Oxen/The Ox (1991)

Oh no! Sven Nykvist shot a great many fine-looking movies in his day, but Oxen, one of the films he directed, is not exactly a masterpiece. The images are beautiful, of course, capturing the bleak light of wintry Småland or the harsh environment of a prison. But beyond this, Oxen turned out to be a sentimental, almost embarrassing movie. The story takes place during the drought & famine years in the middle of the 19th century. Some go to America, others remain. The times are tough and in a confused state of desperation Helge kills his employer's ox with the intention of getting food for the winter. His wife blames him for what he did, even though they have a small kid to feed. In the end, his crime is revealed and he gets a cruel life sentence. Stellan Skarsgård triest to make the best of his character, the tortured Helge, but he is given clumsy line and not much to work with. Max Von Sydow is the only memorable character from the movie, playing a well-meaning pastor. The film is melodramatic, immersing itself in misery rather than shedding new light on the situation at hand. This is the kind of film in which one bad thing after another happens but the only thing I was left with was feeling numb, not caring much about the fate of these poor souls. Nykvist tries to scrape up a moral drama about poverty and bad conscience, but the magic is in the details, and in this movie, the details are never focused on. Instead, the characters are one-dimensional and so are their moral problems. The cinematography is austere but the austerity never takes off, it never takes me anywhere - it's just ... pretty.

The Elephant Man (1980)

I watched The Elephant Man as a kid and haven't watched it sense. Despite some sections that end up much too sentimental than they need to be, the film turned out a much more interesting experience than I expected. Victorian-era London may be a surprising choice of movie setting for David Lynch, but I must say he evokes a place that one still recognizes as Lynch's territory. I've read that the film may stray from the real story about the elephant man, who apparently was indeed working at a sideshow, but was not treated nearly as badly as he is in the movie. But as I see it, Lynch's movie is not primarily about the elephant man as a particular person. He focuses more on the society that breeds interest and curiosity for the unusual, the monstrous, the extravagant. I'm not saying that Lynch was making a deep Foucaldian analysis of power and the Gaze, but what I liked about the movie is how he makes connection between the world of seedy sideshows, the clinical hospital and the bourgeois salon - as places where things are on display, whereas other things remain hidden, but where a special Gaze is always directed at some sort of secret, whether it is a scientifically obscure syndrome that is to be brought to the light or whether it is the strange and elusive creature attracting the circus audience. My take on the movie is that this is not so much a tale revolving around the courageous life of John Merrick but that it is an investigation about what it means to "enter society" and on what conditions one does it. - - But some of the sentimental images in the movie (OK they exist in abundance, I must admit) spoil this approach, and make it a quite conventional story in which we are to admire how this man that is first presented as a freak and a monster turns out to be an eloquent man about town, charming ladies and quoting the Bible. (Still, one could read this as a portrayal of the ideal entrance into Victorian society.)

Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea

John Waters (one of my favorite persons in the movie business) lends his voice to the story about Salton sea, a constructed sea that once was a high-end holiday resort, but has now transformed into an environmental disaster. The documentary about Salton sea, directed by Chris Metzler and Jeff Spinger, is both entertaining and tragic. Located in the middle of the Californian desert, Salton sea, originally an accidental, man-made sea born out of irrigation water from the Colorado river, was a project intended to be a part of modernization, the American dream of leisure and fun. As a result of flooding, rising salt levels and hurricanes, tourists turned elsewhere and many of the residents moved away. But some stayed, and in Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea, some local eccentrics are interviewed. They talk about their lives, the sea and what it is like to live near this environmental trash heap where the fish and the birds die because the water is so bad. Some of these residents relent in their opinions: it's still a beautiful place and a good place to live. - - - Few documentaries succeed so well in combining social commentary and personal anecdotes. Perhaps the reason why the film is so good is that it abstains from unnecessary posing. The people appearing in the film never feel just like quirky characters offering comic relief - we start to see Salton sea through their eyes.

