The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

No directors bend genres the way the Coen brothers do. Western, thriller, film noir - they can fuck it all up and make the genre mannerisms parts of their own goofy world. In The Hudsucker Proxy the brothers inhabit the universe of the screwball comedy through sleek-looking office landscapes of 50's New York. The film might not be a peak of the Coen-ouvre, but it is a charming dissection of careerism: the film shows you where "ambition" brings people. The world of business is not taken seriously at all, which is mostly a good think. Business, here, is all surface and style. Tim Robbins plays Norville, who goes from mouse-like mailroom clerk to sleek-looking exec sitting on the top floor of a glossy skyscraper. The road to the top: the invention of a hoola-hop. Of course, the Coen brothers do everything in their power to project the absurdity of capitalism. Norville is surrounded by plotting background puppetteers and wise-cracking journo ladies (Jennifer Jason Leigh with an ... accent). Hudsucker Proxy is about the little guy from the small town who becomes the boss because the top management tries to make the stock value fall; Norville seems to be the perfect proxy - a useful idiot. The American dream? Some more nightmarish version of it, yes.  Some parts of the film are rather contrived and does not quite take off. But it's well worth watching for its icy description of life at the successful business company. Among the classic office movies (The Apartment and so on) this stands its ground.

London River (2009)

I sat down on my sofa and grumpily expected to sit through a tedious and sentimental TV-drama about terrorism.
I was wrong!
London River, directed by Rachid Bouchareb, is a moving chronicle of a friendship between two people united by grief and worry. The storytelling is low-key, almost without melodrama, and plenty of space is given to exploring different parts of London. The film really excels in presenting a wobbly and extremely precarious relationship between two people.
The film follows the aftermath of the London suicide bombings. A man and a woman are worried about their children with whom they try to reach contact to check whether everything is OK. A widow from Guernsey comes to London to search for her daughter. She meets a man from Mali who is looking for his son and they end up investigating what has happened as a joint quest.
This film could have become a really schmaltzy affair about an encounter between 'cultures'.
But I am a bit ashamed for worrying so much about that. The film explores conceptions about cultures, it explores racism and stereotypes - in a subtle, humane and critical way. There is no preachy Message. London River examines how a tragic event disrupts people's life. That a tragedy may bring people together is here not a cliche, but rather a difficult realization that matures during the film as an insight for the characters.
The suicide bombings is treated as a human catastrophe with consequences for an entire city. But the tone of the film is not political - Bouchared sticks to the inter-personal. I find this less to be some sort of statement than a very fruitful dramatic point of view for exploring not only the evolving relationship between strangers from different backgrounds but also the relationship between parents and children. London River is a sad, but not gloomy, film that puts its hopes on the changes that new encounters present us with.
Superb acting from Brenda Blethyn (famous for her role in several Mike Leigh films) and Sotiguy Kouyaté.

Working girl (1988)

Working girl is, in some ways, Liberal feminism 101. Women should have the same right as men. They should have the same right to climb the career ladder. This means that the state of working life is pretty much taken for granted: if the presupposition is that women should obtain the same rights as men, the idea is still that competition is a natural environment; justice means that women should somehow get 'a fair chance' to survive in the rat race.
However, Working girl take an ambiguous position. It seems to advocate a blandly American version of feminism, basically glorifying business and corporations. But one can also read it as criticizing a world in which women are to compete with each other. From this point of view, Working girl may be said to tell a story about a girl from the working class whose problem is not only gender, but also class. Rule number one: in business, you have to un-learn everything about solidarity and friendship among women.
The point, in this movie, is that a woman in business must be respectable and that this creates a particular connection between gender and class, united in a sexist world.
The heroine is called Tess (Melanie Griffith) and she's the lowest of the low. She is a secretary at a fancy corporation on Wall street and her boss is a steely woman (played by Sigourney Weaver, hooray). Tess has ideas, she is good at selling stuff to customers. She knows the game and how to rule it. She is clever and brave, but her street-smart edge is not enough. Her boss is an asshole who likes to humiliate her female subordinate. The boss goes on holiday and Tess sees that she has stolen her secretary's idea. Tess response: she sneaks into the boardrooms by presenting herself as an exec.
Sadly, the film reels off into a stupid romantic side-plot that involves Tess and her boss' lover. This makes the film much more boring than it has to be. And much more predictable. It's more fun to watch Tess in her working-class hoods, talking to her friends and visiting tacky bars.
Mike Nichols makes the film engaging because it presents Tess as somebody who has a life and a background (Staten island!) - and Wall street is presented as a full-fleshed vampiristic environment where new money learns to talk to old money. Mergers & acquisitions.
But, as I said, the very core of Working girl remains unclear to me. Are we to think that Tess will, end the end, become just like her boss? Or are we rather lead to think that there are more ethical and fair people who will change the game?
 My fear is that the film remains very shallow, both in its critique of sexism and in its critique of class structures. Perhaps the film is just conjuring up the capitalist fairy-tale of romance and business as a harmony of passion and ambition.

