Leviathan (2014)

The barren, arctic sea-shore of a small town in Siberia transforms Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan into something more than a film about corruption - corruption in the human sense and in the sense of institutional corruption. Cosmic might be the word to capture the feel of it. The choice for the viewer is what level one should focus on. A theme that drives the overarching mythic tone is suffering. There are references to Job: why should I suffer? How can God allow this to happen? When I watched this movie, my friends and I disagreed to which extent these references are to be taken as direct questions borrowed straight from the Biblical story, or whether they have a more context-dependent and, thus, more ambivalent role. I haven't really settled my mind: is this film suffocatingly blunt, beating you on the head with a certain 'message', or is it more open-ended than what a cursory interpretation might suggest?

Kolja and his family live by the sea. Their home is threatened when the local - very crooked, very Yeltsin-lookalike - mayor makes claims on the property. Kolja's friend, a lawyear from Moscow, arrives to help his mate with his problems. There are dirty deals and also matrimonial infedelity. Kolja's life starts to break apart. Zvyagintsev takes a look at the vodka-fuelled structures of this small town, in which the mayor - constantly drunk - goes to see the priest every now and then, and is given a pragmatic piece of godly-worldy advice.

An essential theme of the film is what it means to stand behind one's words. In the beginning of the film, we see Kolja at the court. The scene plays out as tragic comedy: the jury reads the negative verdict in a furious-paced bureaucratic quasi-lingo: the voice of the woman reading it is completely mechanic. In the very end of the film, the priest delivers a sermon. There are bombastic formulations about the state and the church. The priest - who is he, what does it mean when he stands there before the bored/drunk parish, speaking those words?

Again: the overwhelming landscapes, underlining the vulnerability of the characters' lives. The mood of the film is established and kept up with repeated images of desolate cliffs, gray, restless sea and craggy whale skeletons. The cinematography is audacious, but not overly so. The music by Philip Glass is, however, too much - the film would have been better without it. Zvyagintsev's sense for immaculate composition is in absolutely no need of being doubled by Glass' fluttering score. (I am no fan of Glass.)

Out of the past (1947)

Jacques Tourneur is the guy who made Cat people, some kind of horror movie I watched many years ago but that has stuck in my mind; I vaguely remember a strange, thrilling and rather elusive build-up of the plot. Out of the Past belongs to another genre - noir - but it also has that strange thrilling propulsion. The details of the story make my head spin. Double-double-crossing. Tangles of events and relations and temporal levels and a heap of thugs. But the basic framework is pretty standard stuff of the genre: guy wants to free himself from his shoddy past. Settle down, lead a peaceful life, find a girl. BUT past stuff comes to haunt. There's the woman. And the small town. And crime! The hero is the unlucky, slightly gullible/self-destructive guy whose fate is finally sealed. This guy who seem to unconsciously love trouble is Robert Mitchum's seemingly honest citizen who sets out to start a new life in a small town. But turns out the man has a past as a private eye, and then he gets involved with old stuff - a femme fatale robbing a gangster, his former love life and the catastrophic acts that love life lead him into committing - and, you know, one thing leads to another. He just can't stay away from that gangster woman who once brought him into trouble. The dizzyingly plentiful details may not be interesting. The film is driven by its elusive pulse, its evocative locations and its ridiculously hard-boiled lines.

The gender politics of Out of the past is suspect, to say the least. The impossibly icy and evil urban femme fatale is compared with the kind-hearted, innocent rural girl. Mitchum's ex-private eye is of course erotically involved with both. And it doesn't take much thinking to see which woman the film itself sides with. But you, dear movie-lover, will fall for Jane Greer's tough-girl style. The look on her face when she points that gun - !

A Star Is Born (1937)

William A Wellman's A star is born could almsot have been written by Tennesse Williams. Cruel human relations, self-loathing characters, plenty of self-searching on the screen. And then there's the bloody (in several ways) world of entertainment: a world of business, rising stars and has-beens. The film, almost a chamber drama, delivers a raw image of a corrupt industry and conjures up an equally jaded image of the human sacrifices and humiliation within that branch of business. The drama takes off with the encounter of the struggling young woman who has travelled from her small town family to Hollywood and who nurses big dreams of becoming an actress, and the movie star that eventually takes her under his wing - and marries her. The girl becomes famous, while the husband is torn apart by doubt and by more than a few drinks. Janet Gaynor as the actress - at first insecure, then growing into being the big star, the modern woman with a career - is excellent, luminous even. But what I remember most of all from this movie is its sympathetic rendition of the flaws of the two protagonists. They are troubled people, but the film shows their struggles with their lives and with business to be a complex and emotionally ambivalent affair. The film addresses tough questions about what it means to experience oneself as a burden. It mostly does so without sentimentality. The husband's career is not looking bright, he is drinking and the wife considers giving up her own acting for him. The husband misses his work, and feels depressed. This couple's problems is not rendered as a power struggle, or a clear-cut man/woman conflict. They both acknowledge one another's point of view, but dealing with the factual situation, taking responsibility and living on is difficult for both.b  I must say that in quite a few ways, it is hard to believe that this film is from 1937.

