The Yacoubian Building (2006)

Some films are strange in good ways and some films are strange in bad ways. Sadly, The Yacoubian Building (dir. Marwan Hamed) belongs mostly to the latter category. This film combines soap-opera drama with social critique and then on top of that the director has thrown in a few noisy action scenes just for good measure. I'm not sure where the film intends to go and I could see that there was a lot on the director's mind; he seems to have wanted to make a film that compiles many different aspects of urban Egyptian life. It's just that too often I feel that the way the subjects are dealt with end up being rigid sketches, sometimes too soapy and sometimes I suspect that the entire approach is shady (this goes especially for the film's treatment of gay characters). The story starts from one building in Cairo and follows several of its residents (among them an ageing playboy, a wealthy businessman who buys a wife, an schoolboy with the aspiration to join the police forces who turns into a religious extremist, a gay journalist). We sense that many things have changed in the building and that life in Cairo is also changing. Hamed wants to comment on everything: on poverty, on sexism, on love, on corruption among politicians, on homosexuality and on the relation between 'European' culture and Egyptian culture. And religion, which is here seen as always standing dangerously close to extremism or it is a mere surface phenomenon in a person who leads a double life. The portrait of Egypt is dark, but there are openings. It is impossible to miss the attempt made by The Yacoubian Building to reject official images of Egypt. Its striving seems to be "telling it like it is". There's nothing wrong with that kind of urgent need to defy and disclose for example corruption and hypocrisy. But the film's vision and stand on moral and political question appear far from lucid (to be honest, I found the attitude it adopted both resentful and moralistic), and as a film, The Yacoubian House is too long and its scope is perhaps too big.

Hunting and Gathering (2007)

Nothing is as French as Audrey Tautou, and romantic comedy-dramas about quirky chatter-boxes. Hunting and Gathering (dir. Claude Berri) is a run-of-the-mill film about young-ish people who are trying to find a path in life. The general tone is that of optimism and a sense that all problems can be solved and all existential tangles can be overcome. In this type of film, any location and any scenario functions as a backdrop for an eccentric adventure. For all its good intentions, the film fails to transform its characters from cute prototypes (the gruff type, the nervous gentleman, the introverted girl with Ideas) into people who haunt our memories. The story has its nice twists and turns, but fails to engage me on a deeper level. (The film's take on gender is also seemingly well-meaning, yet clumsy, but ends up confirming many traditional patterns.)

Johnny Guitar (1954)

Nicholas Ray is an expert on explosiveness on film. Johnny Guitar, a sort of alternative take on westerns, attests to that skill. Joan Crawford plays the saloon owner and her presence in this film is unlike any other. This film is built around her. Tensions abound and I think the story is just an excuse to focus on these tensions, the character of which the viewer has to guess for herself as one looks at the gazes that pass between Crawford's saloon owner and her arch enemy Emma (played by Mercedes McCambridge), a fierce cattle baron (but bad readings of this have been made as well). A bunch of outlaws and portentous law-abiding types and cowboys hang around the saloon, many of whom are of course gunslinging dangerous folks, and trouble is stirred up, lots of it: showdowns, hideouts, confrontations, witch-hunts. It's hard to leave the story on a surface level - the level of aggression would be quite unintelligible then. Something else is going on, and "railroad", "robbery" and jealousy are mere hints at a story about lots of other things (McCarthy's hunt of communists, some have suggested, but I don't know if that was my immediate reaction - another aspect that struck me when I watched it was how the film defies the usual anti-modernism of western movies; here it's the villains who oppose the railroad). What speaks for Johnny Guitar is also its look: the strong colors and the minimal sets bring out the tensions I talked about in a wonderfully sleazy way. Some of the conversations are full of melodrama but the melodrama takes place between gritted teeth and atypical gender structures. Its hard to explain the edginess of Johnny Guitar: on the face of it, there's nothing special here. But then again, that ferocity speaks volumes, and as I said I'm not sure about what. But hey, as I like Douglas Sirk's play with Hollywood conventions it might not be surprising that I also like the artificial-subversive feel of Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar.

Climates (2006)

It's winter in Turkey. A rather self-centered college professor has broken up with his girlfriend and leads a lonely existence in Istambul. Too lonely - he realizes it was a mistake to part with her. The girlfriend works in the television business and has gone to the eastern part of the country to produce a TV series. The college professor sets his mind on talking to her again.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan made the excellent Uzak and Climates is very similar, both in the subjects it explores and the style it is immersed in. Ceylan is interested in the distance between people, the friction, the silence. He uses wintry landscapes to augment the icy atmosphere of the story and even though that sort of embellishment is likely to have ended up in overwrought cheese somehow the film's sober tone saves it from sentimentality. I mean, Ceylan even gets away with showing people looking at ruins without this becoming too much a painfully obvious metaphor for the kind of emotions the film looks into. (The two main roles are played by the director and his wife - I didn't know that until afterwards) Ceylan looks at how specific situations evolve. How people struggle with words, how they talk past each other, how they are awkward or lonely in one another's company. Ceylan does not have to show us the history of this couple's resentment towards each other. All scenes hint at that, and we need no more to understand that there are problems of many different kinds between them that go way back. The camera focuses on faces that express too much all at once or face that are hard to read. Climates may be a pessimistic film, but it is far from world-weary. The second half of the film is strikingly beautiful, and sometimes painful to watch. Ceylan is a master of simplicity and I hope he will make many more films.

