Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)

From the first frame to the last, Jiro Dreams of Sushi (dir. David Gelb) is an absorbing documentary. OK, stylistically, the film may not have excavated new territories, but its presentation of the main character, sushi maestro Jiro, was exquisite, thrilling, even a bit unnerving. I disagree with those reviewers complaining that the film reveals too little of the human drama and the rifts between the members of the family; for my own part, I must say that I liked the quite strict focus on work, the routines, the learning and the future of the business. Jiro is a man for whom life is work and work is life. His small and seemingly - but only seemingly - unpretentious restaurant (drenched in Michelin stars) is a stage for this man's calling: to make the perfect sushi. He is 85, still active, still trying to achieve his goals. For him, the perfect bite of sushi means an almost-Platonist attempt to reach an ideal, or to materialize an ideal. This requires hard work. Jiro is hard on himself, and he his hard on everyone else, too. The film crew follows Jiro, his two sons and their apprentices. We are taken along to the fish market, where we learn what a good fish looks like. We see the crew in action, preparing the delicacies (just watch watch the kind of effort the ... massaging of a tuna-fish requires. It's quite unbelievable if you haven't seen it.) For Jiro, ten years are nothing. To become a master takes time, a bloody amount of time. Repetition is the essence of how he presents work - that, and attention.

I liked the film because it provides no interpretation of Jiro's work ethic. You have to look and judge for yourself: how could this sort of dedication be understood? Is it about work? What does work mean here? Is it mania? And what would you say about Jiro's stern striving for perfection?

I would not like to work for a guy like Jiro, nor would I like to eat at his restaurant (the waiting list is three months): I can't imagine what it is like to eat those bites of sushi while you are scrutinized by Jiro's eagle gaze. This is nonetheless a documentary that held me in its spell and raised some important questions about work and dedication to work.

You Can't Take It with You (1938)

Even though I am not crazy about Frank Capra's populist movies, You Can't Take It with You was a surprisingly enjoyable movie experience - a nice comedy with a few funny quirks; I couldn't help being a little charmed by its lively and light take on tough stuff like property and class (the only red flags in this film is one of the characters who though it would look nice to print a few red flags). Capra's films are usually not filled with ambiguous plot developments and in-between characters: right is right and wrong is wrong (and alienated labor is exemplified by a man sitting in a boring room engrossed by an adding machine). This is the case also here, even if the good side comprises a crazy bunch of people who would much rather play than work. And perhaps this was what I liked about the film: at least here we have an all-American film with no particular enthusiasm about work morale. The message, one with which I would not take issue, boils down to this: dancing and crafting home-made fireworks is much funnier than hunting for a business contracts! (But of course one could point out that the contrast between business on the other hand and merry, creative activities on the other are very typical.) I'm not sayin' this is Thoreau or anything like that, but You Can't Take It with You offers one or two healthy handfuls of scepticism towards what is usually considered Serious Adult Stuff. Then again, one can interpret the message of the film from the point of view of one of the goofy characters, who has made up his mind not to pay income tax - one should be allowed to do whatever one pleases, shouldn't one? oh well. One reviewer remarks that the film could be a critique of capitalism for its colonization of utopian spaces. That kind of makes sense here. In this film, there is no innocent acquisition of money, no good capitalism. But the film is confined to a individualist perspective: you should do what you like. If your job is boring, why do it?

Ulysses' Gaze (1995)

