I re-watched Spike Jonze's Adaptation and was surprised about how touching it was, in spite of, or perhaps because of all the goofy and looney twists and turns. Perhaps it was my writer's block that did the emotional work. It's hard to say what the film is about, in the end. Obsession, obviously, and the hard labor of imagination - yes. The line between fiction and reality - that too. It's the story about a desperate screenwriter (and his unscrupulous twin!) and his attempt to render Susan Orlean's book about a ... orchid thug ... into a decent film. He worries about his creative independence while at the same time trying to pacify his producer. Adaptation throws us right into the abyss of imagination, its worming paths and overheated outbursts. Rare flowers in the middle of nowhere are paired with the rare flash of inspiration in the middle of the mind's desert. Exploitation is shown to the other side of fascination, and fascination is damn close to ... really dangerous stuff.
Ah yeah, and then there's the love story, stories, or whatever. The writer has developed a crush on Orlean - we sense disaster right at the beginning. And Orlean - she sort of falls in love with the hickey orchid thug about whom she writes the book. Hold on, there's a crime somewhere, as well - of course. Somehow, Jonze succeeds in balancing all this craziness into a watchable and surprisingly moving film. For me, the part as the screenwriter is one of Nicolas Cage's best performances. He fills it with wit, sadness and a dose of agony. It works. Don't forget Cage also plays the screenwriter's twin and that, too, is brilliant. Adaptation never gets pretentious. It toys with the ideas about fiction without the brow being too wrinkled. It fucks with us and we go along with it to New York apartments and weird swamps - and why not? The best thing about the film is perhaps how it, like other Kaufman/Jonze movies grows and grows and grows until it contains what comes to feel like the entire universe in one single film - while also in a way shrinking to the content of a specific person's mind. This process of ridiculous expansion and ridiculous shrinking is what kept me on board.
fredag 19 juni 2015
La Promesse (1996)
La Promesse is one of the early feature films by the Belgian Dardenne brothers. Even so, their distinctive approach to cinema is here fully developed: their meticulous attention to locations and their emphasis on moral ambivalence is strongly present. The existential problems of the main characters are vividly evoked by describing their lived situation. Like few other directors (there is Bresson, of course), the Dardennes' sense of reality is primarily moral - and morality is not reduced to thin concepts of good/evil, right/wrong, but, rather, a plethora of perspectives of deceit, truth, friendship, trust, family and many others.
The protagonist, Igor is a teenager working for his father in a construction business, but he dreams of becoming a mechanic. The people his dad hires are illegal immigrants who live in a house nearby. Roger, the father, is described as a man who tries to earn money from this business, and he does not hesitate to demand high rents from the immigrants. Still, he is not depicted as greedy. We get the sense that he, too, belongs to the working class and tries to make ends meet. But this does not take the edge of his cruelty. One day, there is an accident. A man is killed on the construction site and governmental inspectors of the place are about to arrive. Before the man dies, he talks to Igor and makes him promise to look after his wife & kid. Father and son buries the man in cement, and keep quiet.
The 'promise' is the moral center of the film. What do we do when we promise? What kind of action is it, what makes a promise a promise? The kid continues to work for his father, who places many demands on him, but Igor also tries to help the wife of the dead man. I don't think it would be right to describe the boy as being torn between, for example, two principles or rules. It makes more sense to describe the relations between him and his father, along with the way he is haunted by his conscience. The father manipulates and exploits the workers, and his son longs for his affection, while also being abhorred by his cruelty. Igor simply cannot resist helping the woman. It makes a difference in what spirit the boy is doing this. It makes a difference for what we take the promise to be. We see him vacillate, and even try to send the wife away. He has not been able to tell her about the death of her husband, and is consequently complicit in lies about what has happened. Even when we see him and his father doing very horrible things, we look at this from the point of view of moral struggle. The confrontation between father and son is a climax of emotions and actions that, even though they might seem extra-ordinary, are rooted in familiar desperation.
If I would read the script for La Promesse I would perhaps find it overwrought, its story too constructed. The same thing can be said about many of the Dardennes' films, I suspect. Somehow, I never get this reaction when I watch their movies. They make me see the urgency in a specific moral situation, its different temporal stretches: we see the characters wrestling with choices and we also see in which way this is grounded in the past and in which ways it has implications for the open-ended future. The Dardennes situate their story in a socio-economic context but it should be said that this is no mere 'context'. Their reflections on class, poverty and exploitation is interwoven with the moral quandries. This is what I think make their films truly great: there is no division between 'characters' and 'surroundings' - these are organically linked in the moral universe of the film.
