Theeb (2014)

While watching Theeb, I couldn't help thinking of Lawrence of Arabia: the gleaming and dizzying images of the endlessness of the desert. Visually, Naji Abu Nowar's Theeb is a remarkable film. As for the story - I wasn't entirely convinced by this coming-of-age story about a Bedouin boy during WWI who goes out on a risky adventure in the desert. The central tension of the story is the young kid's enchantment with a British man who visits the camp he and his family live in. But this tension is soon lost: the film lapses into a rather conventional action mode where the viewer's attention is grabbed by an insistent will-he-survive. While the first few scenes of the film worked very well (establishing a form of life) the middle part about a boy growing into manhood crept forward rather predictably. However, one thing it did very well was to convey historical upheavals indirectly. There is the fall of the Ottoman empire, technical revolution and globalization, all of which figures in the film through the child's eyes. Even though Theeb has an interesting undercurrent - a pacifistic one even? - somehow, its presentation of innocence and struggle failed to engage me at depth. "The strong eat the weak" is delivered as a universal truth about what human life essentially is.

From What is Before (2014)

Static camera. Rustling leaves. The wind. Grass. The sky. The roaring sea. Lav Diaz' From What is Before is a film that sticks close to nature. During the 338 (!) minutes of the film I am entirely surrounded by these images and these sounds. Being a political film at heart, Diaz chooses an interesting path in making the viewing experience so sensual. The setting is an isolated village in Philippines in the seventies. Horrible things start to happen and the villagers' lives are torn apart. There is an almost apocalyptic feeling in how Diaz approaches the terror of the regime - a sense of apocalypse conjured up by an almost-static camera an sometimes extremely lengthy takes (Béla Tarr comes to mind for several different reasons). The 5+ hours of the movie makes us acquainted with the village and the routines of its dwellers. We see neighbors visiting one another's houses. A young woman takes care of her daughter who drifts from a coma-like state to a state of distress. A small boy believes he lives with his uncle because his parents are in quarantine due to leprosy. A lonely winemaker exploits the disabled girl sexually.  A female merchant arrives to the village. She tries to sell goods to the villagers in a rather aggressive way (this character adds a comic aspect to this otherwise pitch-black story). A priest warns the locals about practicing the traditional rites. Worrying things happen. Cows are found slaughtered. Huts are burnt. A bleeding man appears. These events seem to intensify an already existing unease or anxiety that shape the villagers' lives. Paranoia among the villagers and as the villagers witness a suicide, we also learn about the many lies that are kept up.

The film is shot in black and white and from very early on, even the beautiful images of nature instills a sense of dread. Several scenes are set on a shore. A woman, the thundering sea, a rock. Later on, this sense of dread becomes more concrete as the army is entering the village: these are events of invasion. Martial law is introduced and some sections of the film deal with the hierarchy among the soldiers sent out to take charge of the village. The army men try to soothe the villagers - in a very bureaucratic way - by telling them that this is just an act of precaution, a way of rooting out communist rebels.

Diaz' use of long takes does not come out as an attempt to play with the viewer or as an attempt to appear 'contemplative'. His static camera gives you time to grow into a specific location. Some have talked about an anti-colonial method: time allows you to see a place, to be lulled into a specific rhythm.

Often, humans appear from within a natural setting as ant-like figures. A person appears from a distance, perhaps partly hid by deep foliage. This enhances the overall impression I got of the story. Here, there might be some open questions with regard to Diaz' perspective. Does he set out to depict how people are reduced to pawns in a cosmic game - the perspective being that whatever people do will remain futile. Or is he rather showing a historical situation - a situation of anxiety and terror in which people's sense of activity is radically reduced? In any case, the vulnerability of human life is strikingly underscored by means of this cinematographic technique. It is important to remember that the entire film is framed as an attempt to remember. Diaz seems to deal with national trauma through individual lives. There are extremely violent and horrible scenes in this movie that evoke a sense of acute trauma. These scenes have absolutely no trace of sensationalism or exoticism. Often, the horrible things done are seen only indirectly but for all that, they are shocking and heavy to watch.

Under the Skin (2013)

Elusive. This is the description that best fits Jonathan Glazer's stunningly beautiful, at the same time stunningly ugly, Under the skin. A dry explication of the story would make most people squirm. The magic does certainly not happen in the story (that the film is loosely based on a novel is interesting, but a novel need not glow because of its story, either). This is a film entirely structured according to the associative logic of images. Scarlett Johansen's alien predator patrols the streets of Glasgow (is it Glasgow?); she's hunting for guys to ... well .... drag into a pitch-black romm - an eating-machine! Johansen, using her body as bait, lures them with her with her anonymous, steely gaze. They go with her in her van, sometimes reluctantly. An unknown figure seems to be stalking her on a bicycle.