When I was 16, Ulysses' Gaze (dir. Angelopoulos) was a great film. You know, profound. Re-watching it a bunch of years later proved to be excruciating (and very, very boring). Oh. My. God. This film tries so hard to be deep, to be pensive, to provide an overarching story about Europe, the fate of Europe, and the nature of man, grief and love and loss and memory and ... well, post-communist regimes looking for a path. Angelopoulos' film is spelled EPIC and that's part of the problem.  Harvey Keitel tries his best, and Erland Jospehsson is sympathetic, it's just that the film's grandiose aspiration is bound to fail. And it fails. This is not to say that all scenes fall flat - the image of the gigantic Lenin statue drifting on a barge is beautiful. Most of the time the dialogue is heavy-handed, the sweeping and slow cinematography seems derivative and the perspective of the entire film appears to be quite self-righteous - a film about the magnificence of cinema, the mystery and enigma of the moving image; but I never feel that I grasp anything essential about cinema - what happens is that I get annoyed by the pretentiousness and self-indulgence of the film (which has not to do with its being slow or inaccessible). The story has several levels. On the concrete level, it's about a guy who travels from country to country looking for a few reels of early cinema. But the story is also about the fate of the Balkans, Greece, nationalism, war, the past. // It is easy to think of directors who have the skills and power of attention to create a stunning scene out of a seemingly haphazard or commonplace situation. Angelopoulos works in the opposite direction. His scenes are composed to the extent that they appear stifled. There is no life left in them, they are weighed down by the desperate quest for MEANING. Roger Ebert awarded the film with one star. "A director must be very sure of his greatness to inflict an experience like this on the audience...." // This is the kind of film where EVERY SINGLE female person is attracted to this elusive main character A (as in Angelopoulos) - after two minutes in the company of this man who moves around like a zombie and talks in quasi-poetic mumblings, all of these women's hearts start throbbing for this guy; everywhere he goes, women's secret and innermost emotions are unleashed. zZzZ.

India Song (1974)

Before I watched India Song, I didn't even know that Marguerite Duras was also a director of films. If you expect the typical literary film, talky, with a very slight attention to the medium of film - think again. India Song is something else, a hypnotic masterpiece of slow motion bourgeois decadence (but the decadence does not look alluring). There is no dialogue in the typical sense of the word. Instead, the film fuses dreamy&slow images (repetition is often used) and polyphonic narration. Sometimes it is easy to combine the voices and the images, but at times the relation is not straightforward (non-synchronous sound), nor is there a clear linear story to follow. It's a beautiful movie, but what kind of beauty is it? Duras' brings forth a world that is more dead than alive, real life only intruding as an outsider, a sudden rupture. India. Sometimes during the 1930's. A string of men pursue a bored consular wife. A big mansion. In several frames, the camera approaches the mansion from the outside. It looks abandoned, decaying. Desolate surroundings. Are the people we see in the film dead? There are hints of death, suicide, but it is not clear. People dance. Sometimes we see them through mirrors. A piano is playing. The same song, over and over and over again. The camera shows the piano, but nobody is playing it, but we hear the music. The effect is eerie. People lie on the floor. Perhaps they have had sex. They look like puppets, very, very still - they look dead. A man expresses his love for the woman. Voices explain it. A sudden rush of emotion shatters the numb and languorous atmosphere of the film, his desperate screams haunt the group. There is also another story, a fractured story, but it is important: we hear a beggar woman. We never see her, but we hear her voice, and her story is told. I suspect there is a connection between the beggar and the consular wife. The characters' world is a narrow one. They seem locked up within these strange social patterns, they seem locked up within their bodies. On some level, this is the kind of story one comes across in Graham Greene novels: the alienated colonialist, at home nowhere.

The visual style and idiosyncratic storytelling of India Song have some similarities with the films made by Resnais, perhaps, most of all, Last Year in Marienbad (and yeah, the connection is not accidental, Duras wrote Hiroshima, mon amour). These films are enigmas, but they are not films that make you engage in the kind of work where you are supposed to reassemble fragments into a coherent story. India Song defies that kind of intellectualistic approach.

L'Argent (1983)

L' Argent is considered to be Bresson's last great movie. And yes, it is very much a Bresson movie: it has Bresson's economical, even serene, approach to film, acting without emotional expression and it contains themes that are familiar to people having watched his earlier movies (including letters). The story of L'Argent (based on a short story by Tolstoy) seems to have a sort of inevitability to it - it is a story about evil surfacing through a series of coincidences which have a disastrous effect. The film begins with two boys trying to buy a frame with a forged note (one of them acts from the need to pay back some money he owes to a friend), and then the note is knowingly passed on to other hands, among them a fuel trucker, who ends up in court, where he is not believed, loses his job, turns into an acomplice in a robbery, ends up in jail - where he learns that his wife leaves him. From there, things get no better. He is released from prison and then goes on what can be called a killing spree. Being asked to justify one of the murders, he calmly states: I enjoyed it.

