy didn't do as much as he could, and afterwards, he fights with bad conscience. We follow him roaming around his neighborhood, a dilapidated housing area which is partly abandoned. He has two sister and a father who drinks. The world we look at is James' agonized world. One day James takes the bus to the end of the line. He walks around, looking at the houses. There is a field of wheat, almost surreal in its sheer existence, in its distinctive movements and colors. This is a quiet, stunning and dreamy scene which is important for the film as a whole. James is portrayed as an outsider kid, but he's got a friend, a girl who the local boys take advantage of. If you read this, you might shy away from all these depictions of urban misery. But if you know Ramsay's films, you know the quality of imagination there. Even though there are plenty of kitchen-sink realism, cruelty and loneliness in Ratcatcher, there is also a sense of amazement. In one scene, James' friend shows his pet mouse. The local gang takes the pet from him and starts playing with it, violently passing it around them to make it 'fly'. The friend ties the tail of the mouse onto a balloon, and the balloon flies up into the air, up to the moon, and the mouse explores the crevices of the moon together with an entire squadron of mice. This scene provides no consolation, but it expresses an aspect of sadness and hopelessness, it opens up another angle. Ramsay doesn't simply throw a heap of gloomy images at our face, she very skillfully and perceptively constructs a world which I immediately believe, I react to it, I learn to recognize and see different elements of it and Ramsay makes the viewer attends to the everyday regularities of life: the canal is there, the dustbins are there, the kids are playing over there. I think this is one of Ramsay's strengths - her understanding of place. Just to place her film in a broader context, I think a director like Terence Davies makes films which work on the same level as hers, and they both share a sense for the elegiac, the moments in which life both stops and brutally moves on. The film touches on political themes. There is a strike among the garbage men. The area is about to change entirely. But at the same time the film does not give away much hope for change - a feeling crystallized in the scene where James returns to the house he explored in the earlier scene with the weat field, only to find it locked. I would say that this political aspect of the film is not as developed as the more personal story about James, about being a child in a harsh world, about guilt and cruelty. The political remains a backdrop, but it is never explored as such.

Apflickorna (2011)

Apflickorna is Lisa Aschan's first feature film. This is impressive, as she develops a style and approach of her own - even though there are of course connections - I though about Ruben Östlund's interest in social dynamics when I watched Apflickorna, the use of static camera and long shots (in this case combined with extreme close ups) also brought Östlund's peculiar mix of intimacy and distance to mind. What I liked about Apflickorna is its refusal to please, to conform to expectations about how a story is to progrress or what characters should do or how they should react. But this is not to say that Aschan has made a provocative film - I would rather describe it as unsettling, elusive perhaps. Apflickorna is a love story, but also a tough tale about power and competition. When you think 'love story', in this case you have to think about hard-boiled lines uttered in a Humpherey Bogart kind of way, stonefaced. When I reveal that the two main characters are training a form of gymnastics on horses, one girl being a newbie, the other more experienced, you might conclude that this still has to be a cute and feminine little film about friendship and such things that take place between two girls who like to create a secret little world for themselves (this is the stereotype). No. The training is situated within a nexus of power and discipline - you are to exert control, not only over you body, but over any situation you are confronted with. Apflickorna explores how this discipline is achieved, or how it breaks down. Sexuality is depicted as playing out both as a way to uphold power and to break it down. In one scene, the two girls are courted by a guy. They tease him, send mixed signals, and dismiss him. One of the girls may feel differently about the situation than the other, but it all takes place within forms of power, even though the character of this power is not at all clear. The situation invokes the idea of femininity as a power tool, but I am not sure in what way the film treats it differently from sexist rhetoric in which the same image is often present (where women are portrayed as scheming, using their sexuality as a weapon) - I guess that one could see it as connected with the film's generally bleak image of relations as immersed in power configurations. An important and heart-wrenching side-plot focuses on one of the main character's little sister, who is in love with her older cousin. The girl is schooled into how to react ('be tough') and the film shows a kind of vulnerability no disciplinary conditioning or attempts at poker-faced self-control could take away.  Apflickorna has its weak points and those occur when too much is spelled out, when things are said, rather than shown. Most of the time, the stiffness works brilliantly and creates an unnerving tension between the characters, but sometimes this stylized acting feels to calculated (I think about what Bresson would have said, how he directed his actors to be blank, but somehow immediately present).

Calais: The Last Border (2003)

Marc Isaacs' documentary film Calais: The Last Border is a well-made and important documentary about present-day Europe. He follows a diverse group of individuals in Calais, he lets them talk, he shows us the surrounding that shapes their lives. Isaacs refrains from big gestures or slogans, this is the big strength of the film. One of the people Isaacs interviews is a man who hopes to cross the canal, to live a decent life in England. He knows he hardly stands a chance, but he nurses some kind of hope, trying to keep up the spirit. Isaacs also talks to a bar-owner from England who has settled down, at least for a while, even though business doesn't look too bright. Business problem is also the focus of the interview with an elderly businesswoman who tries to cope with economic problems. Not only does Isaacs make us attend to these individual persons, he also evokes this transitory city, Calais, in which most people seem to be moving on, somewhere, but where a lot of people have found themselves stuck against their will. But Isaacs doesn't let the film succumb to mute depression, there is plenty of life here (even in the repeated image of a man waiting for a bus that never comes, scenes take take on an almost Beckettian feel, but without losing any of their sense of ordinary despair), he shows how things change, not always for the better, and how people deal with that. If you want to see a very everyday portrait of European migration - watch this.

Roadkill (1989)

There are three or four movies I simply cannot watch without falling asleep (Alien 3 comes to mind). This must prove they are bad movie, you might think. No, not necessarily. Roadkill (dir. Bruce McDonald) is one of these movies - I watched it again in the middle of the night at my parent's place and I, well you know, fell asleep. It's the dreamiest film about rock musicians on the road I ever seen, as if Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man was set among sleazy, beer-drinking indie rockers. Well, it kind of works. The story is strange and massively erratic and so is the film, in a good way. Somehow, the film has a sort of atmosphere that prevents it from falling to pieces. The main character is a record label employee who is commissioned to track down a rock band. She doesn't know how to drive so she takes ... a cab that worms its way through Northern Ontario. The journey is winding and even though she finds the band, she loses them again, but she meets other characters along the road, one who is obsessed with animals killed by vehicles. I didn't always know what exactly was going on, but that was OK. Roadkill is filmed in beautiful B&W and Canadian bands from the late 80's play on the soundtrack. My recommendation: buy yourself a couple of bad-brand beers, sit down in front of the telly late at night and let yourself be wooed by this eerie, little movie. 

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.).