River of no return (1954)

Cheesy but entertaining - River of no return offers some stunning locations, a mediocre story and some quite clunky acting. The reason why Otto Preminger's film is shown on Finnish television 50 years later is, no doubt, Marilyn Monroe. Marketed as an 'outdoor drama', this film seems more about showing of Monroe on a log raft or playing guitar in a saloon than the mountainous scenery and the glossy CinemaScope. Robert Mitchum is almost always clunky but charming and this is true also about this movie, in which he plays good-hearted loner. This is a movie in which Indians are portrayed as unnamed bad-ass people who pose a threat to decent Whites. Hm.

The Fall (2006)

Tarsem Singh made the colorful and imaginative but rather hollow The Cell. The style is instantaneously recognizable in The Fall. If you like films by Terry Gillian or perhaps Tim Burton, or films like Pan's Labyrinth, this is for you. If not - well.
Speaking for myself, I was strangely entertained by this film - I found myself sucked into its nonsensical world. The story is, on the face of it, very simple, like a fairy tale. A girl is hospitalized after having broken her arm. The setting: Los Angeles in the 1920's. She starts to talk to a stunt man. He tells her a story. The film shifts between the gritty reality of the hospital and the lush images of the stuntman's story.
It must be said that the audacious aesthetic of The Fall is rooted in music videos and commercials. It is a film of wild imagination of the sort that does not touch you deeply. Pan's labyrinth, with its story about children and war, is on another level in this sense, I think. However, I don't think The Fall is cheaply calculated - it is far too wild and crazy for that, its exercises in shared imagination (the girl and the stuntman's) too bold and winding.
So perhaps: the romantic, sweeping panoramas that Tarsem Sing conjures up don't really, for all their stunning effects and visual play, speak to me.
The Fall is also a very romantic elevation of the force of cinema. Not only does the silent movie stunt man become a romantic hero - the visual fantasy testaments to the limitlessness of movie-making (or at least I think that is Tarsem's own idea).

Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015)

Peter Greenaway is famous for his professed belief in an image-based cinematic language.
I am very sympathetic with this irritation with a devastatingly dominating mainstream of movie-making in which images are mere companions to words, words, words.
Sadly, Greenaway's latest film doesn't really live up to the promise of strong, overwhelming images, even though he tries hard - I mean HARD - much too hard, it seems. He tries hard to chock, to provoke, to shake us. Treating us with split screens, color changes and archive material does not make this movie come alive.
Not only is Eisenstein in Guanajuato overwrought (which could be ok) - Greenaway appears to be stuck in his ideas, re-using stuff, treating his own aesthetic palette as LEGO-blocks to play idly with.
The problem is not (not at all) that 'we don't get to know Eisenstein as he really was'. Films about existing people can be far-out and brilliant - think about Jarman's Wittgenstein. Historical accuracy - screw that, if you like.
The film simply fails to engage me as a viewer. My eyes follow the glossy tricks on display, but none of them move me.
The worst thing: Greenaway is severely stuck in his 'life consists in sex & death'-mantra. This film: sex and death - but in a detached way, as if both shrink to mere cinematic tricks.
As you might guess, this is a testament to Greenaway's adoration for Eisenstein's films. But this testament fails to do what it so passionately wants to: show the viewer a love for film, film as its own language. There are movies which have shaken my conceptions of what film is, what film can do, what film can do to you. Eisenstein in Guanjuato cannot be counted among these eye-opening films.

Half Nelson (2006)

The relation between teacher & student has been the subject of far, far, far too many moralistic Hollywood movies. Is Half Nelson (directed by Ryan Fleck) one of them? Yeah, at least partly, even though the film deviates from the formula in some ways - most importantly, here it is the teacher, not the student, who is to be 'saved'. But still, the sentimentality of the teacher-student-genre is all-present, despite or perhaps because of Half Nelson's indie 'ruggedness'. The film's teacher is a troubled addict (a scruffy-looking Ryan Gosling) who tries to survive at work, where he teaches his kids in a self-styled free-wheeling way, ignoring the instructions in the ring-binder. Of course, he's a history teacher. This kind of teacher-student film won't work, I guess, if the teacher teaches geography or biology (my hunch). The study of a fucked-up teacher builds upon his relation to one of the student, a girl whose father is worthless, whose mother works all the time and whose brother is in jail - a self-reliant, tough girl. Their dynamic: she tries to save him from drugs and he tries to save her from the world of drug dealing. This is what the director preserves from the inspirational school genre: the saving project. This is admittedly a bumpy project. The people in the film are lonely, self-conscious people who don't want to be saved. Half Nelson approaches its subject with some grimy cinematography and slow pace - still, I cannot resist feeling that it is a sentimental film that thinks of itself as a bold rule-breaker. It gestures towards questions about class and race, but all this remains gestures, self-conscious gestures.