No character in the film is seen mulling over alternative paths of action. People act with a sort of disastrous immediacy (made all the more striking in the hands of Bresson's dispassionate actors) - if you are familiar with Pickpocket, you know what this sort of destructive choreography might look like from Bresson's point of view. Bresson shows how different actions have an effect on each other, creating a situation in which goodness does not appear as a possibility - there is deceit, lies and violence. It is tempting to describe the story of L'Argent as an innocent man who, through unfortunate external circumstances and no ill will of his own, becomes another man. Somehow, this seems wrong-headed. Maybe it is the circumstances that makes me think about this (watching Bresson on Good Friday): L'Argent seems to be about original sin and evil as lack - a downward spiral changed only by a sudden change of direction, a sort of radical grace

I must admit that my feelings about this films were a bit mixed. Altough I do admire Bresson's approach to film-making, along with his harshness with regard to ideas, I did at times find myself at a loss of what to make of L'Argent, a film where Bresson very ingenuosly tells a story that only partially happens in the frames. What kind of inevitability does the film depict? Or should it be called inevitability, from what perspective? I do not crave more input about the inner workings of the main character, the fuel trucker. That would make for a completely different, and non-Bressonian, film. It's just that the chain of events move so quickly that I sometimes lose track of what is going on, and this risks making me care less - one gruesome thing happens, and then another, just as inexplicable. Watching the first part of the movie, I started to think that this would be a film about the power of money, but after a while, that stopped making sense as a more overarching theme. But heeellooo, the film is, as a matter of fact, called "Money". At leat this is another take on the destructive impact of money than I've seen before, even though it is of course possible to make connections to a film like Greed - but there seems to be a distinction in terms of fundamental ideas about what an obsession about money does, what kind of havoc it wreaks, and what kind of world it corrupts (or were we already corrupted? When is money a motivation, when is it a symbol for something else for Bresson?).

The theme may be tough to the extent that I have a hard time not attempting to domesticize or putting a false meaning into this chain of events which do not seem to reveal an inner meaning? So maybe the problem is not the film, but the problem is in me, in my limited capacity to understanding Bresson's perspective (and also this time, I have the feeling I'm getting it wrong by talking about 'capacities'!)

If I would think some more about this film, I would perhaps try to elucidate why the story seems to fall neither within the category of causes (it is what it is, it drives) or reasons (trying to make sense of why somebody did what he did) - Bresson seems to evoke an altogether different point of view, and it is this I have trouble grasping. Which leads me to an important question: what does it mean to say that one does not grasp a religious perspective? It is not as if there is something very specific my thoughts are unable to reach, as in the case where I have trouble understanding how the machine of a car works or why Molly chose to invest her money in this type of stock rather than that one. What I want to say is that I feel like I can't decide whether I should say L'Argent is a flawed film, or whether I should say it is a film which I do not understand. Or to state my worry in a blunt way: couldn't the kind of unintelligibility and distance that L'Argent presents to us (forces on us?), where we are not allowed to make judgments, or try out intepretations, evoke a hazardous perspective: YOU SIMPLY CANNOT UNDERSTAND! But that is not really what I would like to say either (as if the contrast we have is: we make judgments or things are unintelligible - hm). L'Argent made me think about some questions in the philosophy of religion I haven't been thinking about in a long time, questions that I have no clear answer to, but questions which are pressing nonetheless.

(Religious themes in films, books etc. are often treated as dangerous because they risk making a work of art didactic or that its openness is closed down. Bresson's film, and this one in particular, is a counter-example; one could talk about openness, but not in the sense that everything is possible, that the work of art exists in an autonomous sphere in which our super-free interpretations keep swirling around in a state of easy co-existence.)

