Orpheus (1950)

I have tried to get clear about the reasons for Jean Cocteau's Orpheus being a cinematic classic. I can't say that I have ever been a fan of the so called poetic realism. Orpheus did nothing to convince me of the originality or insight of that movement - and well, to be honest, it is more surrealism than realism, so maybe it's wrong to link it to that school anyway.

On paper, its oscillation between the ordinary and the dreamy sounds extra-ordinary. It could work. The actual film is, in my opinion, rather clumsy and even drearily pretentious at times. There are a few stunning scenes that could have been developed into something spectacular, but that never happened. In fact, there is an enchanting scene in which we see the central characters gliding through the rooms of the Underworld. Instead we have a lot of heavy-handed Mythological references that never quite make it into dynamic cinematic expression.

The film is based on the Greek myth about Orpheus, that guy who tried to save himself and his wife from the underworld. The updated version takes us to the cool corners of Paris, a quotidian marriage and, well you know, a love fling with Death. Orpheus reels from love triangle (or love square?) to mythical story to a meditation on the strange conditions of art and artistic inspiration. I guess Cocteau tried to say something about all of these things, but for me, the film is so unfocused that it succeeds in none of these specific respects.

At best, the film is a critique of art. The main character, an older poet, ends up in the underworld after an encounter with a younger man in a brawl - and then Death herself comes along and drives them into the land of mirrors and shadows in her Rolls-Royce. After returning to his home and his wife Eurydice, the poet is enchanted by a series of radio-transmissions, white noise. He sits listening to that in his car, mesmerized an unable to get out of his secluded world. Death, rather than Eurydice, present the stronger artistic or erotic possibility. - But too much is thrown into the film in order for this critique to gain any serious weight.

One day (2011)

I find it important to watch all kinds of movies, old and contemporary films from various genres. So what about the romantic drama? One day is directed by Lone Sherfig who has made a few hit movies both in Denmark and abroad. The basic idea is to follow the lives of two people who met randomly in the late eighties and who had a fling going on, and later became friends. There is undoubtedly something touching in the set-up and I can't quite resist being drawn into the story about disappointment and evolving relationships. The film's episodic nature - it follows its characters during one day, year after year - is both a problem and a merit. What kept me interested in the story was how it dealt with change, and that different sides of growing older was taken account of. On the other hand, the pattern of the film, to focus on the events of this particular day, a day in July, felt a bit constructed and Sherfig seems to have been too eager to present a linear story. However, regardless of my complaints, I like how the film never really lapsed into a simple will-they-or-won't-they-become-lovers scenario. In a few scenes that turn out to exude a surprising sense of fragility, we see a good example of the relation between parents and their grown-up children. Moments like these save the film from becoming conventional.

The Trip (2010)

Steve Coogan and his pal Rob are commissioned to make a TV-series about fine dining restaurants in the northerns parts of the country. The TV show was a success and movie version, The Trip (dir. M. Winterbottom), is also delightful to watch. Before having watched any of these I feared that the viewer was supposed to accept an endless stream of male sentimentality, a British version of Sideways. My fears proved groundless. This film combines joyous moments of ABBA singing in the car with grumpy outbursts and anguished encounters. And then there are the silly imitations/impressions: touching, more than anything else. Very little is said about the food; it is the interpersonal friction, rather than the culinary judgments that occupy the central role here.

L'Enfant (2005)

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have made several extremely good films that are characterized by a moral clear-sightedness. L'Enfant, like other Dadenne movies, has a rather everyday setting but from this setting, deep problems and questions arise. The main character, Bruno, has become a father. We see him together with his girlfriend Sonia. When he hears about the baby, he acts as if this is nothing to stir any trouble about. Bruno lives day by day, taking part in a number of petty crimes. One day Sonia tells him to watch the child. Bruno makes a deal with some people; he goes to an empty-seeming apartment and leaves the child there. In exchange, he gets a nice sum of money. So what is this, an episode of Oprah? The Dardenne brothers make movies about desperate people. Bruno is not only desperate, he is also cruel. Instead of passing judgment on him, L'Enfant makes us look at what he does. The camera follows him around and takes us to busy street-crossings, deserted houses and his mother's apartment to which he goes to ask her to lie to the police. I instantaneously care about these people, knowing next to nothing about them. I care because of the kind of attention to film directs at them.