The strangeness is enhanced by extremely absurd and stylized scenes being interwoven with ultra-gritty shots of rain-soaked streets and brightly lit malls. There is no safe distance between these two styles, the dreamy and otherworldly & the social-realist grit: everything is seamlessly sucked into the film's wandering gaze. (Many have talked about a Hollywood star plopped into the humdrum settings of pedestrian people. I am not too interested in that angle.)

I watched Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth a few weeks before Under the Skin. The two films share a number of thematic and visual features. Both films' take on alienation works with humor in a way that makes the underlying sadness all the more present. Why sadness? Both Bowie and Johansen are detached from human emotions. They observe, and react according to some mechanical pattern. In a scene that drops all the satire and humor, we see Johansen's alien by the shore. She watches an accident. Or does she watch? What would watching mean for this creature?

An extremely weighty dimension of this film is the sound. The music (by Mica Levi): a throbbing, pulse-like score. Worrying dissonance, threatening tones.

Under the skin: in no other film has sex looked so abstract, a boring-beyond-boring activity to trudge through.

Late Spring (1949)

Ozu's Late Spring is perhaps the most striking film I have ever seen about the relation between father and daughter: Ozu focuses on the quiet tenderness between the two. How often do films capture that particular closeness between members of a family? I mean: closeness that bears no hint of neurotic claustrophobia. There is also another unusual thing that sets Ozu's films apart. Rather than delivering a bleak, pessimistic image of modernization, his films show people dealing with rapid changes; even though he shows the lack of understanding that may occur between generations, he never seems to be inclined to force upon us a verdict on "the modern life".  

Noriko is in her mid 20's and her widowed, professor father worries about her. She should get married, it's about time, he thinks. His scheming sister is also eager to marry her off. But the father also appreciates the life he has with his daughter. Both of them seem to thrive in their present situation. Many scenes chronicle their routines, their feeling at ease in their home. But there is this obligation, this social expectation. As a way of talking her into marrying, he tells a lie: he announces that he will re-marry. Through an encounter with a family friend in a bar, we learn that Noriko is extremely opposed to the idea. But why is she so disgusted? Is the disgust a rationalization of her grief? -  Some has interpreted the film in psychosexual terms, so that an undercurrent of the tensions would revolve around repulsion and sex, but I don't know. A suitor, the professor's assistant, is presented to Noriko. They seem to enjoy one another's company (we see them on an American-looking bicycle ride), but Noriko does not marry him (the circumstances remain open-ended). A new suitor appears. He is said to look a bit like Gary Cooper. Like in Early Summer, we never get to see this suitor (very successful move).

Setsuko Hara, who plays in several Ozu film as a woman named Noriko, is brilliant. In one of the films, she goes to see a noh play with her father. The camera lingers on the play, the audience. Suddenly, Noriko notices something, the woman her father is supposed to marry. We see the sadness in her face; anger, perhaps, as well. That's a stunning scene.

Many of the central feelings in the film are only alluded to, shown in their indirect expression. The loneliness they both experience when their living situation changes remains a private thing: they cannot show it to the other. They put up a brave, smiling face and go through with what they see as the things to be done. So what is the film about? It seems wrong to say that it is about two people who do something they do not want because they want to comply with a set of socially accepted standards. The film seems to explore different meanings of 'family', what it means to take care of one's parents and that there might be a point in one's life at which there are certain things one has to let go of. Rather than working with dichotomies (traditional/western) Ozu gives us a nuanced pattern of emotions, decisions and perhaps also confusions. This makes it, I think, wrong-headed to label the film as a story about what somebody wants or does not want.

King Kong (1933)

King Kong, the version from 1933, features some faltering special affects (dated to the extent that they appear to me as cute) and a dose of some kind of civilization/media critique. It remains an impressive film for all its - or because of - technical clumsiness. The acting is terrible, but the film takes the viewer to a world of terrible spectable that is laughable (stop motion effects!) and somehow moving at the same time. King Kong offers you a frantic film director, a (racist-tinged and colonialist) journey into unknown, foggy land which culminates in the film crew being chased by Kong and ... some dinosaurs. There's of course a love story (between whom?) and the climactic end that switches the colonial gaze: it is now New York that is exoticized, marvelled at. Kong roams around in chains and the idea is that the beast is to provide innocent moments of diversion to the bored but curious city-dweller. It is almost as if we see the diminuitive-looking city from his point of view. Maybe it is too much to think of King Kong as an anti-colonialist film, but - well, traces of that is certainly present.