This is a film I should watch again, as I realize that I missed many details when I watched it the first time.

Bashu, the little stranger (1990)

Bashu, the Little Stranger (Bahram Beizai) turned out to be a pleasant surprise. The story follows a young boy from the south of Iran. He is orphaned in the Iran-Iraq war and flees to the north. He ends up in a small village. Perching in a wide field, he first encounters Nai and her two kids. They are first suspicous (among other things, they have no common language), and he is afraid. Gradually, however, he becomes a part of their family. The villige treats the boy with hostility - the film depicts a cruel form of racism. I liked several things about this film. Stylistically, it was a wonderful film comprising long, languid takes of nature and ordinary chores (the scene on the bazaar was extremely well crafted, very simple but very striking). The film's treatment of the relation between the boy and Nai appealed to me in particular. The boy becomes a part of her life, and she cannot help taking care of him, of taking responsibility, of seeing him as somebody to help and shelter. Trust is often seen as a process where people prove themselves dependable (trust as reliance). In this film, it is perhaps tempting to say that trust is earned, but that would be misleading. Nai grows to trust the boy, and the boy grows to trust Nai, and this is an interdependent form of trust which is not at all about proving oneself worthy. Here, we rather see how the villagers or Nai's absent husband presents a temptation: the boy is a burden, is there any reason that he should be there at all? Does Nai really have any obligation to look after him? We see how this temptation is dangerous, but also how it loses its power and how that perspective slips away.

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Wes Anderson makes good-looking and quirky movies about, well, people who do not walk along the common route of life, or people on a quest for oddballsy reconciliation. Even though I like his style, I appreciate his sense of humor, I like his visual world, and perhaps even more importantly, his cheerful-melancholy take on outsiders with a Mission, I can't really say that any of his movies have really resonated deeply with me, or what it would mean to say that his movies could do that. But they are inventive, touching films nonetheless. Moonrise Kingdom looks good, it sounds good (Hank Williams - all the time!) and this sad story about coming-of-age is as off-beat and subdued as ever. But somehow, when I was watching the film I came to feel that the whole thing is so self-aware, so concerned with how it appears that nothing much is left. It's a sweet story about two kids (who are labeled as problem children) running away from the strange society in which they live, and away from aloof and sad adults, hoping for a life in the woods. Or at least, they hope for a summer away from the normal routines and restrictions. They bring camping gear, a few books, records and a cat. But in the middle of the film the ideas seem to have run out, and the rest of the material, to me, is too detached - the whole thing stops being a magical adventure and actually becomes a tad bit boring as I get lost within quasi-action scenes. Moonrise kingdom is something of a one trick pony, however with a truly marvellous use of artifice. But yeah, it's not a bad film, and there are some scenes which got through to me with a strange and tender interpretation of how humans interact with each other. I called it self-conscious, but then again, I never felt that it is contrived or false. Plus, the wonderful ranger telling us about the history and geography of the islands on which the story is set. And - do I need to point it out? - Bill Murray is Bill Murray.

Nobody Knows (2004)

A bunch of kids are left at home while their mother goes off to work. She is gone for several weeks, and then she comes back for a few days, indulging the kids with presents and funny games (or coming home drunk, encouraging her sleepy kids to eat sushi in the middle of the night). After that, she doesn't come home at all. The kids don't go to school. They are told not to leave the apartment, but of course, it's impossible to live that way, so soon enough, they venture out on adventures of their own. The arc of the film is that of tragedy,  but the film rarely leaves the kids' own world - the story is told from their point of view, immersed in their world, in their understanding, or lack of understanding.

Hirokazu Kore-eda is a director with a voice and an eye of his own. I've written about several of his films here, and they all have made an impression on me, and from them I've learnt much about the possibilities of film-making. An important aspect of Kore-eda's films is their attentiveness to how we experience the world with all of our senses - his movies evoke smells, touch and sounds. The stories he tells are situated in a Japan that is not romanticized. Street junctions and non-places are usually given a prominent role - it is often in this kind of mileu that the characthers' lives play out. This is the case here as well. The cramped, solitary, increasingly messy apartment is contrasted with the bustling world outside: streets, a grocery shop (where a kind clerk gives them something to eat now and then) and a park with real flowers and soil.

