Nosferatu (1979)

One could say lots of things about Werner Herzog's take on Nosferatu. One could, for example, say that it is more sexist than almost any other movie (the vampire can only be killed by a woman with a pure heart, or how it was: oh look at the true self-sacrifice of a beautiful woman!). The second thing to be said is that it is a brilliant film, one of Herzog's best, a stylistically marvellous show-off that needs no particular technical devices. Bruno Ganz, who is always good, plays Jonathan, the decent bourgeois man with a beutiful wife. He is sent on a business trip to the strange land of werewolves and old tales, in which Dracula resides. Kinski plays Dracula, and of course he adds both drama and strangeness to the role. You know the rest of the story. The only thing Herzog has added is his usual tirade about science and how we are misled by scientific thinking. The film features countless striking scenes (even small ones, as a little girl coughing in a harbor filled with rats, people and a boat). The film is shamelessly pessimistic and the message is: evil will - pervade! The film is a mix of funny and sad. We see a doomed world, and even the Dracula figure itself lacks all marks of 'evil', he is more a tragic figure. On the other hand, Herzog's coy humor is expressed in many places, for example in the character of van Helsing, a scholarly doctor-cum-vampire hunter. Nosferatu, thankfully, has very little of the proneness for blood&guts of traditional horror movies; it opts for aesthetics and atmosphere more than sensation.

Cosmopolis (2012)

Cronenberg is Cronenberg and Cosmopolis is no exception. Cronenberg has always been interested in how the world as we know it is torn apart, how glitches are opened, how the clean surfaces are smudged. In my opinion, this is a far better achievement than many of his last films (Spider, A history of violence, the Freud&Jung film), which does not imply that Cosmopolis is a masterpiece - it's not. It's a messy film that could've been straightened out, some scenes could have been discarded. Especially towards the end, the film loses much of what it had going for it. It is the urban dystopia of the first part of the film that I was thrilled by. Cronenberg's cold, icy gaze looking at these people who are not elusive at all - they are walking dead. A young businessman sits in a limo. Destination: the young man needs a haircut. A security risk has arised on the radar and the president is in town. A rap star's funeral is celebrated somewhere on the streets. The traffic is on a standstill. The security guys advise change of plans. The young man wants his haircut, and the limo continues its strange and hallucinatory route uptown, NYC. (Or I guess its uptown, I don't know exactly.) Business talk mingles with quasi-marxist speeches. The world of business is depicted as a lonely, lofta universe with no contact whatsoever with the surrounding world. Capital shits out golden eggs but the eggs are rotten inside. A world is about to crumble, or will it? The businessman has what he needs in his car, even his own theoreticain and prostrate doctor, and he doesn't let angry demonstrators scare him. He speaks in a monotonous drone and there is no sign of life in him. He quarells in a zombie-like way with his girlfriend, and engages in anonymous sex with a security guard and a mistress. Towards the end, we meet his Nemesis. The nemesis dons a towel on his head; Kraaazy vs. Kraaazy. Is there a Resolution? Oh.... My friend pointed out that Cronenberg's film lacks perspective. What should we understand this scenario as? Dystopia? Or are we already there? What kind of dystopia? I agree with my friend that there are many unclear things here. - - And what should one really say about a film as icy as this one?

I wonder what the Twilight fans thought about Cosmopolis.

Archipelago (2010)

I suppose the budget of Archipelago is not of a millions-and-millions dollar scope, as this is a film in which locations are few, and no particular special effects are used. In other words: it's a simple film, with a simple plot - but that is also why I loved it. Joanna Hogg may not be Ozu, but she sure has a good eye for familial conflicts of the kind that grow and grow, often in a way that is not acknowledged by anyone. A family of three goes to an island to have a vacation. They hire a house and even a maid to fix dinner for them. From the get-go, there is tension in the air. The son is irritated that his girlfriend couldn't come. He is angered by the other family memeber's treatment of the maid. The mother and the sister treats the son as somebody who should get a grip, get "realistic". A never-endeing sadness in how these people are alienated from each other, and how they hide out in their own rooms. We see these tensions in small details, in the way things are discussed or the way discussions are broken in silence. In one scene, we see the family gathered at a restaurant dinner. The sister starts to make a fuss about the soup, and the situation immediately gets excruciating. Gradually, the conflicts get grittier, but there are never any big revelations or anything of that kind. What we have is simply people with certain difficulties in relation to each other. Hogg is not the kind of director that hunts down big drama. Archipelago has the feel of a Mike Leigh or Kore-Eda movie; understated, yet clear (and very English, the upper-class people who shoot partridges on the island included). Locations are used to great effect, making this into much more than just a dark family tale: no details seem superfluous. There is no atmospheric music, no lavish outbursts. It's a film in which ordinary things as the meek, cold sunshine is used to great effect. Hogg knows her medium, no doubt about it. I look forward to her next films.