The film is set in an industrial town. We sense that many people there are in Bruno's position. He is a young kid with nowhere to go. We see him with Sonia. They take shelter in a private world - a very fragile world. And we see this world shattered. Bruno tries to appear like to tough guy in charge of his life. The film shows in which ways this appearance is a lethal one. It does so without moralization. The Dardennes are not pointing fingers at poor people. Their film reveals a world. Like Bresson, there is a resolute sense of moral crisis here, but this is not a moral crisis where you are lead to say things like 'youth of today....' or 'these people should get a job....' L'Enfant is, as I see it, a film about what it is like to live with what one has done. There are no short-cuts on the map.  What I think separates the Dardennes' films from many others are their awareness of poverty as a wide, societal issue, an issue connected with the meaning of life and the everyday struggles of people who live in what is often represented as the margins of society. 'The margins of society' has become an expression so common and so thoughtlessly used that we seem all to familiar with it, even though we are not. The expression has become a cliché that often marks a certain distancing in how poverty is discussed. The Dardennes take us away from these clichés. Their films offer an unsparing confrontation with such detached clichés.

Liverpool (2008)

It's rather uncommon for me to be truly stunned by the way a movie is made. I mean: sadly, most films follow the beaten path of storytelling and cinematography. Liverpool, directed by Lisandro Alonso, definitively bears similarities with some contemporary movies (while watching it, I thought about Pedro Costa as well as Chantal Akerman), but there are a couple of things that makes it stand out. The first few images of the film takes us on board of a cargo ship. There's the automatized rhythm of the work and some moments of leisure. The ship is about to reach its port and a man in the crew is preparing to leave. In extremely long takes, we see him dress, collect his stuff. The scene is not filmed 'beautifully'. There's a plain room and a man is rummaging about his belongings. As he reaches the harbor we follow his slow-paced journey to what turns out to be his home village where is is to meet his mother. He plods around the small village and people recognize him. He's been out at sea for a long time. The encounter with his mother is not a glorious moment of home-coming. She is sick, and it's unclear whether she recognizes him. There's also what seems to be his daughter. In extremely minimalist scenes, their communication, mostly quiet, is captured. The quietness never leaves the film. Instead of words, there is the snowy, matter-of-fact landscape. There is beauty, yes, but the camera also registers the matter-of-fact landscapes and living environment of people who live in a poverty-stricken village. We see the protagonist, Farell, in very undramatic situations. He eats at a restaurant where he knows nobody, he goes to the small cantine in the village where some music is playing - in both these places, he is simply waiting. The lack of dialogue is paired with the observational, paired-down camera-work. As one reviewer put it: the places he visits looks like the edge of the world. The question that the film evokes is what kind of life this sense of isolation stems from.

Some reviewers have complained that the techniques applied in Liverpool are familiar elements of the art house film tradition, techniques that are to repel the masses, singling out the eager elite. Yes, there are risks in the kind of material dealt with here: the drinking male loner who heads out on a winding journey. It's just that Liverpool never seems to elicit the familiar reactions to this kind of material. There is no romanticism, no deep-going sadness, no elevation of loneliness. The major difference is, I think, the ending. I will not spoil it for you, but for me, it was what made this film stand out.