The protagonist, Igor is a teenager working for his father in a construction business, but he dreams of becoming a mechanic. The people his dad hires are illegal immigrants who live in a house nearby. Roger, the father, is described as a man who tries to earn money from this business, and he does not hesitate to demand high rents from the immigrants. Still, he is not depicted as greedy. We get the sense that he, too, belongs to the working class and tries to make ends meet. But this does not take the edge of his cruelty. One day, there is an accident. A man is killed on the construction site and governmental inspectors of the place are about to arrive. Before the man dies, he talks to Igor and makes him promise to look after his wife & kid. Father and son buries the man in cement, and keep quiet.
The 'promise' is the moral center of the film. What do we do when we promise? What kind of action is it, what makes a promise a promise? The kid continues to work for his father, who places many demands on him, but Igor also tries to help the wife of the dead man. I don't think it would be right to describe the boy as being torn between, for example, two principles or rules. It makes more sense to describe the relations between him and his father, along with the way he is haunted by his conscience. The father manipulates and exploits the workers, and his son longs for his affection, while also being abhorred by his cruelty. Igor simply cannot resist helping the woman. It makes a difference in what spirit the boy is doing this. It makes a difference for what we take the promise to be. We see him vacillate, and even try to send the wife away. He has not been able to tell her about the death of her husband, and is consequently complicit in lies about what has happened. Even when we see him and his father doing very horrible things, we look at this from the point of view of moral struggle. The confrontation between father and son is a climax of emotions and actions that, even though they might seem extra-ordinary, are rooted in familiar desperation.
If I would read the script for La Promesse I would perhaps find it overwrought, its story too constructed. The same thing can be said about many of the Dardennes' films, I suspect. Somehow, I never get this reaction when I watch their movies. They make me see the urgency in a specific moral situation, its different temporal stretches: we see the characters wrestling with choices and we also see in which way this is grounded in the past and in which ways it has implications for the open-ended future. The Dardennes situate their story in a socio-economic context but it should be said that this is no mere 'context'. Their reflections on class, poverty and exploitation is interwoven with the moral quandries. This is what I think make their films truly great: there is no division between 'characters' and 'surroundings' - these are organically linked in the moral universe of the film.
Howl (2010)
A far-out movie about the far-out poet Allen Ginsberg? Howl tries hard to transform the energy of beat poetry into images. It uses spaced-out cartoons to spice the whole thing up, but the result is not enchanting in the least. The entire movie chronicles the life of young Ginsberg, a shy guy in horn-rimmed glasses and ill-fitting clothes. My memory of the film is mostly James Franco reading Ginsberg's poems in an embarrassingly phony way while a hipcat audience in the hipcat coffeehouse cheers on and while not doing that, he is serenading a rather icy Jack Kerouac. Avoid this film! If you have a desire to look at beatniks, go watch the Coen brothers' Inside Llewelyn Davies instead. Much better film, and manages to actually be quite far-out.
Waiting... (2005)
OK so maybe I had the wrong expectations about Waiting..., a quite conventional drama/comedy. Rather than a sociological account of the insecure working conditions of the precariat, we get a film focusing on young people and their immature jargon. Almost: American Pie in a McJob setting. Still, there are some interesting things about this film and it is that it actually takes an interest in work. We meet a group of kids working in a diner. They are aware that their friends who have other jobs look down on them, and most of them try to convince themselves that this thing is just temporary. The film clearly tries to show the boredom of dead-end jobs, but instead of really looking at that existence, the film gets lost in an extravagant plot and stale jokes.
torsdag 18 juni 2015
Force Majeure (2015)
Ruben Östlund has a scathing eye for social tensions. His films tend to scrutinize the moments before conflicts are about to erupt, and they let us follow the ways people try to handle these kinds of often understated eruptions. Force Majeure contains a dose of Östlund's rather grim sense of humor, along with a scenary that is a perfect frame for middle-class crisis: the holiday resort in the Alps.
The drama is centered around a family eating lunch when an avalance breaks out. Tomas grabs his mobile phone and runs away from the restaurant. His wife Ebba understands this as an expression of selfishness and even neglect. The ensuing drama zooms in on marital difficulties. How does Tomas understand the situation? His immediate reaction is to play the whole thing down. He doesn't see why Ebba is shocked - as he sees it, 'upset' - and tries to evade the subject. This makes Ebba feel even more hurt: she thinks that her husband is unwilling to face the truth of what the situation is really like. During all this, there kids are left to themselves. Östlund expertly captures the childrens' sadness and confusion with regard to the parents' conflict.
