Giant (1956)

Giant (dir. George Stevens - who made the fine A place in the sun) is an epic mess. It has its good parts but oh lord, is it overwrought! But I tend to enjoy these kinds of megalomanic attempts to make the Ultimate films, so I fared quite well through it all. I mean, who DOESN'T love over-the-top studio productions with acting that veers from papery to "intense". The James Dean - Rock Hudson chemistry hardly beats anything. With a sprawling script, tacky lines and a story that covers almost every phenomenon within the human condition, Giant must be taken for what it is: a film to enjoy for its sheer ... grandness. I'm not sure of every logical step, but forget about it. Enjoy the technicolor! One must say that the social agenda of the film is in the right place: Texas is indicted for its racism (the film's relation to machismo codes is much more complex). Hudson plays the wealthy landowner who finds a girl to marry. The girl helps people in the community - people that shouldn't be helped, according to the landowner, Bick. The girl Leslie has "adjustment problems" and her befriending a local worker called Jett Rink (!! yep) doesn't help. Basically, Bick, the racist swine, is the focal character of the film: he is the one who gradually faces himself, who changes. For this, it needs a couple of generations and the transformation of Jett Rink into a wealthy oil magnate. Giant is also refreshingly anti-capitalism. It captures the business of landowning-for-profit and the oil business in a very unflattering light. Land is exploited and in the end, people are exploited, empty and lonely. Interestingly, BOTH the rugged individualist AND the well-rounded socialites are presented negatively. That's a point I can sympathize with.

 - - I shouldn't be too harsh on the film. In some interesting scenes in the second part of the film, the clashes between children and parents are chronicles, clashes that are often sparked by the children's pursuing a different path of life than their parents. Sadly, this aspect of the film is under-developed. The drama is what is focused on.

Come and see (1985)

Come and See (dir. E. Klimov) is a movie about war; the afflictions war brings with it, the endless suffering and pain it produces in people. There is no glory here, no worthy purposes and no heroes. War is not in the least thrilling - it is the view that war is an adventure that is brutally crushed.

The film starts and ends with Flyora. Belarussia is occupied by Germany and destruction is total. Everyone is afraid - and I have rarely seen such feeling of fear in film, the physical feeling of shell-shock and the fear of being caught. Flyora, a role very well acted, is the young kid who thinks about joining the partisans. Like the other kids, he plays and looks for rifles. A bunch of them arrives at his house, for the purpose of recruitment. The kid, of course, doesn't know what joining would mean. Despite the worry of his mother, Flyora tags along with the band of soldiers, and is initially a part of their routines - they have gathered in the woods, and it is evident that it is all a bit ramshackle. Flyora is encouraged to leave behind when the rest of the group goes to fight, and the kid disappointedly (he wants to be the heroic partisan) goes away on his own adventure in the woods, where he meets Glasha. Here the problems with the film starts. The boy is depicted with - it seems to me - some sort of honesty and sensitivity to what it means to be a child in a state of war, and the sorts of naivety a child might have (to see war as adventure). Glasha is immediately sexualized and this approach to the character continues throughout the film. She is the Beautiful, Deranged Girl. And there is an obvious thread in the film that I think reveals a form of horrible sexism: war destroys the purity of Womenhood (madonna -> whore).

The film continues with the two kids' return to Flyora's village after they have suffered a heavy air raid attack. The boy is deaf and the village is desolated and it is clear that people have left it in panic. Flyora tries to find the rest of his family, stubbornly convicted they are still alive. The two kids wallow through a bog to an island on which other villagers have gathered. The laborious trudge through the bog is some of the most gut-wrenching stuff I have seen on film. Klimov makes the bog come alive to the viewer and the viewer experiences and looks at the bog from the perspective of wallowing through it. It is a landscape of horror, but the way it is evoked never gets heavy-handed.

Come and See doesn't stop there, but I think this is enough to get a hunch of what the film is like. It is a visually stunning (where stunning does not mean breath-taking in a way that encourages you to sit back and relax and enjoy the beauty of nature) and the horrors of war are transported into images in a unique way. No consolation is offered, no humor, no release, no breathing holes. This is total destruction, of the world and of the soul. Survival here means escaping death, as if that escape is itself defined or marked by death, the destroyed world. The film does not pretend to speak a supposed language of realism. It is immersed in nightmares, it conjures up the tactile and auditory elements of those harrowing nightmares. That the horror is rendered so harrowingly real is however not, as I saw it, an expression of the director's diabolic imagination. Somehow, it feels as though this film had to be made (even though some elements of propaganda can be detected towards the end - having to do with how 'nazis' are depicted - the film seems an honest attempt to say something about war).