Nobody knows does not seek out the sensational. The tragedy of the story never flies in your face - what we see is rather hints of despair, loneliness and disorientation. The abandoned kids are not presented as mere victims. Instead, Kore-eda conjures up their desperate attempts to fend for themselves, to make do, to survive. Gradually, they become aware of their gruesome situation - but to an equal extent, this is a narrative about phantasy, about dreams and ways to escape. What is most striking is left for the viewer to ponder on her own: why did things turn out this way? Why did nobody intervene, why did no grown-ups acknowledge the severity and impossibility of the situation? This may be a political film about lack of responsibility, but Kore-eda chooses subdued images rather than a shrieking appeal to THIS IS A TRUE STORY!!! In this way, moralism is dodged and the film is all the more troubling as a result. Even though the camera sticks close to the kids, their small adventures or their idle moments, Kore-eda's approach is not suffocating or intrusive (he is not Ken Clark). The main character, Akira, the kid who, in being a few years older than the others, has to take care of and protect his siblings, is a character who remains quite mysterious. We see his sadness, his worries and his caring manouvres, but the director stays at a distance from him. This is not to say that the film creates no understanding of the kids. What I mean is rather that Kore-eda is not interested in an all-encompassing psychological perspective. This makes his film-making unique: he treats kids as human beings, not as stereotypes equipped with one-dimensional characteristics or a bundle of cute quirks.

Amour (2012)

Some directors have a fabulous insight into film as a form of art where every new topic requires a re-thinking of what it means to craft moving images. Haneke is one of these directors. I would grant him this, even though some of his films choose a remarkably skewed angle of what it is to be human. In Amour, however, Haneke has left some of his cynical attitude behind. The title contains no irony. This is actually a film about love. And what a film! I remember a Finnish-Swedish reviewer writing that most films revolve around themes that do not really concern us that much: space trips, and what not. Amour is about something we all experience, something that we all have to deal with, something that we all have to think about: death.

It's not a flawless film, but Haneke's study of a married couple who grapple with sickness is powerful and moving. He shows their tender interaction, their day-to-day life where the husband tends to the wife, whose illness quickly gets worse, and how he interacts with their slightly alienated daughter (icy performance by a great Isabelle Huppert). Hanake confines the story to their serene, but clearly lived-in apartment (everyday objects are often focused on: a chair, a piece of clothing, a cup). The world outside is reduced to sounds, a hallway (in which an imporant and uncanny dream sequence takes place) and two birds. And, importantly, in one of the very first scenes, we see the couple arriving home after a night out. They notice that somebody has tried to force open the lock of the door. The story is pretty clear from the get-go. The progression is clear. After her first stroke (the second one is not shown) the wife is operated, and is half-paralyzed. The man bathes, feeds, talks to his wife. A nurse comes to look after the woman, but the man accuses her for mistreatment. The man does what he can as his wife gradually slips away from him, but sometimes we see signs of life as they are able to sing together, or repeat words - here, Haneke makes clear how small things matter, how life is also the ability to drink a cup of water, or respond to touch, or the traquilizing effect of words. The film follows the dread the man goes through as he decides what must be done. This is shown without sentimentality. It is hard to watch - the nakedness of the scenes, the intimacy, is something I rarely see, and this makes Amour different from a run-of-the-mill sickness drama. Intimacy, here, shifts from being distressing to being beautiful, and here Haneke, as he always does, confronts me with the important question of what it means to see, to look, or to look away, or to suspect that one sees too much, or that one shouldn't look, that this is something between two people and not for others to see (what does it mean to watch the decline of a human being.

