The Blue Gardenia (1953)

Fritz Lang made better movies than The Blue Gardenia, a stylish thrillers that has plenty of captivating moments. The leading lady of the film ends up in trouble after spending a drunk night out with a guy. The guy, an über-slimy douche, tries to rape her when she has got intoxicated in a fancy restaurant. The next day she is accused of having killed him. She leaves with two girlfriends and the film strays from the male-dominated thriller genre by focusing on these women's everyday lives and troubles with lousy jobs and lousy boyfriends. Throughout the film, we get to know the routines and bantering of these friends. This framework of everyday life makes the weaker part of the film, the murder, much more interesting. Because the focus is never on guessing who the killer really is. When the film is busy with a tale about a journalist (just as slimy as the guy who has just been killed) trying to catch the killer, only to be bombarded with false leads, the film, to me, loses its appeal. But throughout, the film preserves some tension by means of odd small choices the director makes. And Los Angeles looks drearier than in most other cities - a city of dull busyness. The theme of the film - false leads and doublings - conjure up a world in which it does not matter the least, from a particular point of view, if one human being is mixed up with another. They're all the same, anyway. What Lang sometimes makes us see is, however, the existential dreadfulness of this exchangeability.

Afsporet (1942)

Bodil Ipsen and Lau Laurizen directed Afsporet, a Danish thriller from the early forties. A woman from the middle class lead an unhappy life. She suffers from amnesia and the film starts when she has somehow derailed into the seedy criminal underworld of Copenhagen. Her daddy, a wealthy doctor, is worried and engages the whole town to find her. The film takes a woozy look at the characters of the crowd: drunks, pimps, artists. The nice girl falls in love with a thief and they move in together - but can they stay happy? Not much happens, but the drama remains tight. The dialogue is almost as snappy as in noir films made in Hollywood during the same years. I am not that impressed by what is called 'Nordic noir' - contemporary films about grumpy police officers with ulcers who drink coffee and think about murdered girls. Here you find the real deal.

My darling clementine (1946)

It starts with a shave & a beer.
Wyatt Earp (played not only coolly but also emotionally strikingly by Henry Fonda) goes into town with his brothers. The town: hoodlums and brawls, beer-drinkin' folks and music.
Earp becomes the new marshal. He's to take care of law&order. Plus: he has some revenge business. His kid brother was killed, and he thinks he knows by whom.
There will be a gunfight - there is a gunfight.
My darling clementine is classical western in the sense that it is about societal change. The old west is juxtaposed with the new west, the community, "society" - cultivation and even Enlightenment.
Doc Holliday, the troubled and tuberculosis-stricken doc-turned-gambler, is a figure of in-between here, who has a very interesting part in the film. There is a tension between him and Earp that builds tremendously and also has a surprising form of sad aspect to it. That has to do with a girl, also. Clementine comes to Tombstone to look for one Doctor Holliday. He has found himself a new woman, and wants to send this tidy girl home. She meets Earp, and some kind of relation strikes up quickly.
John Ford chooses to focus on the quieter material rather than the shootouts.
As a tale about change & civilization this film draws on many shady images. One of them: women civilize violent men. Clementine, in this film, is a figure of purity and decency (she becomes the village's next school teacher), and as Earp falls in love with her, his sense for justice seems to be enhanced. Well, basically Ford chronicles a heroic story in which white men and women come to the west with their own personal business in mind, but end up making the place a decent community.

Mr Nobody (2009)

You may or may not remember Jaco van Dormael for the irresistible Toto, Le Heros. I remember that film as hiding its dark secrets in lots of inventiveness and imaginative twists. Mr. Nobody offers more of the same in that sense. Sadly, this movie is eaten up by its own imagination: it ends up being a loony thought experiment. The basic concept is that of multiple worlds. The film throws us from one world to the next, from one possibility to the next. More concretely: we see this guy, Nemo, living his life in several parallell worlds, one in which he spent his youth with his mother, one in which he spent these years with his father - and has a cutesy on-off thing with a girl called Anna, who is something his step-sister, or falls in love with Elise.  I am not sure whether the film should be interpret as some sort of cosmic joke, a light-hearted exercise in metaphysics or as a simple yet very complex story about a boy and his mother. The problem with the film is that I never care enough to pose this as a serious question. For all its fascinating and head-spinning turns, Mr Nobody never succeeds in enchanting me and hardly even in entertaining me.