Hunger (1966)

Per Oscarsson is perfect for the role as Hamsun's restless wanderer in the film adaptation of Hunger (Dir. Henning Carlsen). His acting exudes a fidgety energy that takes us straight into the world of Hamsun's suffering writer who walks the streets of Oslo without finding much comfort anywhere. He has no money and whenever he manages to get some, he gives it away. He looks at himself as a Writer, a finer person than the ordinary bourgeois people - desperately, he seeks to keep up the appearance of being an honorable person. The oscillation between shame and pride is a crucial theme. The protagonist grew up in the country but for some reason he has ended up in the city, where he leads a life of poverty and humiliation. He visits the pawn shop and he tries to sell his articles to a newspaper editor. Carlsen's film manages to create a feeling of social realism that simultaneously is situated within a subjective point of view. We see Oslo as the tormented protagonist sees it. It is many years since I read the book, but my impression is that the film is a much more open-ended affair than the book. The main character never becomes a hero, the stereotypical suffering Artist. Carlsen and Oscarsson zone in on isolation, the frenzy and the humiliation the main character experiences. One example is the encounter between the main character and a girl he meets on the street. My memory of the book is that we are lead to look at these people as two tragic lovers, two equals, and that this doomed man needs a moment with a woman who understands him. The film shows the strangeness of their relation, and the distortion of reality. Oscarsson's performance is expressive, but it is also fragile. His face really lends itself to this character: through the contorted, scared face we see a complicated character. // For all its portrayals of humiliation and destitution, Hunger is also a grimly funny film. It is funny in the way it looks at fragility: it describes a world in which reality is always on the brink of dissolving. In this case, this is both funny and unnerving to watch.

I love you, man (2007)

I love you, man (John Hamburg) may not be a good movie but if one wants a study of infantilized masculinity, this is a good start. However, I doubt that the aim of the film was to give that sort of account. The main character, Peter, lives with his girlfriend and he is kind of satisfied with their life together. He's a rather stiff person who seems to be hiding within his shell. Something is missing. He has no male friends! The axiomatic truth posed by the story is that a guy need some bromance in his life in order to be a thriving human being. The answer to this predicament is Sidney, a walking and talking man-cave in whose little man-cave our (anti)hero finds some man-love and man-comfort. Sidney is just sensitive enough, macho enough, but not too much. They jam together, they drink beer and they are close-close. A man needs some space to kick back & crack a few cold ones, right - for that, a man needs company, male company. The problem is that Peter must also act the part of Heterosexual Male. The man-love must remain a function. I love you, man clearly expresses the fear of real love between men, but at the same time it wants to be a modern film that has a relaxed relation to homosexuality. One can say that the infantilized masculinity presented by and praised in this film is a solution to this problem: these two guys are allowed to take it easy together, to regress into a state of man-cave-bliss, but the problems arise when all this starts to mean something. One rendering of this infantilized state is that it is a secluded sphere, no questions asked, a fantasy world. I am surprised how much this rather conventional b/romance engaged me: it is precisely the tensions within its ideals that makes it interesting.

Walkabout (1971)

Don't Look Now by Nicholas Roeg is one of the movies that has made a deep impression on me and its eerie atmosphere has been haunting me since I watched it. I first watched Walkabout as a teen. 15 years later, I did not remember much of the film, except for the strange feelings it evoked. I didn't remember, or then I didn't understand, anything about the film's exoticism, its at times rather tiring contrast between nature and civilization and its insistent preoccupation with the nude female body. Beyond that, Walkabout has its strong moments of unarticulated dread as well as interpersonal encounters.

The story starts out with two children and their father going out to the outbacks. They get out of the car and instead of a nice picnic out in the wild, the dad starts shooting at his offspring. They run away and the dad kills himself. The film follows the kids as they wander through the barren landscapes. They are dressed like neat school children and their conversations have a strangely detached tone. No trace of civilization is to be seen, except for the radio they are carrying around with them. The viewer loses the track of time. The children find an oasis with some water and one day they meet an aboriginal boy. The boy knows much more about nature than these two children. He hunts, he knows his way about and he knows how to find water. The rest of the film focuses on the communication between these three children. They do not share a language, but they share a life, or rather, they share some moments together.

The film gets rather stereotypical in how it depicts the sexual tensions in the relation between the girl and the boy. The camera ogles the girl's body and we are lead to think that a sexual encounter would somehow be a dangerous infringement on some basic rules. This sense of games is placed among images of snakes, lizards and bugs. It is as if Roeg is trying to show that two of these children can never be fully in tune with nature - only the aborigine can. This seems to be a hugely strange claim to make, especially as the film risks bringing forth the image that aborigines are somehow mythically and mystically close to nature, and that they are, in fact, 'nature'. In the end, Roeg's major message seems to be the futility of hope when it comes to understanding others. We remain captives within our own worlds, he seems to suggest. If the film were less artistically challenging, this pessimism would have bothered me even more.