My Night at Maud's (1969)

A guy stands with his arms crossed in a bedroom. He looks serious and he's talking. A woman lies in a fluffy bed. She wears a sailor's shirt and she is listening:
- Women have taught me a lot, morally speaking... I know 'women' sounds....
- a little vulgar
- Yes. It would be idiotic to generalize from individual cases, but each girl I met posed a new moral challenge that I'd been unaware of or never had to face concretely before. I was forced to assume certain attitudes that were good for me, that shook me out of my moral lethargy.
- You should have concentrated on the moral and ignored the physical.
Says the girl, who lies in the bed. But we only hear her; the camera sternly focuses on the guy who stands in a slightly different position than before, his arms behind his back looking both relaxed and awkward.

This is a typical scene in Rohmer's My Night at Maud's, one of his early films (even though the director was in his fifties when he made it). Rohmer is famous for the easy-going tone of his movies, despite the constant appearance of philosophical discussions. These sometimes are no more than intellectual prattle that says more about the situation than a sterile philosophical argument. Usually, I'm quite fond of this approach but for some reason My Night at Maud's annoy me instead of thrilling me or sharpening my attention. Also here, discussions about belief, love, and conventions whirl around, and these are always rooted in a particular relation, but somehow I am never engaged in this film. I am irritated by the film's portrayal of the two main male characters. They think about Women and their past Adventures and the next move they are going to make with a girl - yes they analyze it by means of Pascal. The two main female characters merely react to these male 'philosophers'. Yes, one is a free-thinker, an atheist who sees through muddled thinking. But still, everything she does is seen under this aspect of femininity and there is always flirtation in the air. The film is about these two men and their existential problems. The women may talk back ('I prefer someone who knows what he wants!'), they may be well-educated and articulate, but this film is never about them, and somehow, they are always reduced to being Women, playing their part in the sexual game that this film is so tightly involved in.

But maybe I make the classic mistake of disliking the movie because I have difficulties with its characters? I don't find my feet in their endless blabber about Pascal, choice and marriage, but they don't seem to know themselves very well either, and one of the things I must admit I admire about the movie is its way of observing how people open up, start revealing who they are to another, but then they get scared, and start talking about something practical, they draw back, only to open up later on; Rohmer has an eye for this type of dynamic. The main character (do we ever know his name?) has finally found his Blond Girl. They talk. He has made some tea (he's an expert, he says) and they talk about choice. He says that choice for him is always easy. The camera is following their tea drinking ritual - Rohmer is always emphasizing the rituals of everyday life - while the girl says that choices can be agonizing, but not always. And it goes on in that vein. It's just that all of these discussion, all the dramatic turns, leave me cold: I know this is a 'good film', at least many think it is, by my own response was not so enthusiastic.

Ratcatcher (1999)

Lynne Ramsay is one of the most interesting contemporary directors, or so I think. I was impressed by the strangeness of Morvern Collar and her latest film, We Need to Talk about Kevin was both disturbing and eerily beautiful. When I start watching Racatcher - on an old, wheezing VHS-tape where the image is both grainy and unstable .... - I immediately recognize her style, her use of colors and her approach to film characters. Be prepared for a movie that is almost oppressingly bleak. Glasgow. Early seventies. A young kid plays with his friend by the canal, and the friend dies. The boy didn't do as much as he could, and afterwards, he fights with bad conscience. We follow him roaming around his neighborhood, a dilapidated housing area which is partly abandoned. He has two sister and a father who drinks. The world we look at is James' agonized world. One day James takes the bus to the end of the line. He walks around, looking at the houses. There is a field of wheat, almost surreal in its sheer existence, in its distinctive movements and colors. This is a quiet, stunning and dreamy scene which is important for the film as a whole. James is portrayed as an outsider kid, but he's got a friend, a girl who the local boys take advantage of. If you read this, you might shy away from all these depictions of urban misery. But if you know Ramsay's films, you know the quality of imagination there. Even though there are plenty of kitchen-sink realism, cruelty and loneliness in Ratcatcher, there is also a sense of amazement. In one scene, James' friend shows his pet mouse. The local gang takes the pet from him and starts playing with it, violently passing it around them to make it 'fly'. The friend ties the tail of the mouse onto a balloon, and the balloon flies up into the air, up to the moon, and the mouse explores the crevices of the moon together with an entire squadron of mice. This scene provides no consolation, but it expresses an aspect of sadness and hopelessness, it opens up another angle. Ramsay doesn't simply throw a heap of gloomy images at our face, she very skillfully and perceptively constructs a world which I immediately believe, I react to it, I learn to recognize and see different elements of it and Ramsay makes the viewer attends to the everyday regularities of life: the canal is there, the dustbins are there, the kids are playing over there. I think this is one of Ramsay's strengths - her understanding of place. Just to place her film in a broader context, I think a director like Terence Davies makes films which work on the same level as hers, and they both share a sense for the elegiac, the moments in which life both stops and brutally moves on. The film touches on political themes. There is a strike among the garbage men. The area is about to change entirely. But at the same time the film does not give away much hope for change - a feeling crystallized in the scene where James returns to the house he explored in the earlier scene with the weat field, only to find it locked. I would say that this political aspect of the film is not as developed as the more personal story about James, about being a child in a harsh world, about guilt and cruelty. The political remains a backdrop, but it is never explored as such.