Here I also disagree with one disgruntled reviewer: the film is not, as I see it, a story about how love is tested. No - there is no question here whether the man loves his wife. In the film, it is evident that these people have lived an entire life together, and that it is impossible to undertand what we see in the film without acknowledging this temporal dimension, which we do not see directly. What we do so however is that the husband sometimes fall from love, that he grows to be more and more unhinged, how he shows remorse, and sadness, but this is all one aspect of love. This was, in my opinion, the strength of the film - it is a work of art that actually believes in love. At the same time, it does not make the two main characters perfect, or particularly likeable. They are sometimes cruel, or self-indulgent. In this way, the film conjures up an absolute perspective without being black-and-white. Also - I wouldn't say that the film is mainly a way to desperately elicit a particular emotional response from the viewer. I never felt the way von Trier's Dancer in the dark made me feel, that emotions are isolated from any context, so that I respond in a way that I have a hard time relating to, or articulating - in other words, in the one case, I felt manipulated, and in the other case, I didn't, even though I did respond strongly to it, and found it hard to watch at times.

There are some scenes I wasn't sure what to make of, the scene involving the pigeon towards the very end being one of them. Here, Haneke leaves things open in a way that has an impact on the entire interpretation of the film, and this is, I would argue, an example of weak judgment on his part. The scene is very Haneke, and it shows an aspect of Haneke's art I have problems with: whereas a sense of openness in how we can understand something works to a great effect in other places of the film, here it feels that the openness is more teasing, or provocative, than thoughtful. Here I had a feeling that my imagination is tested in a way I would not like it to be tested or, let's put it like this, Haneke introduces hints of possibilities I would not like to go to far into, but it is hard not to.

But, all in all, a great film, impressive acting and meticulous and elegant cinematography (how sterile, or unsettling, white light floods the apartment - sunlight is rarely seen.).

Naked (1993)

Mike Leigh is one of the directors I've been following through the years with keen interest. Generally, his films have had both the force to move me and to tell me something important. Naked, however, is not his strongest production. Throughout the film, I had the feeling that the bleakness of the story does not add up to anything - as a viewer, my eyes are rubbed into a cynical world with just a hint of resolution, but what resolution, at what price? The main character, a truly unsympathetic man, rapes his girlfriend and travels down to London, where he goes to see his ex, who lives with other people in a house. He's not the perfect guest. Stuff happens. He ends up on the street. He talkes to security guard. He delivers 'deep' prattle about meaninglessness, the universe and that kind of stuff. He is mysteriously taken in by every woman he sees. EVERY woman in the film falls for this asshole. I am puzzled: what does Leight want to say about these women who are treated badly, but who falls for the guy nonetheless? And what would resolution be in this case? We see no hint of change, really. Things are what they are, but people realize that they have to live with each other. Perhaps. To state my worries openly: is this yet another film in which an entire society - in this case post-thatcherian UK - is embodied by an angry young man, whose anger is made intelligible because it symbolizes a fucked-up class society? Why do so many directors, especially those with a sympathetic leftist background, fall prey to this very stereotypical image of masculine anger as justified and always something that should be understood within a larger perspective - whereas women remain figures that are mere victims or mere punch-bags? (One reviewer puts it this way, and I find it symptomatic: "Johnny's unkempt irascibility seems to have been selected by nature as an expedient defense mechanism." M-hm-m. Nature, right? (I had to look up the meaning of 'irascible'.) The reviewer goes on to write: "And the remainder of the characters are essentially well-wrought foils that tease out Johnny's dizzying mercurialness." Though I agree with this, I would argue this to be the film's major flaw: we are locked into Johnny's universe, and this makes it hard to catch sight of who he really is. To articulate my problem in yet another way: Johnny becomes a hero, an intellectual truth-teller who walks through hell, is hell, and the film tells us: there is no comfort, this is what life is! It's what we have become! But once again: what kind of universe is Leigh building, what does he want us to see, to feel, to think? // That said, the brooking, dark images, grim gray-blue light, of an almost post-apocalyptic London are not easily forgotten. Here, Leigh works brilliantly as he plods through hell and misery - or takes a moment to let Johnny converse with a very, very angry and confused Scot.