Döden er et kjaertegn (1949)

Erik is a mechanic. His colleagues are constantly bullying him about girls. One day, a rich dame arrives at the gas station and flirts with him. She knows what she wants. And, after a bit of hesitation on the guy's side, she gets what she wants. Erik breaks up with his kind-hearted girlfriend and moves in with the dame. The film shows how their lives are torn apart: love transforms into misery and violence. An over the top melodrama, Döden er et kjaertegn is as infatuated and as crazy as its character. In other words: don't expect sober lessons on attraction and lust - expect a brutal, woozy story with a sordid end. Obsession all the way.

Edith Carlmar directed the film. She is rumored to be Norway's first female film director. Can this really be true? Anyway, Döden er et kjaertegn belongs to a sleazy noir tradition I cannot help but adore.

Lorna's Silence (2009)

I regard Luc and Jean-Pierre as two of the best directors of our times. Their films strike an ethical and social chord that never fail to engage me. This is the reason why my verdict of Lorna's Silence may be too harsh. I was disappointed, even though I was also aware of the many strengths of this film.

Lorna lives in an apartment with a heroin addict. She comes from Albania and now lives in Belgium on some sort of marriage-for-sale deal. She is dependent on gangsters. The transaction and the network of sinister-looking gangsters are only hinted at. We suspect there are shady things going on and that this is making the protagonist very scared. Soon, it gets clear that the drug addict is to be killed. Lorna knows about it, and she seems to think that she will marry another man, a Russian gangster get a passport and then get the possibility to be with her lover. She dreams of opening a café with her lover, leading a normal life. But soon enough she realizes what is about to happen - and the film follows her ethical response.

Like all of the Dardenne-movies, Lorna's silence introduces heavy and serious ethical questions, crystallized into hectic situations in which a person must act, must choose, must respond. The problem I had with this film is that the direction did not appear to be as tight as what I have experienced it to be in other movies of theirs. The world of the character is established meticulously, yes. But the focus of the film is sometimes a bit erratic, which makes my attention stray from the central existential concern: what does it mean to try not to care about another human being, to treat this person as just a means?

Lorna's silence is a claustrophobic movie. Many of the most important scenes take place in Lorna's small and shabby apartment - here, her relation with Claudy plays out. We see them, both trapped in their own lives. But there is also an external world which the film introduces: a seedy bar, the houses Lorna and her lover visit to scout for the perfect location for their café. These scenes come as a relief. This sense of relief is strengthened also in the very last couple of scenes, and here I think the Dardenne brothers really lose track of what they want to do. Without spoiling this ending, I found it ambiguous in a problematic way. The Dardennes, to me, are making movies that are clear, yet complicated. Lorna's silence, or at least its ending scene, is compromised by giving in to what to me appears as a rather desperate attempt to present something 'interesting' and 'mysterious'.

Dodsworth (1936)

William Wyler's Dodsworth works up an almost Henry Jamesian fascination with the difference between the 'continental' (European) and the 'American'. Or maybe we should blame Sinclair Lewis, who wrote the novel on which this film is based. Anyway: great film, great direction - great characters. We are introduced to Ruth Chatterton's Fran, a dame who speaks so quickly that we can hardly follow what she says. She dreams about Europe, good old Europe! Adventures! Her husband (Walter Huston!) is a wealthy businessman. He is uncomfortable with the idea, but tags along. He says he needs a break now that he's retired. The old chap reluctantly follows her every whim, just trying to make her happy. Early on, we gather there's something wrong with the way they interact. Their 'relaxing' little holiday in Europe turns into a clash between the spouses. The wife accuses the husband of lacking a sense of culture. But when we see them, it is sometimes he who is enjoying himself with simple tourist attractions, while his wife seem agonized, even agonized when flirting with other men (well, she is almost about to marry a baron!). The husband even finds a flirt of his own, a European beauty.

The film takes us to the American tour of Europe. We can see William Wyler's wry smile when he introduces us to the increasingly americanized places the tourists are herded to and find some comfort in. The idea of Europe mirrors ideas about the US. Europe is here represented through the bitchy wife: she is 35, but thinks she is still young (...). In other words: Europe is the past. Simultaneously, we see the husband's development as he starts to flirt: he is shown as youthful, practical, vigorous.

Dodsworth makes us care about its characters - even the nasty ones. It shows us self-deception without despising the ones who deceive themselves. The husband's and the wife's self-deception are seen in relation to each other. He is naive, afraid perhaps, and she uses his naivety for her self-centered purposes. This way of conveying the disintegration of a marriage is artful - instead of contempt, the perspective of the film is that of gentle humor and a quiet sense of devastation.