Milk (2008)

Milk is the second part of Semih Kaplanoglu's autobiographical trilogy. The films are loosely related, and a ideosyncratic aspect of the trilogy is that the story is told backwards - the first film is about a grown man, the second about a teenager, the third about a child. The main character, Yusuf, we saw in Egg is here an aspiring poet. He lives in a small child with his mum and as he did not make it in the entrance exam for the university he has to settle for another kind of life. This is not easy. He makes a little money selling milk. He's in love with a girl who is also having an affair with another man. The film deals with the young person's ordeals in trying to get clear about the future. A political dimension of the film appears when it is evident that Yusuf is supposed to do his military service. Yusuf seems to loathe the idea of joining - this is not the life he wants. Anyway, he is not forced to go because he is an epileptic. He is a dreamer, a loner. But somehow, the film manages to dodge almost all clichés about dreamy young men - Kaplanoglu offers us a gentle, yearning perspective that perceptively captures what it is like to worry about the big choices one has to do in life. One of the central relationships here is the one between Yusuf and his mother, whom he adores - he even writes poems about her. Oedipal drama? Well, not in the way you expect it, I think. The boy is eager to be the good son, the worthy son - and seems to fear that he is failing also in this respect. The mother has met a new man, an official - this changes their relationship and we see some kind of resentment in the son. The son feels rejected, perhaps humiliated.

The visual style of Milk is stunningly beautiful, but not in an overwrought way. Kaplanoglu's film is at times so striking that it is difficult to watch. The first scene is so eerie that one is almost jumping out of one's chair - I will not say more about it here. I know nothing about rural Turkey so I cannot say anything about that, but it is the surroundings that stand out. One segment that is hard to forget is a visit that Yusuf pays at his friends job. The friend work in a mine. But also he is a poet. The two talk. It's a scene full of sadness - crushed dreams, longings, fears.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

The Maltese Falcon is of course a classic noir film and as usual with these films, the story itself is secondary - the most important thing is how the characters view what is going on, how they perceive a very complex chain of events, how they are dragged into something, lead into something or are investing themselves. The concrete plot (based on some novel by Dashiell Hammett) is about a private detective who is immersed in the search for a statuette. A dame (Mary Astor!) with some phoney tale is, of course, the reason why he ended up in the mess. In this film, the main character is not the usual anti-hero in the sense that Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade seems to have far more insight into what is going on compared to most of the manically driven noir types. Then again, this movie was made in 1941 and there was barely such a thing as film noir. But Spade is otherwise the sort of weary-looking guy that hundreds of noir films rely on: the tough, sometimes violent, man who talks in muscular idiom.

John Huston focuses on the cravings, the hostility and the lust - and perhaps also a sense of "honor", code of morals: a sense of what one has to do, despite one's personal feelings about it - a very interesting form of conventional morality where the question arises: what does Spade really care about? Obviously, it is not the murdered partner. The Maltese Falcon is thus a violent film, even though it does not show that much explicit violence. There is more an air of violence that never leaves. There is for example a brilliantly filmed conversation between Sam Spade and a shady crook called Gutman. The camera swirls, Gutman offers Spade a drink, they talk, Spade drinks - and passes out. There are many scenes like this, vigorosly built, where tough talk and tough dealings make one thing lead to another, double-crossings and triple-crossings.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)

Even though I am no connoisseur of Dario Argento's films (having seen only one or two, many years ago), I highly enjoyed the utterly stylish and stylized horror sleaze of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. The standard fare story involves a bystander in a labyrinthine quest - its unclear what this quest is, but at first he sets out to find a murderer, then he is accused of the murder himself, and then he is chased by the murderer. The images evoke a world of cat-eating weirdos, stuttering pimps and dark alleys. Cheap tricks are used to great effect. The main character, the American bystander, has the sort of innocent mania that is propulsive in this kind of context. During the first dramatic part of the film, we see him witnessing a horrifying scene in an art gallery, where a man is trying to kill a woman. The American enters the gallery by breaking the window, but is then trapped. The images immediately create a splash; colorful, kitschy and evocative. Argento knows his craft and plays on the viewer's worry about what will happen the next second. Some argue that The Bird with the Crystal Plumage hints at broader social topics and that it contains several references to patterns of social domination. I must admit I did not pay much attention to such undercurrents. I just noticed that cages were an important image (birds kept in a cage, a lunatic artist keeping cats in cages, the apartment that becomes a leathal cage), and is also mentioned in the title. The ending scene shows a boxy television and on the screen we see a cheesy studio, in which a murder is transformed into sensationalism - a sort of entertainment cage.

