Good men, good women (1995)

I've been quite impresed by the contemplative, slow-moving films I've seen by the Taiwanese director Hsiao-Hsien. Good men, good women was for some reason somewhat disappointing for me. Its part of a trilogoy that very much engages with the history of Taiwan, and at times I felt the stupid viewer who doesn't really get the subtleties of the depictions of change.  The film contains several layers, one of which is a story about a married couple in the forties who go to China to fight against the Japanese. After the war, they return to Taiwan, where they are politically active, but end up as victims of the political repression of the Chiang Kai Shek regime. The other level is about an actor living in an anonymous flat in present-day Taiwan, grieving her boyfriend & drinking booze. Mysteriously, she receives entries from her diary on her fax machine. The parts are related through the actor's preparation of a role where she plays the woman we see in the other story. For me, the two level weren't really satisfactorily intermingled and I tried to guess at the point of having them both. I remember the film for its neat scene composition that often gave very minute descriptions of a life situation by briefly presenting it - and successfully conjuring up not only political tensions but also strong emotions; the scenes capturing the lively atmosphere among intellectuals making a newspaper are especially memorable, and so are the scenes from the gruesome political prison. The film exudes a deep sadness about the traumatic history of Taiwan and the image we get of the present (the 90's) is a country stricken with corruption and commercialization.  

The secret in their eyes (2009)

Lots of films revolve around unsolved crimes that some eccentric is haunted by, perhaps taking one last shot at getting at the truth. The secret is in their eyes is a film that quickly draws the viewer into its own very tense and also very solemn universe. The main character is a legal cancellor who once almost had an affair with his superior. The attempt to solve an old case sparks old memories of their almost-affair, and they meet again. - - But beyond its tense atmosphere, I agree with the reviewer who compares it to a Law & Order episode with a few frames of nudity thrown in for good measure. The problem with the film is that the case is not that interesting, nor is really the tension that is still present between the retired law types. The cinematography is excellent, though. Some political dimensions of Argentina past & present are hinted at, but, sadly, they remain - for me at least - mere hints that aren't really developed into something to get hold of.

A remake has apparently been made of this movie, but I haven't seen it.

The Westerner (1940)

The Westerner is about the encounter between a drifter, Harden, accused of stealing a horse, and a somewhat morally corrupt judge Bean who hangs every man he convicts, on shady grounds, for crimes. The relation between them is not only defined by the drifter's supposed crime, but also by an English actress the drifter says he knows, and whom the judge is infatuated with. William Wyler's romantic western is also about the conflict between cattlemen and homesteaders, where the drifter acts as a kind of peacemaker, but the film never really rises to the level of penetrating analysis of cultural change. The good thing about this movie, if I were to say something in praise of it, is that one of the main characters switches back and forth between villain and good guy.

Away from her (2006)

Based on a short story by Alice Munro, Away from her is a gentle and, one could say, graceful, yet heartbreaking film directed by Sarah Polley. A marriage changes when the wife gets Alzheimer - but rather than predictable tearjerker, the film develops as an existential drama about what it means to see the person one loves slip away, become unreachable. And the film also choses not to lead us into a narrative that goes from health to sickness and deterioration. When the film starts, a dramatic change has already started. This is a bold move. Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent are both excellent as the married couple. Their roles exude frailty, but in radically different ways. One could say that Away from her focuses on the grieving husband, who is trying to cope with his wife's sickness and also with her attempt to 'spare him'. He feels left out. The film succeeds in making that pain very tangible - it does this in quiet scenes including car rides and trips to the nursing home, to which the wife has moved. Polley does not shy away from the ordinary life of alzheimer's, what living with a person who has it means in the context of ordinary life and routines. The visual style evokes wintry landscapes and harsh light. But, luckily, it does not indulge - I thought - in explicit symbolism. Most of the time, Sarah Polley focuses on sickness in a way that is intermingled with the strange tangle that life is - a tangle of disappointment, joy and grief. She focuses on complexity and relationality, rather than a fetischized attention to the deterioration a person goes through.

Carol (2015)

Todd Haynes moody take on Patricia Highsmith's bittersweet story about closeted love exudes a remarkable dedication to the characters and the story. The languid aesthetics conjures up chilly 50's atmospherics with a fascinated attention to the details of decor and clothing. The slightly grainy cinematography adds some much-needed edge and grit to the slinky dresses and alluring cigarettes.

I haven't really been a fan of Cate Blanchette before, but maybe I just haven't understood her strength. Here, as Carol, the depressed housewife who falls in love with a young shopgirl, here acting has a brave sense of fragility, not to mention a leathal, heavy elegance. The shopgirl, Therese, is subtly played by equally terrific Rooney Mara. We see her intimidated by the older woman, but we also see her acting, being independent, fierce, even. She is very much a young person trying to know herself. These two manage to make us re-consider what is going on in the film, makes us re-consider who these people are. One of Carol's strengths is that, despits its framing in classical melodrama (Sirk), builds upon very unconventional characters. Neither are 'typical' in any sense.