Rust and Bone (2012)

Rust and Bone is a rugged romance. The story could have been ridiculously cheesy. A man falls in love with a woman and when she goes through a serious accident and loses her legs, he loves her even more. Jacques Audiard made the no-nonsense Prophet and Rust and Bone follows suit in this respect. Both: brutal descriptions of life as its harshest. What makes a difference here is the way the two major roles are played. Both are played without big gestures. Ali, ex-bouncer, is living with his sister's family, re-connecting with his son. He's passionate about boxing. Tough fights. He meets Stephanie, an equally tough person, who works with marine shows. When she has her accident, he sticks to her, first, for sex. It turns out he is the one to support her when she feels alone and isolated. What's so strange about Rust and bone is how its brutal tone accommodates the idea of love as a miracle without any fuss at all. The brutality is never left behind so that the film would switch tone into some kind of sugary romanticism. Love itself is described with the same brutal, visceral approach. - - - By no means a perfect film, but interesting because of its unusual tone. One reason I liked it may be that there are no grandiose gestures here, despite the theme: love as miracle. Audiard does something right here, for sure.

Take this waltz (2011)

Can you bear with a hipster-leaning indie movie about a middle-class couple in some nice Toronto neighborhood? Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz surely has more than a few annoying sides : it's easy to be infuriated about respectable indie movies about respectable, rich white people who have respectable problems.

I guess this story could have been made anytime between 1850 and the present. It inhabits a particular modern problem, a problem of sticking to the safe haven of a nice and cozy wedding or trying out (or giving in to) one's spontaneous, unruly desires. Margot is married to Lou who has, to quote one reviewer, 'a shaggy likeability' . Lou is a cookbook writer, she is a writer. They share a beautiful home on a quiet street. One day she meets a guy she is instantaneously attracted to. The guy: the romantic, pensive kind - you guessed it: an artist. Turns out they are neighbors.

All of this seems predictable enough. What sets the film apart is perhaps its strangely old-fashioned tone. It is a tale of mores, really, in the sense that perhaps Henry James or Jane Austen would have had it. One can also say that Take this waltz plays out like a prolonged fantasy that nudges against reality. It's an elegant film: the depiction of Margot's rumination is sometimes cinematic in an interesting way, that plays with the ideas about 'respectability' and 'unruly desire'. But that is perhaps also the film's biggest problem: in playing with a classical scenario of adultery and choices, it is never quite resolved in what it wants to do. An example: it presents the new guy as a sensitive artist, the Erotic Female Dream but it also hints at him being a fucking unreliable asshole.

Take this waltz could be seen as a symptom of a cultural pattern - then its aesthetic choices would be in a way more bearable. That would be my good reading. The other one, towards which I am equally disposed, is that this film merely wants to present 'the eternal problem of married life'. Many reviewers praise it for being both 'true and honest' - so.

Sarah Silverman as an alcoholic is great, though.

Junebug (2005)

Junebug captures the traumas of returning to one's home town. It also studies family life in a mature, reflective way. The pressure felt by the characters is rendered in a quietly suffocating way: Phil Morrison who directed the film is a perceptive interpreter of what really hurts us in our everyday lives. Because that's what the film is about - everyday life. There is no big-big drama here, just the situations that turn life upside down. The film starts with a newly-wed couple arriving in the small town where the husband's family lives. The wife, Madeline,  is an art dealer, and they're there because she wants to check out a local eccentric. She hasn't met the husband's, George's, family before, and the awkwardness that arises between them is enormous. They are afraid of this big-city creature. Madeline is afraid of making the wrong impression on George's family: she is afraid of being seen as aloof.