But, as I said, the gender thing is hugely disturbing here, and it says something about very troubling ways of understanding affliction and war. But: Come and See is an important film about war. It focuses on war as a traumatizing time in a way that I didn't feel was exploitative (or nationalistic). Still, there are some scenes, especially towards the end, that should have been left out. Images of Flyora shooting at pictures of Hitler together with a montage of newsreel material about the third reich - I ask: from whose perspective is this montage seen? I find the idea of adding it ill-advised on many levels. What the film basically says is: look, this war destroyed the entire world for these people. The war becomes a form of apocalypse.

Uncle Bonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)

I must confess I don't have much of a clue about what Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is about. Mortality, yes, but in what way? Apichatpong Weerasethakul's approach to storytelling is idiosyncratic to say the least. Linearity and the quotidian - or even the extra-ordinary! - is not his thing. He invites us into a story about ghosts and people and places. The ghosts never surprise anyone in the movie. They appear, and become a part of life. I've seen one other film by Weerasethakul, and I was thrilled - Uncle Boonmee made me even more convinced that this is a director with his very personal contribution to how to make a film. In fact, this film turned out to be a magnificently eerie and beautiful piece on how we live together. Depicting what is the center or the angle of the film immediately reveals how one understands it. Let's say we are introduced to Uncle Boonmee, a dying man. He lives in a rural area and members of the family along with a nurse take care of him. When these people gather for dinner, they are joined by other family members who appear from the shadows of the jungle. One of them is Boonmee's wife. Nothing of this is silly, or scary. (And don't expect it to be fluffy magical realism: here's a film that suddenly turns political, dealing with xenophobia and Thailand's bloody history.) The film shifts gears several times, and throw us into completely other forms of lives, but I sense Uncle Boonmee is always present in some form or other, as a catfish perhaps. The end of the film is a mix of Kim Ki-Duk and David Lynch - the thing is just that it keeps us close to what somehow still is everyday life. These are elusive scenes, and I am not able to talk about them here. The cinematography of Uncle Boonmee is breathtaking - if you are one of those who have problems with Terrence Malick, but think that there is some potentiality there, you should watch how Weerasethakul immerses the camera in the flows of nature. This director's film all reflect a mix of playfulness and tenderness I rarely see in other films.

Network (1976)

Sidney Lumet's Network is made like a dystopia about the world of TV but it does appear far from contemporary reality. The film explores how a TV network tries to fix their bad stats by letting a deranged TV anchor ramble in prime time. The audience love the guy's "honesty" and now everyone is watching.The point is obviously that the guy's rants (his first outburst came after he was told that he would be laid off in two weeks) are transformed into exploitation, he is a domesticated mascot who can say anything on TV as long as the ratings are good. Network is a parody about how mainstream media takes advantage of radical streams in society and thereby makes them less threatening (on the TV channel in the film, there is a docu-drama with a terrorist sect.) William Holden is impressive as the news division president - a jaded type who finally comes to realize that is precisely what he has become. OK, so Network may not be the most subtle work of art in the world, but as a reflection on the relation between business and what is seen as "acceptable" this is a quite good attempt to mock cynicism, populism and branding. But the film has many flaws as it also tries to delve into some of the characters' personal lives and as the story goes from interesting to far way over the top.

Bright Star (2009)

Jane Campion has made a bunch of interesting movies. One of them, An Angel at my Table, about the author Janet Frame, is one of the best biographical films I have seen. On the paper, Bright Star sounds quite awful: the story revolves around John Keats, a poor and rather self-involved poet living for his art and a young girl, an independent-spirited dress-maker, who is his neighbor. They have mixed feelings for each other but gradually fall in love (despite Keat's jealous buddy who wants the poet all for himself), but it is not possible for them to marry. The poet, turns out, is ill. The film hints at a familiar figure of thinking: romantic love as most noble when it is - as the expression goes - never consummated (I recently read a philosopher who held this idea to be an important theme in 18th novels). If you expect all Campion's films to be about sex - this one is an exception. But the awfulness I expected never quite materialized. Campion is a far too curious director. What is perhaps most successful is how art occupies many roles. It's an enchantment, an obsession, it has its great risks, a sort of self-indulgence, where life itself becomes art. But in the end, Campion ends up confirming the image of ennobling romance, where romance transcends mere human desire by ending up in martyrdom. Well - it's interesting how Campion takes on the task of exploring this not very contemporary ideal, but I have no idea what the film wants us to think. It's never quite clear to me what destroys these people's love: an external obstacle or ideals and fears? Or is this more a film about transience and mortality? Is it a film about self-deception or a film about doomed love and what does "doomed love" even mean?The style of the film gives little cues. Campion embellishes the material with a calm, (mostly) restrained yet expressive cinematography (in slow, wistful takes, the colors and scenes of country and semi-urban life are evoked - and no obtrusive music is used to make us feel anything very particular) and she never looks for the sort of explosive scenes that are so common in movies about love. What saves the film is Campion's debunking of the myth of the Artist whose creativity and singular vision makes human relations secondary or even impossible. Campion takes a deep look into this image, disentangling it into several different human forms of temptations and yearnings. Campion seems to take more than a cursory interest in what kinds of conventional ideals about love the two main protagonists give expression to. The characters are often melodramatic but the film places itself at a distance, quizzically gazing at this form of life in which romantic poetry of the early 19th century was immersed.