Shame (2011)

In Steve McQueen's films, suffering, human tormenting, is perceived from a clinical point of view - the clinical not preventing the films from working their way through graphical details. - - From this description, it is probably quite clear that I find McQueens cinematic approach deeply problematic, and perhaps even morally shady. One coud perhaps say that his films evoke a neutralized concept of empathy, empathy being reduced to a dissective process of understanding and observing other people's minds - rather than understanding having moral connotations, and being enmeshed in complicated questions about responsibility: what does it mean to see/look/catch sight of something? It is as if such worries are sidestepped by McQueen's clinical camera. The point of the films I have seen seem to be a project of revelation: the dark patches of the human soul are to be penetrated. The ideal appears to be not to flinch, to stare directly at the suffering at hand.

A pair of siblings are the two major characters in Shame. The sister is a nerve-wreck of a person. She crashes in her brother's bachelor's pad - which he hates. He is addicted to sex and trying to hid his addiction. The films tracks his obsessions, along with his quest for normalcy, by focusing on his stormy and sexually tense relation with his sister. And well, then there's his sleazeball boss who is just as bad as he is - just as sociopathic. Along the way, we do indeed see these characters react to each other's difficulties and problems, but all of these reactions are fuelled with shame, humiliation or rancour. As a viewer I, too, react with shame and an uncomfortable feeling that I have seen something I shouldn't have - a feeling that, I assume, is precisely what McQueen is aiming for. To make the viewer complicit in the characters' humiliation. Even though the perspective of this film, what it is trying to do to you, is problematic, it must be admitted that McQueen knows how to compose detached, steely images. Michael Fassbender - who else - is the perfect match for the scary leading role.

The big problem with Shame is that it goes nowhere. It stares - blindly at the misery it has reduced the world to. 

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

I recently watched both The Man Who Fell to Earth, a cult movie by the eccentric director Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, Don't Look Now) and Jonathan Glazer's hyped - and weird - Under the Skin. Without being derivative, the latter film unashamedly draws on Roeg's (infamous?) classic. Roeg is a master of composition: his images often have a painterly quality and there is often something very unnerving about them, even though you may not always be able to put your finger on what is so unsettling.

If you hear a summary of what happens in the film, you might be put off. An alien - David Bowie is the obvious choice! - comes to earth to get water for his desert-like planet and gets kind of stuck in the human form of life, the corporate world - and a relationship with a human. Hmmm, indeed. For all its silliness, and there is truly plenty of it, The Man Who Fell to Earth excesses in cinematically glorious eerie moments; Bowie's icily detached face is the perfect center of the film's strangeness. Bowie IS an alien. Roeg looks at the world, as he often does, from the point of view of alienation. Bowie's alien wanders around, makes business deals, hooks up - but nothing seem to matter much. After a while on planet earth, he slides into depression, drinking GT's and watching TV. The earth, of course, is represented as a spiritual desert. Roeg throws in a few references to ecological desaster and corporate corruption - the earth does not seem a particularly friendly place. The point, basically, seems to be that nobody is truly at home. Perhaps Roeg would not have neeeded extraterrestial excursions to bring home that message, but then again, this film's idiosyncratic use of 'aliens' sets up a peculiar mood. Pretty much everything of what's going on is shrouded in big mystery. This feeling of mystery is enhanced by Roeg's approach to images. These are not 'perspicuous representations', you know, the kind of broad presentations that traditionally takes you by the hand in a movie to make you familiar with the setting of the film. Here, instead, time and space are broken, ruptured by the use of fragments and cross-cutting. There are conspiracies and plotting - but the essential theme is the alien's alienated state, which illustrated through imagery left elusive enough to haunt one's imagination for a long time. 

Nightcrawler (2014)