It is this awkwardness that occupies the center of the movie. Madeline is trying to be friendly, to be accommodating, while George is initially embarrassed, only to grow into his old habits later on. The patriarch is a withdrawn loner and his wife is hostile towards the new family member. Their son Johnny also lives in the house with his ebullient high school sweetheart, now pregnant. She is the one who takes the edge of the tension in the family with her sweet laugh. She treats Madeline as a new sister. Or does she - would it be more correct to say that her innocent ways heightens the tension?

Morrison approaches this tricky family situation with an almost Leigh-ian inclination to see hope even in a constellation that appears locked or hostile. If this was set in Britain, Junebug could most definitively be taken for one of Mike Leighs class-sensitive films about the tensions of everyday life.

Junebug works with unspoken emotions. Madeline puts on a smiley face - and the question remains: is that a fair description of her? Is she really putting on a face, acting a brave, mature part? George is equally hard to read. We see his silent disappointments, and at least I am all the time waiting for some major eruption of emotion. Then there's his brother, Johnny, who seems to spend all of his time buried in angry silence - he seems to grow into the type of person his father already is. The film delves into all of these people's feelings so that we gradually learn more about their relationships and their attitudes. This is a film in which almost everyone look at themselves as outsiders, as misfits. We get a strange perspective on these familial tensions as the artist whom Madeline comes to check out is also presented as a full-blown character. He is a lonely man, and the well-behaved art dealer tries to make up her mind whether he is a lunatic or whether he an outsider that can be understood by commercial art circles. In this way, the topic is embellished with yet another take on the feeling of not fitting in.

One of the things Junebug has in common with the films of Mike Leigh is that we are constantly encouraged to re-evaluate our understanding of the characters. What is the matter with George's dad? Is Johnny's girlfriend a dumb bimbo? Does Madeline think she is better than everybody else?

In other words: the focus lies not just on the drama that evolves between these people, but also how you as a viewer respond to the changes that the film deals with. Why do I see this person as so repulsive? What would be a fair description of her? Junebug is a quiet and also - I rather hesitate to say it because it sounds so boring - sober film. Sober in the best sense: it calls us to look at ourselves.

Midnight Run (1988)

On paper, Midnight Run is a film I should stay away from. Comic thriller? DeNiro playing an ex-cop, bounty hunter chased by the mafia and chasing some accountant blamed of having stolen 15 million dollars? Sounds very, VERY terrible. But somehow, I just let go and let myself be entertained by this trashy tale about ... well, forget about it. The film is driven by a sort of energetic madness that just won't stop. Basically, what we have here is an endless row of scenes of two guys being chased or chasing each other (if they are chased by mobsters of the CIA makes very little difference in this universe). At heart, this is a good-natured - even cute - film film about the relationship between two renegade guys who love each other even though they don't know it most of the time. (And yeah, I am deeply embarrassed that I like a movie by the same guy, Martin Brest, who made Beverly Hills Cops.)

The World (2004)

A theme park in Beijing is the central location of The World, Jia Zhangke's playful and sad story about - well, let's see - loneliness and a sense of placelessness. The theme park contains miniatures of famous symbols for different parts of the world. There's a big ben, an eifel tower, a taj mahal, a st. peter's cathedral. The location is at once cheesy and mesmerizing. The film seems to track relations situated in a globalized world where people long to be somewhere else, with somebody else. Globalization, and the dream of endless possibilities, is contrasted with a feeling of being trapped. The theme park may be too obvious a symbol for dislocalized or disoriented desires, but the film makes all of this work because it induces the place itself, the shabby theme park, with an eerie shabbiness. The theme park represents dreams (dreams about going to France, for example) but is also a very concrete place immersed in gritty working conditions and seedy human drama.

The leading characters are a couple who both work in the theme park. He is a security guard. She is a performer in a voluptuous musical group. The performer's ex comes to visit and the relationship grows increasingly hollow. The security guard tries to help migrants from his home province. The two drift apart from each other, get involved with new people, start to lead new kinds of lives - and start to nurse new dreams and new hopes. We are introduced to the dress-maker whose husband migrate to Europe and a Russian woman who seems to have been forced into prostitution. All this lends the theme park - THE WORLD - where they work with a claustrophobic atmosphere. There they are, surrounded by the world, desiring to be some place else. The world: a surrogate, a cruel joke, a miserable job. A depressing, yet still yearning, simulation.