Force Majeure is a drama laced with caustic comedy. While some have interpreted the film as a film about masculinity, I would tend to view it as more relational. Gender is an important aspect, and Östlund studies the way the spouses' reactions are mutually aggravated in a process of ressentment, silence and outbursts. The wife's anger is coupled with the husband's silence and, later, outbursts - we get to see how destructive emotions are rolled into a complex situation of mutual distrust. At times, the film might lean towards cheap psychologizing and perhaps it can also be said to end up confirming many cinematic clichés about the hollowness of the seemingly ideal middle class life, but mostly, I found the excavation of uncomfortable revelation rather penetrating, given that I take the film to be a satire.
Stylistically, Östlund borrows a lot from Haneke's clinical frames and sense of sparse location. The hotel is an impersonal space of corridors and balconies. Nature appears as a frightening setting of danger, but also as landscape domesticized by the tourist industry. The snow, the avalanches and the slopes are all seen as factors to be handled and controlled. And the whole thing is punctuated with a few bursts of music - by Vivaldi.
The flaws of the film can be derived from the director's attempt to add some dramatic frills to the basic outline. A few extra characters are thrown into the story, along with an extra catastrophy and an end that leaves one with rather counter-productive questions.
The drama is centered around a family eating lunch when an avalance breaks out. Tomas grabs his mobile phone and runs away from the restaurant. His wife Ebba understands this as an expression of selfishness and even neglect. The ensuing drama zooms in on marital difficulties. How does Tomas understand the situation? His immediate reaction is to play the whole thing down. He doesn't see why Ebba is shocked - as he sees it, 'upset' - and tries to evade the subject. This makes Ebba feel even more hurt: she thinks that her husband is unwilling to face the truth of what the situation is really like. During all this, there kids are left to themselves. Östlund expertly captures the childrens' sadness and confusion with regard to the parents' conflict.
Force Majeure is a drama laced with caustic comedy. While some have interpreted the film as a film about masculinity, I would tend to view it as more relational. Gender is an important aspect, and Östlund studies the way the spouses' reactions are mutually aggravated in a process of ressentment, silence and outbursts. The wife's anger is coupled with the husband's silence and, later, outbursts - we get to see how destructive emotions are rolled into a complex situation of mutual distrust. At times, the film might lean towards cheap psychologizing and perhaps it can also be said to end up confirming many cinematic clichés about the hollowness of the seemingly ideal middle class life, but mostly, I found the excavation of uncomfortable revelation rather penetrating, given that I take the film to be a satire.
Stylistically, Östlund borrows a lot from Haneke's clinical frames and sense of sparse location. The hotel is an impersonal space of corridors and balconies. Nature appears as a frightening setting of danger, but also as landscape domesticized by the tourist industry. The snow, the avalanches and the slopes are all seen as factors to be handled and controlled. And the whole thing is punctuated with a few bursts of music - by Vivaldi.
The flaws of the film can be derived from the director's attempt to add some dramatic frills to the basic outline. A few extra characters are thrown into the story, along with an extra catastrophy and an end that leaves one with rather counter-productive questions.
Wall Street (1987)
Re-watching Wall street made me reflect not so much on greed as on desperation and insecurity. Gordon Gekko is of course what this movie is famous for but what grabbed my attention was the young broker, trying to make it in the world of stock gambling. For me, what was moving about the film is the relation between the increasingly successful and increasingly rich broker and his working-class dad, an aircraft mechanic and a union man. The film digs into the self-deception involved in much social mobility and even though it hardly does so subtly, there is some real tension between these characters that I found much more interesting than the steely mannerisms of Michael Douglas. I come to think of Laurent Cantet's marvellous class struggle movie Resources Humaine and the way the hurt of class differences is brought out there. The focus of Wall street may lie elsewhere (profit-hunting gamblers on the stock market) than on class analysis, but that aspect is still there.