Carol and Therese get involved and from the get-go, the film shows their mutual desire in an extremely powerful way. That desire is, for both of them, intermingled with loneliness. Carol is in the middle of a process of getting divorced, and is scared of losing her daughter. Theresa hangs out with boyfriends, increasingly tired of their prattle and plans. However, Carol is not a film in which we see the lovers hesitate and doubt each other. Yet, they feel lonely and they are scared. The film shows their emotions both directly - focusing on yearning gazes and lines full of secret meaning - and indirectly, for example through how Carol talks to her ex/friend (a Beautifully crafted character, so full of life), or through Therese' bored interaction with her boyfriends.

Sure, there are a couple of one-dimensional characters here. All of them are male. But one might defend this lack of depth with the heart of the movie all the time being the relationship between Carol and Therese. The male characters mainly shed light on the intimacy between the two women.

Rio bravo (1959)

Rio bravo is full of western artificiality but it succeeds, somehow, in filling its limited (this is almost a 'chamber western', no great plains here) world with life and even, a bit surprisingly, sweetness. Sweetness is not perhaps the description one would usually assign to a western movie and here I was also taken aback by this peculiar character of the film. It does have its quota of macho bravura - this is, after all, a John Wayne move - but even Wayne is a bit peculiar in that his role as a sheriff is very physical in a quite unusual way. Physical in the sense not of showing the standard range of masculine posture, but rather in displaying how toughness is suddenly broken down by tenderness. Howard Hawks directed the film and he uses a long format to tell a rather banal story about people gathered in a prison: a drunk, an old guy and a kid gunslinger (bunch of misfits, basically) who all try to protect the town against outlaws that are trying to free a bad guy from jail. Then there is a female gambler for whom the sheriff falls, played by Angie Dickinson with a beautiful range of emotions: she is a woman who shows a resiliant desire for the man, and it is she who pursues him, not the other way around.

However, Rio bravo offers standard fare when it comes to ideology. John Wayne's character is the all-American authority figure protecting the community and above all its female members against external threats. He is brave and he is manly and he is solid - but at least he cannot act on his own, but needs help from figures who might seem weak, but are shown not to be that. This lends some much needed complexity to the story. He is the man who wants to be independent, but this is shown to be a weakness, not a sign of brave strength. The sweetness I talked about is present in the relation between the sheriff and his flawed friends.

The representative of the law, the sheriff is also an image of civilization and social mores. But as I said, the film also shatters the common images of the stone-faced man a bit, and that, perhaps, saves it. (Some moments of random crooning by Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson provide some good cheesiness.)

The quiet roar (2014)

A woman goes to a clinic to undergo a sort of meditative treatment - a sort of hypnosis. She remembers her life, her younger self, scenes of emotional tension. She is diagnozed with life-threatening cancer; she has three months to live. She has a need to reflect on what her life became. The quiet roar quickly established a slow, searching pace. Henrik Hellström has focused on existential matters also in previous films - Man tänker sitt - but here the film somehow never succeeds in inviting the viewer to a quiet place of reflection. The material never really becomes a coherent way of approaching the topic. I have no problem with a shift of tone and uses of different moods and techniques, but here, the effort seems strained. I never really feel involved in the main character's inner journey. However, the acting is often good. Evabritt Strandberg plays the woman who knows she will soon die with dignity and calmness. Hannah Schygulla is the therapist, most of all present through her authoritative voice.

Silent light (2007)

Silent light is not a romance film. It's take on infidelity is rooted in morality and religion. The film pays homage to the Danish director Carl T Dreyer and it also seems to aspire towards Dreyer's singular seriousness. Mostly, this seriousness appears not as a stylistic ploy but rather an attempt to come to terms with something. Johan and Marianne are among the least extravagant lovers I have seen on film. Their infidelity is not represented as an exciting adventure - their affair is simply inevitable, something they cannot resist. Johan's wife knows about the affair; she grievs, but she does not reject him. They are mennonites, and the religious dimension of their lives, of the small Dutch-speaking community in which they live (the story is set in Mexico), is an important aspect of the film. The film treats religion as a way of life, in which ordinary life and faith are intertwined - religion is here far from collectivity and stern rules: rather, confession is emphasized but where people also try to live with difficult things without really acknowledging that they are present. Peace is an ideal, and that ideal is shown in all its ambiguity - as a way of accepting, but also avoiding conflicts.

Nature almost overshadows the characters of the film. The rural landscapes are from the get-go a world in which we are encapsulated - it is no mere adornment. Often, the camera films the characters from far away. The impression is often austere and even sublime (yes, that's a tricky word). A sunriese, almost seen in real time, opens the film, and the experience of darkness/light and chirping birds is one that one will not forget easily.