Apflickorna (2011)

Apflickorna is Lisa Aschan's first feature film. This is impressive, as she develops a style and approach of her own - even though there are of course connections - I though about Ruben Östlund's interest in social dynamics when I watched Apflickorna, the use of static camera and long shots (in this case combined with extreme close ups) also brought Östlund's peculiar mix of intimacy and distance to mind. What I liked about Apflickorna is its refusal to please, to conform to expectations about how a story is to progrress or what characters should do or how they should react. But this is not to say that Aschan has made a provocative film - I would rather describe it as unsettling, elusive perhaps. Apflickorna is a love story, but also a tough tale about power and competition. When you think 'love story', in this case you have to think about hard-boiled lines uttered in a Humpherey Bogart kind of way, stonefaced. When I reveal that the two main characters are training a form of gymnastics on horses, one girl being a newbie, the other more experienced, you might conclude that this still has to be a cute and feminine little film about friendship and such things that take place between two girls who like to create a secret little world for themselves (this is the stereotype). No. The training is situated within a nexus of power and discipline - you are to exert control, not only over you body, but over any situation you are confronted with. Apflickorna explores how this discipline is achieved, or how it breaks down. Sexuality is depicted as playing out both as a way to uphold power and to break it down. In one scene, the two girls are courted by a guy. They tease him, send mixed signals, and dismiss him. One of the girls may feel differently about the situation than the other, but it all takes place within forms of power, even though the character of this power is not at all clear. The situation invokes the idea of femininity as a power tool, but I am not sure in what way the film treats it differently from sexist rhetoric in which the same image is often present (where women are portrayed as scheming, using their sexuality as a weapon) - I guess that one could see it as connected with the film's generally bleak image of relations as immersed in power configurations. An important and heart-wrenching side-plot focuses on one of the main character's little sister, who is in love with her older cousin. The girl is schooled into how to react ('be tough') and the film shows a kind of vulnerability no disciplinary conditioning or attempts at poker-faced self-control could take away.  Apflickorna has its weak points and those occur when too much is spelled out, when things are said, rather than shown. Most of the time, the stiffness works brilliantly and creates an unnerving tension between the characters, but sometimes this stylized acting feels to calculated (I think about what Bresson would have said, how he directed his actors to be blank, but somehow immediately present).

Calais: The Last Border (2003)

Marc Isaacs' documentary film Calais: The Last Border is a well-made and important documentary about present-day Europe. He follows a diverse group of individuals in Calais, he lets them talk, he shows us the surrounding that shapes their lives. Isaacs refrains from big gestures or slogans, this is the big strength of the film. One of the people Isaacs interviews is a man who hopes to cross the canal, to live a decent life in England. He knows he hardly stands a chance, but he nurses some kind of hope, trying to keep up the spirit. Isaacs also talks to a bar-owner from England who has settled down, at least for a while, even though business doesn't look too bright. Business problem is also the focus of the interview with an elderly businesswoman who tries to cope with economic problems. Not only does Isaacs make us attend to these individual persons, he also evokes this transitory city, Calais, in which most people seem to be moving on, somewhere, but where a lot of people have found themselves stuck against their will. But Isaacs doesn't let the film succumb to mute depression, there is plenty of life here (even in the repeated image of a man waiting for a bus that never comes, scenes take take on an almost Beckettian feel, but without losing any of their sense of ordinary despair), he shows how things change, not always for the better, and how people deal with that. If you want to see a very everyday portrait of European migration - watch this.