måndag 18 maj 2015
Picnic (1955)
A stranger comes to town and causes great upheaval. The stranger's arrival sets old conflicts in motion; old wounds are re-opened and repressed tensions come to the surface. This can be said to be a genre of its own in Hollywood movies, regardless of whether the stranger is a cowboy, a criminal or a don juan. Joshua Logan's Picnic is a comedy/romance/drama rolled into one, an unabashedly melodramatic tale about small-town neuroses. The elusive stranger is a drifter called Hal who jumps off the fright train in a town somewhere in Kansas to look for his old college chum. He's there to visit an old pal but one thing leads to another and Hal ends up in the storm's eye, at the center of social conflict and dramas involving business and romance. Hal is the cheerful guy who wants to be liked by everybody. The climax of the film is a picnic featuring rowdy drunks, dancing and fierce jealousy. Picnic could almost have been directed by Nicholas Ray - the same focus on social upheaval. Another point of reference is Arthur Penn's outrageous (but rather funny) The Chase from 1966. Completely over-the-top, but I must confess I enjoyed this rather clunky story (along with the wooden and/or overwrought acting) about the drifter and the beatiful girl and her mother. - - Good trash.
lördag 16 maj 2015
Rabbit hole (2010)
Rabbit hole (dir. John Cameron Mitchell) is a well-made and subdued film about grief and its effect on close relationships. It's a film without frills or big gestures, almost as far as you can get from Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It features some good acting - Nicole Kidman makes a good performance - and generally, the worst kinds of dramatic clichés are averted. The two main characters, a married couple in the suburbs, have lost their small child in a car accident. They do what they can to restore the routines and normalcy of everyday life. The film focuses on the distance between them and their inability to share their grief. They find fault with one another's attempts to be intimate with another and the communication between them constantly misfires (in this way, the film bears some similarities with another great performance by Kidman, Revolutionary Road). Kidman's character nurses a fascination for the boy who run over their child. The couple attend group therapy that the wife constantly questions the value of. The husband grows increasingly impatient with the marriage and finds a sympathetic friend in the therapy group. - - - This set-up may sound terribly formulaic and one can blame the film for not taking any risks, for sticking to the mature-film-about-life-pattern. Nonetheless, some scenes managed to capture the emptiness of the couple's life and the spouses' attempt to find a way out with a sort of emotional rawness.
fredag 15 maj 2015
Pride (2014)
Pride (dir. Matthew Warchus) has sometimes been dismissed as a lighthearted feel-good comedy, a sugar-coated crowdpleaser. To me, it was so much more than this. To be honest, I have seen very few movies that express political hope the way this film does. It is true that the story about solidarity is couched within some genre conventions, but these don't in any way compromise or displace the urgency of this film. In fact, I thought the use of genre, the use of comedy and feel-good formulae, worked in a similar way as in Little Miss Sunshine. In these two cases, the familiarity of certain plot developments stands against the backdrop of a ever-difficult questions about hope and love. When people call a film 'uplifting' I usually respond with unease, but here I have nothing against that label: these two movies are uplifting, but not in a bad way: these film don't make me feel uplifted in a fuzzy way so that it simultaneously sneaks in lots of questionable baggage.
Pride celebrates the alliance between gay activists and coal miners in the eighties. A coal strike was struggling to overthrow the thatcherite policies. A group of gay activists decide that they should take part in the miners' struggle. After all, the characters in the film argue, they have a lot in common: their resisitance has similar features.The gang - in which friction is not completely non-present - heads off to Wales, where they meet their miners' and their families. In one sense the ensuing story chronicles the awkward encounter between urban and rural, but at the same time, the film shows the instability of these categories, and the ways encounters are much too unruly than we would expect in our gloomy preconceived ideas about differences and 'different interests'. What I liked best is perhaps how the film shows that this unruliness is something hopeful. A very limited part of the film's funny moments center around the clash between macho hicks and streetsmart gays. When we see such clashs, the aim is to reveal not the clash itself (haha, hicks and gays!!) but rather, the fragilities, secrets and hostilities at hand. Often, we see situations in which that type of clash never appears, and how people deal with this, to them, surprising openness.
One of the threads is the story about Gethin, who has left his homophobic village a long time ago. The film follows the struggle he goes through upon returning to Wales, and making an effort to talk to his family again. Small things matter. In one scene, the head of the committee in the village supported by the activists makes a phonecall and expects to talk to Gethin's boyfriend. But when she hears that she is talking to Gethin, she gently wishes him merry Christmas in Welsch.
I particularly appreciated the way the gender divisions both within the queer movement and the miners' community was dealt with. Perhaps the really good descriptions are of the wives of the miners, and the way they have formed a crucial part of the political struggle, while still being in a way subjected to a role in the shadows. The scenes in which the ladies from Wales head off to London to celebrate are marvellously moving in bringing out a sense of rebellion and freedom - but not freedom here described as 'the freedom of the city against the freedom of the narrow-minded village' but rather freedom as a celebration of life. Strangely, I come to think of the Ealing comedy Whisky Galore! (1949) and its representation of community, mischief and resistance.