Maurice (1987)

Maurice is based on a novel by EM Forster and considering this is a Merchant-Ivory production, the film is pretty interesting, daring even (almost). Yes, this is a film in love with its time period (the years before WWI), its props, its sense for innovation, its mannerisms and neuroses. But it is also a film about love. Maurice is the young bourgeois kid who falls in love with a fellow Cambridge man. Their love story does not work out well, as the other lover is more interested in Plato than his lover. His friend becomes a pillar of society, a man who passes the time strolling around his estate and making politics and a name, while Maurice broods and whiles away his time in a boring business office in London. The story revolves around love of the unspeakable kind, the tensions it reveals, the strange glances of people who know, who suspect, who guess. As a film, this is nothing out of the ordinary, but this is not to say that the film lacks style or inventiveness. It is, I must admit, terribly elegant, capturing details and taking its time to tell the story. As an adaptation of the novel, this is a pretty decent attempt at being true to the source. In a exquisitely tasteful way, Maurice takes a deep breath of a society full of lies and pretense. The shortcoming of the film - and the book - is extremely crude depictions of class differences.

Shadow of angels (1976)

Fassbinder acts in a prominent role in Shadow of angels (dir. Daniel Schmid) and it wouldn't have surprised me, had he directed the film, ripe with typical fassbinderian elements: references to Marx, doom & gloom, stagey presentation. This is the uplifting story about a pimp and a prostitute. Their lives are miserable and gradually they become even more miserable, as more people are drawn into their circle. The 'rich Jew' (as he is called in the film) for example, who 'seduces' the prostitute. Love and capitalism - intertwined. Or shall we say: 'love'. Plenty of contempt, contempt for oneself and for others. What makes the film work is its structure. At first we have a fairly realistic setting, but by and by, the film becomes more theatrical. We are dragged deeper into the hell-hole that the story comprises. The actors are veritable zombies, muttering sinister words, never communicating. One may say that the entire thing is intentionally flat. No nothing in terms of feelings or change, or loopholes. Instead, we are fed with existential poison and political commentary: fascism lurks around the corner, be it in the shape of a cabaret artist & father dressed up in a sleazy gown. - - Prepare yourself for a heartwarming experience!

bullhead (2011)

Michaël R. Roskam's Bullhead explores the connection between masculinity and industrial breeding of animals. But even though the film takes a critical perspective on masculinity and the construction of masculinity there are some scenes that I would argue fall into the trap of male self-sentimentality, where being male in the non-conformist way is reduced to a form of tragedy. Despite being an interesting take on gender and animals, the problem with Bullhead is that it scoops to much material into a small film that would have required much more coherence and focus. The story wobbles unsteadily between the story of Jacky, pumped up guy whose innermost desire seems to be being a real man, and the story about the shady business of farming that he is involved in (the animals are pumped up as well, with illegal substances - in many telling scenes we see a resemblance between Jacky's physique and the cattle). It tries too hard to be a crimi-drama, without having the time to fully excavate the criminal underworld that it tells about. The film follows Jacky's attempt to understand his past and deal with his foes, but also on the level of psychological drama, there are some weak points (Jacky himself is a man of few words, mostly we see him making business deals or taking T, admiring his own bull-like body). We never see Jacky in his day-to-day work with the cattle. - - It is a tough film, and the image it conjures up of Belgium is not exactly beaming with a friendly light. Bullshead's Belgium: concrete, ugly roads, seedy clubs, industry, hard people, political hostilities.   

Death of a salesman (1985)

Work can become the biggest illusion of one's life, or it can manifest all kinds of delusional thinking, lies and rotten&impossible projects. Work can take on a life of its own, becoming a lofty dream about what life should be that has nothing to do with living with other people or doing good. This is work as an abstract striving, to be number one.