Color me Kubrick (2005)

A film about bad impersonaters of famous directors sounds like a lousy meta-movie. Color me Kubrick is intentionally lousy, a farcical film about a guy who says he is Stanley Kubrik, the director of 2001, A Clockwork Orange and Judgement at Nurenberg. John Malcovich is of course a good choice for this kind of role - Malkovich is good at dry, dead-serious people with blank faces. Color me Kubrick is absolutely no cinematic masterpiece, but it is quite funny to watch how the rather drab story about a guy who tries to fool people gradually turns into a carnival of, well, very, very bad acting. Malkovich's con artist is savvy and outlandish and tries to impress everyone from tough guys to big shots in the entertainment business. It is this savviness that rescues this otherwise quite, quite shaky affair.

Her (2013)

A guy in love, the classical storyline. A guy in love with a silky-voiced operative system - a not so likely plot for a romance movie. Or maybe Her is not a romance, more a leathally funny dystopia of what we might become. Spike Jonze created a beatifully crafted and restrained movie that uses its crazy but still eerily recognizable story as a leverage for social critique. But the basic level of the tensions developed is the deep loneliness felt by the shy main character, a drab newly divorced office worker, Theodore, brilliantly played by Joaquin Phoenix. His job consists in writing emails for other people who cannot express their emotions. Theodore acquires a new operative system, a kind of electronic assistant. Voice and all. The assistant develops from mecanic task manager to ... well - every description depends on Theodore's attachment. So basically this operative system bears a resemblance to Theodore's office job - a function that stands in for emotions. The world of Her revolves around attempts to make emotions calculable. Theodore's romantic "partner" is his friend who always reasserts him, boosts him, always has a soothing word. But, oh, then it's this thing about "learning" algorithms. Theodore's OS has a, erm, life of her own. Her muses on the familiar image of the expanding and dangerous machine. Instead of HAL, we have a silky-voiced OS that teams up with her ... friends. The film works because it uses its sci-fi-leanings not as a detached thought experiment but rather as an emotionally grounded investigation of loneliness and social awkwardness. Theodore's OS is the perfect image of wishful thinking - and of course it turns out that there are more to us than our simple wishes, even those wishes are not that simple. Her shows the brittle character of a world that we try to construct and manage, and it also show, to toe-curling effects, what happens when things fall apart. Some of the most memorable scenes portray Theodore's interaction with "real" people - Jonze masterfully mixes the comical with the sadness that these human encounters express. Hoyte van Hoytema's cinematography frames these moments in minimalist, almost claustrophobic settings and lets them bathe in a worrisomely clean-looking light.

Onibaba (1964)

One of the movies that have really struck with me in a way that I can't really explain is Woman in the dunes, the strangely evocative film (directed by HiroshiTeshigahara) about an entomologisk who is stuck with a woman who lives in a pit. Onibaba, directed by Kaneto Shindo and released in the same year, has a similar dreamy and mysterious quality - and they also share a focus on the sensual that never strays from the mysterious tone. Nothing is explicitly explained in these two movies. We are taken to places - in the latter case, a wild and rugged-looking grassland. The time: feudal, pre-modern. The story of Onibaba has mythical qualities, but none of this has the effect of distancing. Basically, the tension that builds up between the characters pours from basic emotions, erotic jealousy. And gruesome, almost cosmic, revenge (the story is said to be based on a Buddhist parapble, but no explicit references of this kind are obvious to this viewer.)

A woman lives in a swampland with her daughter-in-law. Most of the people they meet are soldiers. But these are not the meek kind. They are killers who murder samurais and sell the goods they scavenge. Their cozy little routine is threatened when a man tells them that the son/husband is dead. The man asks all kinds of questions. The older women suspects that the daughter-in-law will engage in both business and other affairs with this man, and tries to offer her own services to him. This is the starting point of a series of hostile and also genuinely scary events. A demon's mask will have a significant role.

The reason why Onibaba is actually a frightening film is that it so closely takes us to a specific place - we are, so to speak, dragged deeper and deeper into the world of the movie. The place - with sword-like grass and compact, thick nights - almost becomes a character in itself. One could say that it is a family drama that lapses into a horror story immersed in erotic tangles and fears. A family drama that is the opposite of "genteel". Onibaba is all about lust, blood and darkness. Along with sweaty, matter-of-fact acting that really enhances the grimness of the gothic tale.

Shindo has made lots of movies. I haven't seen many of them, except for the marvellous, haunting documentary-like Naked island that was made a few years before Onibaba. Both films attend to a ritual-like form of existence, even though they show extremely different existential modes.