The Rules of the Game (1939)

If The Rules of the Game had been made in the US, it would have been a lighthearted screwball comedy, or a slightly melancholy and extremely talky film by Robert Altman. But this film is so typically French in its idiosyncratic shifts of gears, from amiable to ominous to comical (I think of a much later example of this cinematic style: The Barbarian Invasion) Jean Renoir's comedy seems to hint at social critique (the title gives that much away) but it is not clear to me what the nature of this critique is. The relations between people is seen as a monumental network of social roles that people are predisposed or take on themselves to inhabit (Renoir's use of deep focus brilliantly embellishes these networks that we sometimes only see somewhere in the background of the image; everything happens as it were at once, on an overwhelmingly vast social scene). One or two of the character seems to be placed outside this "game". There are a multitude of characters here and the romantic entanglements are endless. The major part of the film takes place in a manor in the countryside where ar party is celeberated: first as a hunting party and then as an evening bristling with tensions and scheming. Among the quests are an anti-heroic, brooding aviator, a family friend and a mistress (along with servants, game-keepers and a poacher). All of them jump from 'earnest' to 'artificial' in a split second, and it is hard to know what is what; everything seems to be moves within an endlessly volatile game that seems to make up a world in itself, indifferent to everything else that goes on around it. The hunting scene is intriguing to watch. Some of the participants are not interested in hunting; they loll about, talking about their messy relations. Other again are involved in shooting at everything that moves, without discrimination. The cruely and strangeness of this upper-class ritual is captured in a single frame of a dying rabbitt. This is one of the very few moments in which we see another approach to reality than that of "the game". The Rules of the Game is a hodgepodge (a thrilling one) of slapstick, endless and overlapping talk (often idling and empty phrases) and a few explosive moments which in the end are not explosive at all, because they are mere parts of the game, which seems to allow for these kinds of continuous eruptions. But what is the point of the film? What is Renoir's ideas about the social system captured in this film (a system in which both the upper-class and the servants seem to take part in the "game", whatever it is)? Something seems to be foreshadowed, but I can't really pinpoint what it is. I am not sure, but The Rules of the Game won me over with its strange mix of rawness and elegance.

The Moderns (1988)

The supposedly bohemian and "free" lifestyle of artists is an endlessly flowing well from movie-makers. All of these films are not bad, but many - are. I apply this hard verdict to The Moderns (dir. Alan Rudolph) about a circle of non-friend in Paris. The artists engage in love competition, professional competition and personal competition. The 20's, everyone's feeling that they live at an exciting moment of history. The artists are bitter and they are not even that interesting (some real people also appear, and not even Gertrude Stein can keep up my interest in this film). As a film, The Moderns isn't anything special to write home about. But the strange accent of that villain-millionaire is something I will remember from this film.

They Drive by Night (1940)

They Drive By Night (dir. Raoul Walsch) develops a rather American line of critique of capitalism: the economic system is bad in so far as it turns people into wage slaves or slaves of commercial relations: people are no longer their own masters. Utopia is becoming one's own boss. Even though They drive by night doesn't belong to the best film noir movies of the period, it has its good parts and strong sides - and it has Ida Lupino in a leading role. The story revolves around a pair of brothers who drive trucks and have a hard time making a living out of it. They strive to be independent but the loan sharks loom over their dreams. Another problem is the Wife: one of the brother's has a wife who is concerned about them being on the road. The two brothers' lives are drastically changed when one brother loses an arm in an accident. The other driver starts to work a white-collar job for one of his friends whose wife (Lupino) is after him ... big time. I'm not sure what led to this HUGE hang-up about "the ravenous woman"; this film is yet another example of a film about the Dangerous Woman who destroys the life of the decent and simple-minded man. The first part of the movie has some interesting (and beautifully filmed) scenes about the trucking business and the film's social commentary is apt (the very American slant on it notwithstanding). The second part - even though that's where Lupino enters the story - is almost a parody of film noir, even if no private eye is involved, the formula and the sentiment is there: there's murder, there's scheming, there's regret and there's dangerous love - and the way to destruction is paved with good intentions. To me, They Drive by Night is too similar to what other noir films do far better: The Postman always rings twice and Double indemnity are two movies that have a similar plot but are superior in my book.