Nonetheless, the film contains a multitude of truly memorable scenes that are placed somewhere between dream, fantasy and reality. A virtue of the film is how little is explained. Even though there are exoticism at play in how the aborigines are portrayed, the film itself can hardly be charged with romanticizing nature. Yes, it seems to say something about an impossibility to cross the border between civilization and nature, but nature is not represented as a cozy haven of tranquility, at least not only. The film ends on a rather unresolved note that begs a new series of questions, rather than delivering some reassuring answers. Towards the end of the film, there is also an unsettling scene in which the children come across an abandoned mining town that evokes a strong apocalyptic vision of culture as a garbage heap. In scene after scene, Walkabout features commentary on the technological society as a site of alienation, exploitation and decay.

Another reason to watch this movie is its eerie music. The stark images of barren nature are accompanied with children singing an extremely strange little tune.

Talk of the town (1942)

The Talk of the Town (Dir. George Stevens) is 40 % screwball comedy, 20 % crime story and 40 % romance. Does that sound messy? If it weren't for the sweetness of the film, that would definitively be my final verdict. The story starts from the encounter between Dilg, a man accused of killing his foreman who has escaped from prison and Nora, who owns a boarding house. These two seems to have had some sort of past history. Dilg is lodged into Nora's house but there is a complication: a law professor has been promised a room in the house and he starts to live there, too. The first part of the film is light-hearted: will the professor find out about Dilg? The second part takes a more uncommon turn, chronicling these people's lives together and their romantic tangles. A few discussions about law and guilt are thrown in for good measure. Dilg, who is wrongly accused of having killed his boss, scorns conventionalism - he argues that this gives him the right to act some juridical decrees - and the law professor argues for good law practice. Cary Grant is great as Dilg: he manages to be a bit menacing, but kind-hearted nonetheless. 

City of Life and Death (2009)

In the winter 1937-8 the city of Nanjing was besieged by Japan. City of Life and Death (dir. Lu Chuan) delves into the horror of the occupation but it also tells many striking stories about human relations. Filmed in crisp b&w, the film has a feel of raw and relentless realism. It draws our attention to systematic killing and raping but it never feels exploitative in doing so. A wide-scale massacre is executed and a German manages to create a safety zone that saves many Chines soldiers and civilians. For all its brave descriptions of war-time atrocities, City of Life and Death sometimes falls into the trap of sentimentality. It tries to look for love in prostitution and heroes in the rank of ordinary men. I have difficulties articulating what my problem with the film was. It was a shattering experience to watch the close-ups of faces expressing deep fear and agony and in the same way the film takes the viewer to unspeakable places of violence and humiliation. We are taken directly to the horrific events of the siege, without the safety net of a historical context. In all this, I cannot repress the feeling that the film imposes a rather rigid storytelling. By overwhelming me, exhausting me, flooding me with images of cruelty versus bravery, it sets out to tell the truth.

Perhaps a further problem is the dichotomy the film risks evoking: the mass against the heroic individual. On the other hand, the film looks at kindness where we least would expect it. Yes, there is the teacher who provides spots of safety but there is also the German Nazi, Rabe who saves people from a violent death. When I started watching this film I feared that the Japanes soldiers would be treated like monsters. They aren't. The soldiers are a motley crew and Lu Chuan shows the multitude of reaction to the horror expressed by the soldiers: there is shock but also jaded responses. Even though I found some things problematic, City of Life and Death is an important film and it is an example of a war movie that never deals in propaganda. This is something to marvel at, given that the Nanjing siege has remained political dynamite. However, as I said, there is a tension, an ambiguity at play. Even though there is no outrageous propagandistic elements here, the way of telling the story, the appearance of relentless realism, does something with how I relate to the images. There is something strange in the conviction the film tries hard to induce in me. Conviction of what?