Frost/Nixon (2008)

Powerful corrupt president talks to journo about scandals - can that really be an interesting movie? I was pretty sure Frost/Nixon (dir. Ron Howard) would not be for me, but somehow, I found myself engaged in the heated communication between the two protagonists. Even though there are a few bad, sentimental parts, the acting of Michael Sheen & Frank Langella - the tension between them! - was top notch, and this is the true strength of the movie.

Les bonnes femmes (1960)

I am not a great fan of the French new wave. Even though some of the films associated with that wave are interesting enough, I am often put off by the sexism and the 'cool' vibes. Claude Chabrol might not be as famous as the Godards and the Truffauts, but Les bonnes femmes definitively has the hip, sometimes experimental and definitively über-cynical qualities of that era. The film sets out to demolish all kinds of romantic hopes about love and partnerships - and at the same time it focuses on the dreams and hopes of romance, only to see them crushed, of course. However, what sets this film apart, and what made me appreciate it, rather than being annoyed by its lofty coolness, is the phenomenal flow on display here. Les bonnes femmes takes us from one everyday scene to the next, from one crowd of people to another, without us knowing much anything about where it is all going to end. The main characters work in some kind of shop. The boss is an asshole, and they are bored, just waiting for life to begin - somewhere else. One of the salesgirls loves to party, while another engages in dreamy fantasies about meeting Mr. Right. A third girl defies this talk about romance. She leads a secretive life and sneaks off at night to sing in a club. A fourth girl has a relationship with a guy who is ashamed of her working-class style. In an awkward scene, we see his reactions during a dinner with his parents. Chabrol zooms in on the tragic-comic nature of the assemblage of emotions and repressive patterns.

Some of the most quietly thrilling scenes take place within the crazy-looking shop, amidst these shop-girls' dreams and longings. The film explores the disappointments and attachments connected with these longings. In one haunting scene, we see a group of young people, some of which are flirting with one another, in a parisian zoo. The place looks appaling, and the way the camera pans from one gruesome animal cage to another reveals an almost horror movie-like atmosphere. The last, rather erratic part, takes us to an unsettling rendezvuous between one of the shopgirls and an evil-looking motorcycle guy who has been following her around for a long time. There are some unnecessarily confusing scenes in this last segment, but all in all - a surprisingly evocative film.

While the structure of many nouvelle vague-film boils down to the idea of an eternal and frivolous struggle between (the so-called) sexes, Chabrol's film takes a slightly different turn, and can even be said to develop a feminist angle. The film starts with a scene in which two older men pick up two girls, and do everything they can to take them home. Chabrol focuses on the scheming of the men, and a destructive pattern of heterosexual play that has a strong violent theme built into it. This theme runs through the entire movie. In one scene in a swimming pool, the same two men we saw in the beginning catch sight of the two girls from the earlier occasion. The ensuing 'playful' chase-scene is uncompromisingly clear-sighted in its depiction of desperate male insecurity and normalized violence. The end of the movie brings home the point in the ultimate, sinister way.

Biblioteka (2014)

A library somewhere in a small town in Georgia. The documentary follows the librarians' attempts to keep themselves busy in a library that seems to have almost no visitors. The librarians, a motley crew, don't seem to get on so well. There are small eruptions of irritation, but also moments of forgiveness. We learn that the situation is not good. Ana Tsimintia's Biblioteka adopts a successful fly-on-the-wall tecnique. The odd thing about the film is the juxtaposition of dusty, deserted rooms and books on the one hand, and the heightened relations and fierce conflicts among the librarians, on the other hand. Even though this documentary has no plot - the only thing we see and hear is a group of women talking and moving about in the shabby library - watching it was a captivating experience.

A pigeon sat on a branch reflecting on existence (2014)

Nobody assembles stylized tableux like Roy Andersson - tableux that in one sense seem to be stripped down to the bare bones, but, one the other hand, open up a multitude of existential levels. He inhabits his own cinematic universe, of course; a film is instantaneously recognizable as a Roy Andersson production. There are the run-down locations that conjure up a vague feeling of the Swedish Welfare state in the fifties, mixed with some contemporary details, all built with interior locations so that the end results becomes intentionally artificial. There are the scruffy, sad-eyed characters played in a style that - well - is deadpan in the best sense, in a way that fits these movies.