Dan Gilroy's Nightcrawler works like an anti-establishment version of neo-noir films like Drive. Caustic, quite funny, atmospheric - and even quite realistic, Nightcrawler sets out to explore the rotten heart of media and, perhaps, work. On the nocturnal streets of LA, a guy called Lou prowls in a car. He looks for - material. He goes to the location of some gruesome crime scene or accident scene to take photos that he sells to a media company. By tuning into the police radio, he learns where the evening's action is. He tries to get as much money as he can for these images, while the media company obviously tries to haggle with him. L.A is all night, neon and grit. Lou is a shadowy figure with the most harried face you've ever seen in a movie. He looks half-dead. He's on the streets to earn his buck and starts to exploit a younger kid as an 'assistent'. The point, of course, is to extract as much value as possible out of the poor youngster who's dersperate for money. The kid cannot say no to this "internship", as Lou calls it. Scruples? Not a hint. Again, there is the thing about bargaining positions. Dog eat dog - and while at eating the other dog, entrepreneurial pride is not lacking: "I work for myself". Be your own boss, be on top of the game. The media company for its part is living on gruesome images that the audience 'wants', so there's demand, for sure. "I want something the audience can't turn their eyes away from." Demand = the ratings, the ratings. The ideal images: where the truly gritty stuff is happening, here and now. And the here and now, the sense of true crime or bloody stuff going on, can be manipulated - invented, or produced. Nightcrawler engages in a critique of sensationalist images, but also the network of forces that keep up such a yearning for sensations happening in real time, how such sensationalism is engineered and upheld. The critique sometimes veers into simplistic preaching, but I am not too bothered, because Nightcrawler keeps up its strange, nocturnal atmosphere throughout in a way that is almost tactile. Disquieting stuff all the way. - - - This week, I've been reading in the newspaper about a new trend. Instead of rushing to help when people witness an accident, they snap photos. Just as in Nightcrawler...

I am love (2009)

On paper, I am love (Luca Guadagnino) does not seem to add up to much more than a conventional romance set in the most conventional (I guess) of cinematic contexts: the bourgeois family. The reason I wanted to watch this film is - Tilda Swinton. Even in the crappiest movies, her luminous performance makes a viewing endurable. Swinton plays the Russian-born wife of a wealthy Milanese textile factory owner. She is the perfect wife, the perfect host, the perfect supervisor of the orchestration of upper-class events: she perfects the institutional role assigned to her. Guadagnino presents a family eager to live up to this institutional function. There are dinners where everybody tactfully plays along in the expected way. In the beginning of the film, the fate of the dynasty is revealed: the patriarch announces that Emma's husband, and her son, are to inherit the business. Emma is an outsider, even though she acts her part. It is hard to know what kind of person she is. Something starts to change when she meets her son's friend, who is a chef. There are mutual erotic feelings, and from there. - - This, of course, sounds like the usual, run-of-the-mill depiction of a monied family, its neuroses and also its escapes. What's special here? Emma is a distant, almost icy person. Swinton is naturally in her element her: elusive, as always (but how she manages to be elusive in so many different ways), but Swinton also interprets her characters lust, her imagination, with an unusual presence. But it's not only Swinton. There's a dizzying sense of overwhelming emotions that the director - and the cinematographer (some reviewer calls the visual style 'baroque', which, I think, hits the mark) - evokes in a, well, surging, way (which borders on the phony - as someone has remarked: there is something of Douglas Sirk in here). Even so, there are quite a few unnecessary dramatic turns and half-hearted subplots that the audience could well do without - this film does not not need them. But, in any case, I was surprised by how well some segments of I am love worked.

The Simple-Minded Murderer (1982)

With The Simple-Minded Murderer Hasse Alfredsson showed that his abilities reach far beyond comedy. This is a frightening movie, in several ways. Stylistically, the film proved to be far more diverse than I expected it to be. Alfredsson boldly tries out different styles - to capture different atmospheres - realism of a fairly traditional vein is intermingled with the supernatural (along with operatic music!). What works so greatly is that there is no tired distinction between fantasy/reality, but, rather, the supernatural is also, in its own way, real. The film also draws parallels between historical situation in a way that to some may feel strange, but I appreciated his ways of explicating a theme in the movie by suddenly bringing in a completely different time. Somebody has compared the film with Derek Jarman's work (!) and that makes complete sense to me: here you have a similar break with traditional forms.

Sven (good performance by Stellan Skarsgård) is seen as retarded because of a speech defect. He is exploited by some kind of industrialist. He sleeps in a barn and is forced to work hard. As he befriends Anna, who is dependent on her wheelchair, he gets to work for and live with Anna's family. But the industrialist does not like this new arrangement and sets out to revenge. The story is told in bits and pieces, with flashbacks. Somehow, this seems to be a fruitful approach to the material, and heightens the sense we often get of different levels of reality.

One could say that The Simple-minded murderer is about the nature of evil. Without shying away from melodrama (which is both good and bad), the film is built like a morality tale. The industrialist symbolizes an almost absolute sense of evil. He is evil not because of some petty interest he seeks to further, but rather, the evil things he does has no specific purpose. Admittedly, Alfredsson sometimes reverts to all too familiar clichés about evil: we see the industrialist gorging himself together with his pals, engaging in all kinds of debauchery (which, however, is depicted not as exotic and titillating but as very, very boring) - I mean, this association of debauchery and evil does not help us understand anything.