Bekas (2012)

The protagonists of Karzan Kader's Bekas are two brothers, Kurdish orphans, who try to survive in a war-stricken country. The story is set in the 90's in the Iraqi part of Kurdistan. The kids head out on a journey in which they try to cross the boarder. They run into shrewd smugglers and shady businessmen - the world of the grown-ups is a world of war and cruel deals. The brothers often fight but when they are torn from each other they long for one another. Even though the film engages with tough living situation and manages to make the viewer care about the characters, I get the feeling that the attempt to evoke "the children's perspective" is imprisoned within a very traditional cinematic way of presenting this perspective. The director seems to be worried about the viewer being unable to take interest in a harsh story about kids growing up in hostile circumstances, a military zone. He choses the path of "childish imagination" to shed light on their predicament. The two kids dream about America, about Superman. Their dreams could of course have been used in a good way but here this land-of-nowhere is reduced to formulaic scenes: two kids screaming their lungs out on top of a hill, action-packed danger scenes, a donkey called Michael Jackson, a small romance, even.... The cinematography is much too neat and the music enhances the sugary vibe.

Tru love (2013)

The yearly LGBTQ film festival in Turku is a treat of both feature movies, shorts and documentaries. All movies are not great, but it is great to watch new films from various countries. This years I watched Tru love (dir. Kate Johnson/Shauna MacDonald), a well-meaning but rather conventional film about a woman who falls in love with her friend's mother. The main character: a rugged type with committment problems. The friend: the straight girl who has second thoughts about who she is. The theme in itself is good, and the film explores a mother-daughter relationship in a way that reveals fragility and hang-ups. Sadly, the directors do not steer away from melodramatic traps and the directors also seemed to have been preoccupied in a problematic way with offering a Haunting Lesbian Love Story. The storytelling is, to put it short, not very skillful. The film is partly bogged down in schematic ideas about how a conflict is to be showed on the wide screen. How about the way this film is executed? The cinematography tries to evoke a poetically wintry New York. The result, I must say, is quite flat. The magic never happens. The result - the composition of images - is at times embarrassingly calculated and there are few moments when it does not feel belabored. The big flaw of Tru Love is that it does not rely on subtlety, that is, the viewer's capacity to realize how things are. Every aspect of the relationships are spelled out meticulously - which pretty much ends up killing the movie and the dynamic between the people in it.  

The Apartment (1960)

How many movies about hetero-patriarchy and office politics do you know? Well, Billy Wilder's The Apartment is one of the few that come to my mind. It might be to stretch it a bit too far to desribe it in this way, but there's something true about it, regardless of the lighthearted tone of the film. The anti-hero of the story is called C.C. Baxter and what gives him a place in the world is the fact that he has an apartment ... that he borrows to his sleazy bosses who want a fuck-pad for their girls. He wants to change jobs and does whatever it takes. He climbs the career ladder while being practically homeless.  The film focuses on the loneliness that this career-climbing requires. The film really manages to bring out the sleaziness of these elderly guys and their need to take care of their business in a practical, low-key way. Visually the film is a treat as well. The office looks gloomily sterile; a place where nobody can be at home. Endless rows of desks, harsh light, anonymous space. Idle chatter by the elevators. This is contrast with the apartment, the home - that is no longer a home. Jack Lemmon is quite great as the mousey Baxter - he lends some warmth to the figure. The viewer is always on his side. The comical twists and turns feel a bit outdated: there is the neighbor who assumes that Baxter is some big-shot Cassanova because of the sounds that can be heard through the walls. Etcetera. But interestingly, the romantic plot of the film doesn't just add to the lightheartedness, but has a critical side as well: Baxter and the girl he fancies share the idea of making "a practical deal" by sacrifizing certain things. In general The Apartment is a pleasant movie ... about hetero-patriarchy and the dreadful lies of "meritocracy" in the office.

(500) Days of Summer (2009)

In (500) Days of Summer (dir. Marc Webb) a messed-up chronology is a device to chronicle a failed romance. Unlike most similar movies, it does not start from the moments at which the parties laid eyes on each other, to go on to various expressions of romantic interest, etc. This film goes about it differently, perhaps wanting to give a more authentic picture of how we remenber things, that when we think back on something, we do not line things up in a neat series of events. Usually, memories appear chaotically, sometimes involuntarily. One thing is associated with another, it's all a jumble of emotion and thought. This is perhaps the most interesting feature of this otherwise conventional tale about the guy who falls for the girl who shies from attachment. - - - My own impression of the way this film takes on its subject is that there are an ugly undercurrent there somewhere. So the guy wants the girl but the girl wants to be independent. The story is told from the guy's perspective, which is also the film's point of view, it seems. I would say that the pespective expressed, but never really acknowledged, is that of self-sentimentality, of pity for oneself. The main character seems more in love with being in love, than nurturing a real interest for the lover. She seems to be reduced to an image, and when she breaks with that image, he is shattered. (500) Days of Summer in no way departs from the old&tired tradition of making movies about guys whose yearning is directed at "mysterious girl", and where this "mysteriousness" is both the core of attraction and the big problem. We end up with the following piece of eternal wisdom: women, you truly madden us men.