All scenes do not strike the right chord, but most do. The tone of the film - contemplative wonder, grief - may not smash you with emotion, but it is gripping in a quiet, steady way to see Johan, Esther and Marianne's struggles and agony. Most of all, there is often a sense of waiting here, a sense that gets explicit and heavily loaded towards the end of the film.

Making a film about Mennonites could easily have become a silly obsession with 'people living in the past'. But the people in the films are not turned into caricatures, nor are they exoticized. Their way of life is not turned into a freak-show. Using non-professional actors was probably a good choice. Reygadas choses a stylized, deadpan style for them, rather than the messiness of real life. Mostly, this works quite well, and enhances a sense of waiting - of the agonies that are there, but never fully openly acknowledged. But that technique threatens to make the film lapse into the sort of exoticism it otherwise avoids. The artificiality it goes for is really double-edged.

Vagabond (1985)

Most films about drifters are about men or boys who look for an escape, or who want to find a more free way to live. Agnes Varda's Vagabond is also about an outsider who does not want to settle down, who wants to be independent and free. But in contrast to the tradition of men who seeks to carve out a life in which they settle the conditions, Varda's film is far, far bleaker. The main character is a young woman - one of the harders characters I've seen on film. 'Hard' in a sense I cannot really decide on myself - is she world-weary, is she tough, has she hardened herself? She seems stubborn, but also fragile. Varda leaves all of this quite open, I think; the drifter remains something of a mystery. It is difficult to see what kind of person she is.

It is a simple film, consisting of several encounters between the main character, the drifter, and the people she meets on the road. The film's own harshness (including its wintry, rural landscapes) sometimes makes me think of Bresson. The film plays out as a quest to understand the young woman, and what happened to her. But there is no resolution here, no safe psychological explanations. There are just a few tableux, and we have to connect them and interpret them ourselves. The only thing we know is that she used to work in an office, but now she begs for money, or works on farms for food and shelter. We see her through the eyes of those who meet her. The documentary-like style, however, creates no false pretense at 'real story' (even the voice-over does not do that, the effect is rather the opposite, somehow). Thinking again of Bresson, what 'reality' is here must be defined in other, more existential, terms.

The encounters between the drifters and the people she meets are often a bit disturbing. There are the kind farmers that give her a trailer and some food - but she refuses to participate in their chores. This brings me back to the hardness. There is an air of refusal in her, of resisting something, of detaching. We see her with a professor who takes an interest in her. There is perhaps some erotic tension there. But she moves on, and as the film progresses, her life moves from carefree to miserable. She slides from a state that I would already call detached to a coma-like existence. Varda follows this downfall without sentimentality; we are all the time drawn into the drifter's world, but not directly, rather from the outside, from the perspective of those who meet her. We see her through people's anger, repulsion, attraction. People project their own needs onto her, and she is mostly a blank surface - sometimes playing along, sometimes being silent, stubborn. People feel rejected by her, but also tantalized by her absence-presence, her strange defiance.

Sandrine Bonnaire is marvellous as the mysterious drifter.

Unforgiven (1992)

Unforgiven inhabits classical territory: the story is about revenge. Clint Eastwood - who also directed the film - plays the dangerous killer who has now settled down, trying to lead a quiet life. He has a daughter. He grew up in another era, an era of cowboys and criminals. The world has changed, and he is now an old man. A rider comes by and asks him whether he is interested in making a little money by doing some bounty hunting. The man - he is called William Munny - resists the offer, but then gives in to it. We see that this is no easy decision. Munny has tried to live another kind of life, and all that is now threatened. Typically, the settled-down, quiet life is most of all associated with femininity; Munny's devotion to his new life is a devotion to the women in his life, the dead wife and the daughter. The reason he gives in is also apparently a defense of women: the men who killed a prostitute is to be hunted down. The guy who tries to convince him, Kid, is a mess of a man: he seems to be settled on being a tough killer, despite being blind and clumsy. Munny is old and a bit fragile. This is perhaps what sets the film apart - its emphasis on masculine fragility. This is not something we see often in Westerns, even though there is the ever-present threat of 'weakness'. But here it is not so clear that strength is good and weakness is bad.  We see a transformation of Munnu, but it is not settled whether it is a positive one. He settles in his old ways, his old grimness and lust for vengeance. One could also say that his inner demons are let loose as he is confronted with corruption (he meets a power-hungre sheriff) and is tempted by violence. Beyond the story of a brooding man Unforgiven focuses on the life of the town in which the prostitute was killed. We are presented with journalists, gunslingers, pulp writers and prostitutes. It's a time were legends are already legends - the life of the west is also a life to brag about and try to conjure up. So, much of the film is about people trying to be something, and often failing. It's about inhabiting a world of ambiguity. To the film's defence, one could say that for this reason (the ambiguity) the story does not completely conform with the usual glorification of revenge. Even though there are traces of that. Eastwood's performance is great, and so is also the rest of the crew, especially Morgan Freeman as his partner.