Pather panchali (1955) & Aparajito (1956)

My knowledge about and experience about Indian cinema is embarrassingly small. Satyajit Ray's Apu-trilogi are films I have wanted to see and after having seen the first two, I can only conclude that their place in film history are justified. The two first films can be situated in the tradition of neorealism but they also feel strangely modern - I sometimes think about directors and films made in the sixties.

Pather panchali is set in Bengal in the twenties. It follows the ordeals of a poor family. The father is a brahmin, a sort of a happy-go-lucky type, whose income is on the meager side. Circumstances makes him go to the city and look for a job. The mother runs the household while taking a hostile attitude towards an elderly lady (it's unclear whether they are related) who is supported by them. This old lady is a magnificent actor and just watching her is one of the reasons to watch the film. The two kids lead the life of childhood: they play, steal fruit and eagerly follow the doings of the candy man. One day, they walk to the faraway place when they can spot a train on the other side of a gigantic field (this scene, as many others, is exquisitely shot!). The film takes a darker turn as it depicts the family's poverty and the death of the daughter. Aparajito chronicles what happens in the following years. The family has moved to the city. After a spell of illness, the father dies. A relative offers a place for the rest of the family in a village. Apu turns out to be a scholarly boy, and he goes to Calcutta to study.

The main thread of Aparajito is the choices Apu has to make: is he to stay with his lonely mother or should he pursue his studies? This leads the film to explore modern life and the conflicts born out of a new historical situation. Ray refrains from moralizing. He presents the struggles in an open way - open doesn't mean neutral, because these films are engaging and impassioned, but Ray never presents either modernity or the traditional life in terms of negative and positive. And: he doesn't conjure up anything as "emblematic" for modern life. He just shows situations of ordinary life and the choices people make. One of the major themes in the first two movies, poverty, is dealt with with a sort of matter-of-fact approach - this, however, not at all implying that feelings are absent. Especially in the first film, two different attitudes are contrasted: the mother is practical, economical - and she turns bitter. The father worries less. He is idealistic, even though he also acknowledges economic necessities.

The first films explore human relations very insightfully. This especially concerns the relation between the mother and the aunt - a relation characterized by dependence and ressentiment. We see the mother's anger, and the old woman's amazement. Another theme brought up in both films to great effect is loneliness. The film presents no solution and no gratifying reassertions, but presents a situation in a clear-sighted way: a boy who does not know how he is to react to his mother feeling lonely (the film shows the oscillation between well-meaning intentions and youthful lack of sensitivity) and a mother who is at pains to handle the fact that the boy is growing up and living in a distant place and living a life she knows very little about.

One aspect of the films I also liked was the music. Ray cleverly uses both non-diegetic music and sounds in the environment. None feels calculated.

Juha (1999)

It's not that surprising that Aki Kaurismäki took a shot with a silent movie. After all, he is known for his quiet movies which trade more in stylistic expressivism than modern senses of stylishness. Kaurismäki builds his own cinematic world in which the history of film always looms low and most of the time I like this slightly nostalgic approach to cinema. Juha takes off as rural drama and veers into a tragic story about the temptations of grim city life. This theme is of course present in other Kaurismäki movies as well. Here we have the farmer's wife who leave her husband only to end up in the arms of a Dennis Hopper-lookalike, an evil pimp. OK, so if you're after psychological realism, this is absolutely not for you. If you can stand a film comprising Kaurismäki's weird homage to the silent movie era, then you should give it a chance. - - - The carnevalistic score, however, didn't convince me and in my opinion, it didn't seem to be a good choice for this film. Juha is based on a novel written in 1911 but it is characterized by Kaurismäki's usual lack of respect for historical specificity.