Jia Zhangke made the very fine and dynamic Still life. He is a bold director who does not seem to fear cinematic leaps: he can go from lush romantic scenes to brutal documentary-style images in a minutes. And these leaps do not feel like cheap effect. He succeeds in telling us multi-layered stories about where we are, about our disconcerting and beautiful world. Zhangke's films - the two that I've seen - are here & now in a way that I find impressing: they are not seeking to hunt for emblematic images for our times as much as they are trying to excavate several ways of interpreting the present. The World is a slow and elusive film - I recommend it!

Platoon (1986)

I re-watched Oliver Stone's Platoon an was not overwhelmingly impressed with it - I have a vague memory of having thought it to be a rather good movie (I saw it as a teenager. Of course, the merit of Platoon is its anti-war point of view. This anti-war perspective is introduced via a young volunteer, played by Charlie Sheen. He's in a platoon close to the Cambodian border. The war is seen through his eyes - they are outsider eyes, we learn rather quickly. He is treated as somebody who shouldn't be in the war, a college kid who drops out of college to volunteer - how crazy isn't that? Later he comes to have regrets. The war is all (viscerally conveyed) dirt, exhaustion, bugs and injuries. The volunteer is hospitalized, but is soon released again. Many of the characters feel like the standard gallery of Vientam war film types: there is the grizzled sergeant and the guy who does lots of drugs to numb the pain. The most successful role is perhaps that of Bunny, a kid who is very, very scared. He is not reduced to a coward. Instead, the senselessness of war comes across through his vulnerability and fear. Platoon is a tactile movie: the combats are chaotic, dirty and the film does not seduce us into a neat, disengaged eagle-eye perspective. The film has been praised - partly, rightly so - for sticking to the gritty level of the infantrymen. And yes: fear and fatigue are treated as primary emotional responses. Amid this fear and fatigue, the enemy is enemy, gunfire from the depth of woods. One weakness - or is it a weakness? - is that this "enemy" is very rarely seen, and when they are, the film does not stray from film formulae about how to present "elusive" Vietnamese people. Who is the enemy? When I watch Platoon there is something about Stone's kill/get killed-point of view that strikes me as somehow, for all the anti-war attitude, disconcerting in its US-centric presentation of the war. That it becomes so, so self-evident who are subjects with existentially resonating emotions in the war. As I said, Platoon is in many ways not a typical war movie. But, still, it chooses the most literary, contemplative guy - the guy who takes the role of observer - as its main character. His voice is used as a voice-over that describes the horror of war in letters to his grandma.

Some moments stand out. In one scene, we see the platoon entering a village. There is confrontation, and murders. The soldiers do as they are told, out of loyalty, even though they act in shock, and are horrified at what they are about to do. A women is raped. The atrocity of this is evident. What bothers me (I'm trying to articulate it): this kind of immense horror is put into a general framework whose main emphasis lies on "the outsider", the innocent guy who knows nothing about war, but who then comes to learn about killed/being killed. Is there a risk that films like Platoon end up  embracing a tragic view according to which we as human being are thrown into a nihilistic world in which there may be kind people, and where the only task left is to fight for a small patch of decent values? The central conflict of the film is that between two sergeants. One is good-willed, humane. The other one represents brutality and "sheer survival". What kind of moral conflict is this really, and is it really as anti-war as it mostly appears? The humane is placed against the brutal - the leading character survives as the mature man who has reached some kind of adulthood without being brutalized by war. The good point is that war changes people in very different ways, and that it is impossible to know about this change beforehand. Stone's film certainly evokes a very strong sense of moral ambiguity. My hunch is, however, that there is something strange going on in how he evokes the central moral conflict and how he choses to present the main character's transformation.