Ride in the Whirlwind (1966)

Monte Hellman directed the quite fabulously low-key racing car-drama Two Lane Blacktop and I wasn't actually aware of the fact that he has also dabble in Westerns until I found a grainy VHS with Ride in the whirlwind. OK, I'm not generally a fan of westerns (there are exceptions) but the way Hellman defies genre rules is great to watch: the story is minimal and could be summed up in a sentence (vigilante posse tries to hunt down three men for having robbed a stagecoach - the men are falsely accused even though their path crosses that of the real killers) and the action is reduced to eerie quiet scenes and something I would say is an intentionally boring shoot-out. I wonder whether shooting at people has ever looked so boring on film, there's zero excitement or coolness here. Only sadness and a sense of endless injustice that I feel will continue and continue as the ending titles roll. Rather than being a film about the usual heroes of westerns, brave vigilantes who conquer the West, Hellman delivers a bleak image of people who do not seem to have a place in the world. Actors like Jack Nicholson and Harry Dean Stanton opt for stony faces and angst rather than bravado. No sense of American honor and frenzied activity, no nothing. As an Anti-Western, Ride in the Whirlwind is a good accomplishment.

The Act of Killing (2012)

After having seen a particular movie, fictional or documentary, I sometimes ask myself the question: should I really have watched this movie? This question is not alway a reaction to a film being sub-par in terms of quality. Here, I have in mind the question whether some images should be seen at all, as I am unclear what they do with me. The Act of Killing (dir. Joshua Oppenheimer et al) is hard to watch. It is strange and I am not sure whether the project in itself should be applauded. Another thing I was not sure about when I watched it was how it was directed, what the director(s) said to the people he encountered and what his idea of the film was. Generally, I might not have been worried by such questions, but the specific content of the film (where a skewed image makes a difference) seemed to elicit a puzzle like that.

The mass-killing of "communists" in the sixties in Indonesia (millions were slaughtered) are the dark core of the film, in which several of the murderer re-enact the killings. They take on the aura of movie stars, proudly calling themselves "gangsters" and rendering the murders with a cinematic quality: when they re-enact the events of the sixties, they do it like a thriller, or a musical. The film consists with these re-enactments along with discussions among the "gangsters". It is not obvious how one should think about this combination of horror and cinema: on the one hand, there seems to be a critique of cinema here somewhere, but at the same time, The Act of Killing itself moves head-on into the realm of images where it is not that clear how we should watch, and as I sad, what it means to watch these people re-enact what they did. Many times, I was not sure where the re-enactment began and where they ended - I am thinking especially of a TV show that included some of the weirdest responses I've seen in a while. The strangest thing in the documentary is watching the murderers' own accounts and testimonies: most of the time, they are not precisely sorry for what they did, they try to justify the mass-killings and represent themselves as cool heroes. At some points the facade drops, and we realize that of course the victims haunt their killers. But where they make these confessions, what does the presence of the camera mean? What does it mean if Oppenheimer staged some of the scenes? What are these re-enactments, really?

The image of Indonesia one gets from the film is not a rosy one. I get the impression - without have any knowledge of it really - that the murderers are still close to the political and commercial power in the country and that the para-military movement that took part in the killings is still going strong.

What troubles me about The Act of Killing is that I am confronted with a string of confessions and testimonies (and sometimes also a compulsion to make other watch, and that might include you and me in a very unsettling way), but the nature of these confessions are so muddled, so double-minded and so compulsive that one is tempted to direct one's attention to the psychological defenses of these killers rather than what they actually did. And that felt very strange. So the point is not that The Act of Killing is a bad movie; I am just thinking about what kind of movie it is.

Ugetsu (1953)

Ugetsu (dir. Kenji Mizoguchi) is a relentlessly pacifist movie. A village is about the be attacked by an army. The villagers know about this. But the film's two main characters are too self-involved to take this seriously. One of them is a craftsman who makes pottery. He is obsessed with selling as many pots as possible. The other one has made up his mind that he wants to enlist as a soldier, a samurai - he wants to be honored, no longer a nobody, no longer a village fool. There's nothing wrong with the film's message: ambition will make people walk over bodies to get what they want. The chronicle of the two characters (admittedly, these remain types) is ingenuously intertwined with the story about war. The village is attacked everybody flees. The craftsman is separated from his wife and ends up being lured into the arms of a wealthy aristocrat. The mysterious femme fatal is here taken to the next level, one might say. The wannabe-soldier joins the troop and pretends he has collected a war trophy. We learn that in this world, nothing really matters beyond keeping one's name clean; ambition and the ability to elbow oneself into the first ranks are the primary virtues here (no stately samurais with an admirable code of conduct can be found here: the samurais in this films are country people who want to create another life for themselves). Mizoguchi's perspective could be described as a form of humanism: he shows how his characters are doomed because of their view of life and the persons who have this view become virtually unstoppable because they are completely convicted that they are right. The potter's frenzy can be compared to the gold-craze in Greed. There are some remarkable artistic qualities of the film as well. Mizoguchi breathes life into the feudal world the film portrays: the film wanders from the village to marketplace as well as very minimally decorated interior sets. In the middle of the film, events take a surprising turn and I think it is the subdued style of Ugetsu that prevents this turn from becoming ridiculous.