Times and Winds (2006)

Reha Erdem's Times and Winds is a magnificently shot movie about the small wonders of growing up. The story is set in a rural community in Turkey. The film focuses on the gap between children and adults. Not that there are any major dramatic outbursts here, but there are clearly many tensions going on here. The children in the film are used to a quite free life, running around in the hills, playing games. Some of their parents try to set up limits and rules but this project seems to be in vain. Times and Wind works with small gestures: instead of showing ruptures and resolutions, it hints at problems and builds up a sinister feeling. Erdem restricts himself to crafting a series of tableaux - the kids lives play out in ordinary situations involving anger, sexuality and friendship. One of the children has a crush on his teacher, another is mad at his dad, the imam. A girl is blamed by her mother for being a good-for-nothing, while her father takes a more friendly attitude to her. He lets the camera tenderly follow the hourly changes in nature, from morning to noon to afternoon to the twilight hours but this has nothing to do with romanticism. Nature is what it is, and humans live with it. The style of the film is interesting: static images of natures are contrasted with very camera work tracking the activity of the characters. I like this approach, especially as it seems not to be bogged down with some upfront thesis about nature/human (but yes, it does contrast change/repetition).  - - Sometimes Times and Winds tend to be a bit unfocused, but all in all, this was a balanced and elegant little film that choses to focus on the everyday rather than the extra-ordinary.

Elysium (2012)

The first part of Elysium actually made my heart pound: it's a riveting start that conjures up a quite alarming picture of life on earth ... and in space. Alarming, because it's also familiar. Los Angeles has become one enormous overpopulated shanty town. People are shuffled around in an authoritarian system of work, but they seem to be dependent on the art of making do, of taking advantage of the situation. Their lives are guarded by robots who carry out the no-nonsense bureaucratic routines. In a slightly Marcusean vein, the main character is employed in a factory where these robots are put together - his precious work (many are unemployed) contribute to his own oppression. Neill Blomkamp here treads on the path he demarcated in District 9: dystopian films with a clear political agenda. Elysium has the politics, it has the setting - but what is sure doesn't have is a good sense for storytelling. Bloomkamp opts for action hero extravaganza and the film's potential goes down the drain, being swallowed up in a gigantic maelstrom of bombastic music, predictable fight scenes and tacky lines. This is the second part of the film, in which Matt Damon, our hero, is on a mission to save himself, his girl, the girl's daughter and the rest of humanity living on earth. What's the answer? The space shuttle taking them all to the space station - Elysium - on which the wealthy & privileged minority reside and there the sick can be healed by laying down in glass box. Their minister of Defence (an icy Jodie Foster - it's rumored that the role was written for a man but she wanted the job anyway, she's great) prefence n:o 1 is to keep the people on earth away from this haven of ordered and pleasant life. The space station itself remains a caricature of sterile mansions and people who walk around in coctail parties speaking French. Elysium could've been a great film about polarization, precarious life and environmental drainage. The stage was set for a great powerful movie about what is already going to hell. Instead, the Elysium we got is a bombastic action flick that tries so hard to press all the right buttons. Bloomkamp's attempt at resolution might be the most preposterious in the history of cinema (revolution is pressing a button) but his vision nonetheless is a haunting one. I hope he will drop the action film pretension and make other kinds of movies.

A Single Man (2009)

Tom Ford clearly wanted to make a gorgeous and wistful film, a film that is more about mood than story, more about feelings than action. A Single Man has the surface, it has the striking look, and I was totally engrossed in this sad story about a man who grïeves his dead lover. That said, this is not a film that will change my life. It didn't unhinge me or set me on a different path regarding how I look at things. Is this to say that its beauty was shallow or false? No, maybe not. Just that, somehow, this film didn't quite succeed in what it tried to be: a personal film, a film that speaks about an individual person. In some sections of the film, I felt that the whole thing started to drift off in a sort of general moodiness - the problem was not the emphasis on mood (I love Wong Kar Wai) but when mood starts to feel propped up. It wasn't like that all the time, but now and then. As some reviewers have pointed out: the aesthetics of lush commercials is not far away. And, indeed, one point of reference here is Mad Men - the same problem there. Colin Firth plays the sophisticated college prof, an Englishman who lives in LA (Firth lends him a dignified but sensual demenor). We see him alone and we see him with other people and all the time we get the sense that there is something amiss. We learn that the man's life has taken a drastic turn since the death of a lover. I think the film handles the topic of grief quite well - but one thing I had a hard time understanding was the point of the romantic flash-backs. To me, they were annoying and superfluous. The scenes that depict a young student's attempt to lure his teacher into bed works better and I also liked the quiet encounter between our main character and a boy who thinks he has been picked up for sex, but the situation turns out to be about something else. (In this scene, Ford's taste for gorgeous setting works quite nicely even though it is SO over the top.) I'm not sure whether Ford had some deeper intention with his use of style - whether the very aesthetisized settings and clothes are to reflect the main character's attitude - he expects nothing of life, it should just be kept in order. But nothing here really breaks the spell, and that's precisely what I craved the most when watching the film, that the surface would sometimes be demolished to reveal something else. But - no. Not really. A Single Man remains much too self-conscious, and it is this that makes it hard to be moved by this film.