Death of a salesman (dir. Volker Schlöndorff) creates a vivid image of a man living in his own world, dreaming his lonely dreams about the successful life, being the perfect salesman. In reality, this man, Willy as he is called, is lost, on the verge of alzheimer's, and has lost touch with his family, nursing an antagonistic relation to his son, the one who could have become a brilliant football player. After a bunch of years on the road, his boss can no longer afford to pay him a salary, so he lives on commissions only. He's a shattered man, and were it not for his can-do wife and his kind neighbor, he would have ended up in poverty a long time ago. Dustin Hoffman's performance may be severely theatrical, but it is fascinating to see him veer from anger and humiliation to incoherent nostalgic mumbling. The two sons have come home for a while. One whose career is somewhat pleasing to the father, even though - a bum, quite successful. The other is getting old, 34!, and has not dedicated his life to anything specific. Death of a salesman revolves around the tragedy of appearances. Appearances will always, at some point, wither away to reveal an ugly truth or a scary lacuna. What do these people want? Well, instead of didactically leading his characters to the light, Arthur Miller, who originally wrote the play, show how relationships are sedimented and how change comes to seem more and more impossible as people's perception of themselves get increasingly rigid.
 

Drive (2011)

80's aesthetics, Chromatics, late nite driving, brutal violence. Drive (dir. Nicolas Winding Refn) is a tough film with arthouse sensibilities. The main character - driver, for the movies and for people with shady agendas - remains elusive and taciturn, and throughout the movie, he has this weird look on his face. The driver meets a girl whose husband returns from jail. The ex-con is in trouble and the driver's love for the girl and her kid makes him help the man - and ends up in a mess. The question is whether Drive is a mere stylistic exercise. Well, maybe it is, but it is a good-looking one, with eerie atmosphere and great cinematography. The violence, however, is gratuitous and could have been left out completely. But honestly: as a trashy thriller movie, Drive is far superior to its explosion and action-centered peers. I mean, even as a person rarely bemused by action-flicks, I have to admit that the driving scenes - augmented by slick music - are shamelessly impressive, mostly because they stay quiet, focusing on grim-looking L.A: non-places, parking lots, the urban desert. Drive's slow and icy aesthetics borrows one or two things from Cronenberg's Crash. Sadly, the film loses its grip after about half of its running time, only to continue on the path of ultra-violence and mobster tough-guy dialogue.

Room at the top (1959)

Love or money? We've seen millions of films on these theme, some of which are pretty good, other again floundering in the sentimental and schmaltzy lane. Room at the top (Jack Clayton) belongs in the first category. It offers no tidy solutions. Instead, it offers bad choices, deluded thinking and a bleak view on life. Joe lands a job in a small town where everybody knows each other. It's after the war, and the scars of the war are still visible, also in the geography (Joe's home was bombed and the surrounding area is now in the state of garbage heap). Joe is from the working class, and it is his intention to get the hell outta there. This, he thinks, he will do through winning a young girl's heart - to get into her daddy's purse. He is determined enough, no hesitation there - until it's too late. At the same time, he dates a French girl, a few years older than him, who has a dirty reputation. This is the kind of film in which cruelty is an aspect of almost every relation - from business relations to relations between lovers. The message seems to be: self-deception feeds on itself, creating an even deeper level of self-deception, from which it is hard to get away. It is also a film in which society is seen as strongly divided into classes, even though some people try to conjure up "a different age". Money talks, bullshit walks and the taste of first love is sweet but mostly rotten. Room at the top is an angry film about a world of disenchantment and YOU should watch it.

Autumn leaves (1956)

A lonely woman, a hard-workin' typist, meets a lonely - and younger - man. Despite a few moments of hesitation (is she ready to settle down?) she eventually marries him and everything looks bright. It turns out the man is lying his way through life - he has been married, and his wife, well, she ended up with his father, something that has 'slipped' his mind, only to be revealed, violently. The wife tries to sort things out. She still loves her. The man goes crazy after a big revelation in the dark psychosexual regions. Autumn leaves (dir. Robert Aldrich) is a melodrama and also a film about psychiatry. It is unclear whether the image of medicalized psychology is positive or not; all we see is: it works. Electric shocks make a man sane and even love survives. At the same time, the young man's way of repressing and forgetting the truth is not something that one shakes off easily. Autumn leaves is a raunchier than the most obvious form of love-oozing drama, darker, too. We never quite know how to interpret the ending scene. Are these people deluded? The question this film asks is: what is the difference between love and need? In what way do we need the people we love? In what ways can that need be perverted, or is it perverted already? The woman becomes a mother for the young man, and this is hardly something Aldrich treats as a neutral fact. Somebody called the film an oedipal nightmare and I tend to agree. This is a rough film packaged in Nat King Cole's croon - if one wanted to, one could say that Autumn leaves treats the run-of-the-mill romance in a tone of parania. The two protagonists' fears mingle, and what we end up with is not so glossy as one might first think.

Joan Crawford looks great.