Some reviewers have suggested that Pride is a nostalgic yearning for a time where things were more black and white. I disagree quite strongly with this. For me, the film represents a moral possibility with us now more than ever. A possibility of solidarity beyond identity, of politics beyond identity politics. Pride does not turn a blind eye to the difficulties such solidarity meets: smugness, self-interested indifference or internal rivaries. But it also shows that things C A N be easy, and that holding on to the idea that things MUST be difficult is extremely dangerous.
Pride celebrates the alliance between gay activists and coal miners in the eighties. A coal strike was struggling to overthrow the thatcherite policies. A group of gay activists decide that they should take part in the miners' struggle. After all, the characters in the film argue, they have a lot in common: their resisitance has similar features.The gang - in which friction is not completely non-present - heads off to Wales, where they meet their miners' and their families. In one sense the ensuing story chronicles the awkward encounter between urban and rural, but at the same time, the film shows the instability of these categories, and the ways encounters are much too unruly than we would expect in our gloomy preconceived ideas about differences and 'different interests'. What I liked best is perhaps how the film shows that this unruliness is something hopeful. A very limited part of the film's funny moments center around the clash between macho hicks and streetsmart gays. When we see such clashs, the aim is to reveal not the clash itself (haha, hicks and gays!!) but rather, the fragilities, secrets and hostilities at hand. Often, we see situations in which that type of clash never appears, and how people deal with this, to them, surprising openness.
One of the threads is the story about Gethin, who has left his homophobic village a long time ago. The film follows the struggle he goes through upon returning to Wales, and making an effort to talk to his family again. Small things matter. In one scene, the head of the committee in the village supported by the activists makes a phonecall and expects to talk to Gethin's boyfriend. But when she hears that she is talking to Gethin, she gently wishes him merry Christmas in Welsch.
I particularly appreciated the way the gender divisions both within the queer movement and the miners' community was dealt with. Perhaps the really good descriptions are of the wives of the miners, and the way they have formed a crucial part of the political struggle, while still being in a way subjected to a role in the shadows. The scenes in which the ladies from Wales head off to London to celebrate are marvellously moving in bringing out a sense of rebellion and freedom - but not freedom here described as 'the freedom of the city against the freedom of the narrow-minded village' but rather freedom as a celebration of life. Strangely, I come to think of the Ealing comedy Whisky Galore! (1949) and its representation of community, mischief and resistance.
Some reviewers have suggested that Pride is a nostalgic yearning for a time where things were more black and white. I disagree quite strongly with this. For me, the film represents a moral possibility with us now more than ever. A possibility of solidarity beyond identity, of politics beyond identity politics. Pride does not turn a blind eye to the difficulties such solidarity meets: smugness, self-interested indifference or internal rivaries. But it also shows that things C A N be easy, and that holding on to the idea that things MUST be difficult is extremely dangerous.
söndag 25 januari 2015
Zorba the Greek (1964)
Anthony Quinn plays a shy Englishman that goes to Greece and ends up in a business enterprise with a jovial Greek playboy. While the Englishman is pallid and timid, the Greek is a dancing whirlwind who has his way with the ladies. ... Already from this description, I hope you realize what kind of movie Zorba the Greek is. Greece is depicted as a very, very exotic country with almost zombie-like villagers, and then this Zorba, who supposedly is to embody the good spirit of Greece. Michael Cacoyannis directed the film and I suspect he had non-Greek audiences in mind when he made the film. Basically, the film revolves around Zorba and his unruly Life Force that cannot be tamed. The business he and the Englishman has together seems to be a mere plot device in the movie that is there as an excuse to show off the old man's courtship charm and dancing moves. Exuberance, exuberance, exuberance. The only thought in my head while watching Zorba the Greek (it's a mystery that I was actually able to finish this movie) was this: can you imagine a female Zorba? This unstoppable, unabashed life force of a person? Have you ever watched such a movie? There is a representation of female - what should we call it? - lust for life in the movie. She's an old 'coquett', an owner of an unkempt inn. She recalls the old adventures and the men that used to court her during the war. Stories of sex and romance. In all these stories, she is the recipient of male attention, and it is this role that is upkept through the film, in which Zorba of course does not hesitate to try out his charms on her. But when Zorba moves on to other female territories, the inn-keeper is shattered: without a man, she is nothing. It's not the same with how Zorba is shown in the movie. He's Zorba, and nothing can take his life energy from him.
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