Roadkill (1989)

There are three or four movies I simply cannot watch without falling asleep (Alien 3 comes to mind). This must prove they are bad movie, you might think. No, not necessarily. Roadkill (dir. Bruce McDonald) is one of these movies - I watched it again in the middle of the night at my parent's place and I, well you know, fell asleep. It's the dreamiest film about rock musicians on the road I ever seen, as if Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man was set among sleazy, beer-drinking indie rockers. Well, it kind of works. The story is strange and massively erratic and so is the film, in a good way. Somehow, the film has a sort of atmosphere that prevents it from falling to pieces. The main character is a record label employee who is commissioned to track down a rock band. She doesn't know how to drive so she takes ... a cab that worms its way through Northern Ontario. The journey is winding and even though she finds the band, she loses them again, but she meets other characters along the road, one who is obsessed with animals killed by vehicles. I didn't always know what exactly was going on, but that was OK. Roadkill is filmed in beautiful B&W and Canadian bands from the late 80's play on the soundtrack. My recommendation: buy yourself a couple of bad-brand beers, sit down in front of the telly late at night and let yourself be wooed by this eerie, little movie. 

Day for Night (1973)

Quite recently, I re-watched The 400 Blows and was struck by how perceptive it was - an almost impeccable movie. But that is, I think, the only good movie by Truffaut I've seen and Day for Night, a whimsical comedy about the film industry didn't change my opinion on that. My immediate reaction when I start watching a film with this kind of topic is to be on my guard: will this be yet another self-indulgent ironical nod that is supposed to show off the director's capacity for witty self-reflection? In the case of Day for Night, my suspicion turned out to be justified. In my opinion, this was a quite tiresome attempt at comedy where a bunch of knotty social relations are interwoven with the messy business of movie making. The crew is depicted as a troubled family that is all the time at the brink of splitting up and everybody is having their own private or social problems. OK, one may say that Truffaut manages to create a less glamorous image of film-making and the everyday life of shooting a (in this case: terrible and cheesy) movie than we are used to but no, Day for Night doesn't really have any dirt under it's nails - in the end this world of hotels and movies sets is portrayed as quite cozy, so maybe I shouldn't complain about the lack of friction. He also choses another perspective on movie-making than Godard's Mepris, something I am grateful for (not being a fan of Godard's self-congratulatory musings - but Fritz Lang was good) - Truffaut presents a tender homage to movie-making, to the process, to the staunch work it involves. The story has its moments and some things actually are quite moving, including the cat not doing its job on the movie set. But most of the time Truffaut is involved in conjuring up a sort of nostalgic attitude: people don't make movies like this anymore, let's show how we did it the old way. In this case, I wasn't as charmed as many other people seem to have been by this movie.

Submarino (2010)

Two brothers whose lives go from bad to worse. The brothers had a horrible childhood with abusive and alcoholic parents. Now they don't speak to each other anymore. The first brother has a kid and he tries to act like he leads a normal life - for the kid. Except that he is a junkie who needs to finance his abuse somehow. The other brother has recently been released from prison. He drinks beer and works out, trying to make do in a tough world. Thomas Vinterberg's Submarino has its indubitable moments of tragic realism, but too often I feel I know exactly where it's going and, yes, it's going right in that direction. Two weeks after having seen the film, I can no longer recall more than a couple of scenes, all of which have an immediate sense of depression in them, which Vinterberg captures rather well - especially the father trying to keep up appearances. I feel like I've seen this film a thousand times: a dark film about misfortune and emotional fragility, but which has no particular perspective on this misfortune; our faces are just pressed against it. And it is also quite revealing that the two characters are men - there is a clear tendency towards male miserabilism here. Some of the actors are good, however.