The problem with A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is that it feels like Andersson is repeating himself, using old ideas, employing a technique he knows so well. For me, some of the scenes felt a bit stale and lifeless and Andersson's quirks stood out much too obviously. On the other hand, there is plenty to enjoy - there is a heap of scenes that capture Andersson's personal blend of sadness and humor. So what is it about? Jonatan and Sam are salesmen. Not very good ones, but they try, you know, with the leading ambition that they just want to help people have fun. They sell novelty items. Not very funny ones, but still. The film revolves around these two, and other creatures of this world. The basic mood the film delivers is that something is deeply wrong in our lives, and that we try to gloss this over with lines like 'I'm glad you're doing fine'. One of the striking things about Andersson's rendition of such existential forgetfulness or hopelessness (haplessness also) is that it is not cynical. In this, and other movies he takes a look at clichés from a point of view where they exude both human warmth and a kind of existential horror. Warmth and horror? How is that possible? Somehow, in Andersson's apocalyptic-humanist approach, it is. His films are full of contradictions molded into a perfected style, and perhaps that is why it works so well when there is more to the vignettes than Andersson's own favorite themes.

The best, and truly elusive, scenes involve .... the Swedish war king Karl XII. It is hard to put into words in which way these scenes dodge silliness, and instead end up being both moving and scary.

I am Cuba (1964)

No doubt about it - Soy Cuba is a propaganda film about the revolution. It is marred with the weaknesses of propaganda, and also its deceit. This is a narrative that asks you to look at some people as the glorious revolutionaries, others as half-hearted pseudo-rebels and others still as traitors and people that simply have to be extinguished in the brutal path towards true socialism. For this reason, it is hard not to be intimidated by Soy Cuba. But when I watched it, I couldn't resist some moments of stunning beauty or strangenesss that the film also contains. The beginning of the film features a lengthy, very dreamy, scene in a bar. The combination of jazz, drunken camerawork and zombie-like acting in terrible English makes for a surreal and haunting scene. There are several examples of Kalatozov's sense for the floating camera and a scene that moves effortlessly (and strangely) from one thing to another. But this strands in quaint contradiction to the didactic and heavy-handed outlook of most of the film. The 'story' (a rather loose one where people are representatives of classes, rather than human beings) takes us from pre-revolutionary times in which yankees loll around on the streets, to the heated moments that paves the way for the revolution, and then the war itself, and the glorious central characters of it. Even though Soy Cuba is by no means a great film, there are still a number of things that speak for it as an artistically original piece.

Bakhmaro heisst Paradies (2011)

Finland is lucky to still have the state-funded TV channel that broadcasts odd documentaries and films from all over the world. Bakhmaro heisst Paradies (dir. Salomé Jashi) is about a restaurant in Chockatauri, Georgia. The restaurant, situated in a dilapidated brick building, is up and running every day, ready to welcome fancy guests, but there are no customers. The camera pans across the strangely painted room, a room that has become a sort of desolate non-place. The owners talk about the future, or what, to them, seem to be the lack of one. This was a surprisingly moving documentary that managed to show huge existential worries in an everyday setting of the small, unsuccessful, business. One day, there is a visit from the Party. The restaurant workers complain about the situation, and the party members shrug: what can they do? Besides that, there is waiting, waiting - for something, for nothing. The film approaches its subject with almost tender, barely visible humor. You can watch the film here.

White god (2014)

Kornél Mundruzcó's White god works best if you allow it to move from level to level. Parable, horror movie, drama - the film moves boldly from genre to genre and doesn't shy away from trying to say big things with a story that may strike some as bizarre. If you accept this restless plunging into several different cinematic expressions, this is for you.

The story starts in a very simple way. A girl moves in with her father. Reluctantly, very reluctantly, the father allows her to take the dear dog along with her. But the dog is too much trouble, he thinks, and drives out to the outskirts of Budapest, where he sends the dog to look after itself. The rather original way of telling the ensuing story is that we follow both the dog and the girl who goes to look for her pet.

The image of what people do to animals is not exactly flattering. I dare say that the film takes us on a spiritual journey from a dog's point of view. The dog encounters other dogs and humans who exploit, capture and hunt. The city of Budapest is seen from the perspective of the animal living in a precarious existence, hunted by humans who want to take advantage of it. It is easy to read this - there are also more or less explicit references - as a story about neo-fascism, about the emergence of race-thinking and a class of people living in fear. One could also interpret the film as a scary image of the kind of people bred by a situation of being outcasts in society. The eventual rage the film depicts towards the end is very, very hard to forget. But here the problems begin: isn't this kind of fantasy about the roaring, violent underclass actually often an expression of an extremely shady idea? What kind of fantasy is it, how is it meant to unsettle us? What kind of revenge does the ending signal? The film ends on an ambiguous note that suddenly seems inclined to pander to our longing for fairy tales with a happy resolution. I suspect that if I would re-watch the film, I would have a much less generous verdict - there are, one might say, traces of an exploitative approach here, where the dogs are reduced to mere symbols.

I find no fault with the element of allegory. It works rather well, even though the way of delivering the message is not exactly subtle (the father works in a slaugtherhouse...). But why settle for the subtle? Mundruczó skillfully conjures up fear by using a frantically pulsating camera that tracks the movements of the dog (dogs) and the girl who sets out to find it. The problem with the film - for me - was the music. The use of a bombastic action film score reduced some of the suspense. After all, this was not a Bruce Willis movie.