Gravity (2013)

If you turn to Gravity (dir. Alfonso Cuarón) in the hopes of a good science fiction film, you are, I guess, bound to be let down. This is not science fiction, this is a metaphor. Gravity will not deliver a meticulous account of the life of an astronaut. But what if you accept the level of metaphor? Well, as a human drama, Gravity contains a lot of clunky bits and parts and well some of it is even a bit embarrassing - a slow-motioned drizzle of tears in zero gravity.... But still, for all that, I found the film extremely entertaining to watch (maybe it has to do with how rarely I watch films with a lot of suspense moments?): it was absorbing, and I was surprised to what extent I was drawn in. Some people have pointed out that it lacks cynicism, and I think they are right about that: it's a film about fear and loneliness and that kind of stuff. Without the big screen of the movie theater, it would not work, but in the darkness in front of the huge screen, it did. The images, they do the trick. You actually, despite the inaccuracies and the psychological trinkets, get a feeling of being up there, in space, in zero gravity, looking at planets. When I got out of the cinema, I had a weird sensation, a strange displacement - I was no longer in the familiar streets looking at drunk kids on a Saturday evening; I was walking on a planet. Normally, I can't stand George Clooney or Sandra Bullock as actors - here, well, they were pretty ok, within their very restricted roles. Clooney was the cheering, genial optimist and Bullock the rugged loner. Most of the time, these two, who are the only characters of these film, occupy themselves with floating around in space or trying to get into space stations (curiously, space stations are located within walking distance, practical right?). But they did not save Gravity from the kingdom of insufferable cheese, the overwhelming images did, and the way sound and silence were used. Few films build up that kind of atmosphere, and I don't care whether its 'realistic' or not.

Dry cleaning (1997)

I can't make up my mind whether Dry cleaning (dir. Anne Fontaine) explores homophobia or whether it represents it. It is clear, however, that the way the subject is dealt with is not exactly of the subtle kind. The film is set in a small, sleepy town and the two of the main characters, a married couple, work and own a dry cleaning. They take a lot of pride in what they do and their life seems to follow a quiet, predictable rhythm. At a night-club they meet a young man with whom they become friends. Immediately, it is beyond doubt that both of them have also fallen for the guy. And here the question appears: how should homophobia be described without the film itself submitting to a certain perspective about "decent men" and normal masculinity? The problem with Dry cleaning is that in the end, the violence of homophobia turns into a dramatic ploy, a way to wrap up the story. The violence we see is brutal and cruel and that's that. Some sort of moral message seems to have been delivered but to be honest I am not sure of what nature it was and I fear it may not be an amiable one either, as much of the material seems to blame dark sexual powers for breaking up people's lives. Even though there are some good scenes here conveying the tensions within a marriage, along with knots of unruly desire, Dry cleaning too often takes resort into dramatic denouements instead of patiently studying these tensions and knots.

Tender son: the Frankenstein project (2010)

Kornél Mundruczós Tender son contains many striking scenes and it was worth watching it simply for some of the scenes. It was, however, a problematic film where the idea just didn't work. Some of the twists of the story seem to have no motivation except for the impact of them - this makes the film a rather shaky affair. Watching it, I kept wondering how exactly the people who made this film perceived the progression of the story: to me, many many things were just elusive, in the wrong way, and sometimes outrageously so.  

The main character is a kid who has spent his childhood in an institution. He goes to look for his family and it turns out that they don't want to see him. His father is a director and his mother leaves in a dreary apartment with a girl who might or might not be her daughter. The kid's response is - well you have to look for yourselves. Somehow, it has to do with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein but well, I don't know. But it is here that the film's psychology goes down the drain (the way the film deals with violence is utterly utterly strange and disturbing). Usually, my complain about movies is not that they lack psychological realism. Here, however, there is just flaws in basic intelligibility which makes it hard to take anything seriously. What made me sit through the film was its beautiful rendition of wintry Budapest. The images were forceful, even though the film itself, sadly, were not.

Body heat (1981)

Body heat (dir. Lawrence Kasdan) is standard neo-noir fair: a slick movie about a poisonous femme fatale and a guy in her claws; there's infidelity, a murder plot and something goes wrong. A doppelgänger of course. The heat is on and Florida is depicted with subdued elegance and grit: offices, beaches and diners. You see the humidity in every scene (while the association of weather + sex gets a bit predictable in the end). The conversation is tacky and the acting is stiff - William Hurt develops this stiffness well in his role as the sleazeball don juan and Kathleen Turner plays a character with whom no man dares to argue; her every movement exudes confidence. And yes, Mickey Rourke is in there as well as an arsonist, his unhinged presence fits perfectly. The plot gets tiresome towards the finale as new twists are added and as the director complies with the obligatory task of unwrapping the thing and drawing it to an end but Kasdan's sense for the nocturnal and the illicit is on the right track.

12 Years a Slave (2013)

Steve McQueen has quite a reputation as a director and I was curious about how he would approach the corrupt history of the USA. It turns out 12 Years a Slave is well worth watching, but it is too much of a conventional story about one man's fight for liberation; the film leans on a kind of narrative progression that makes the whole thing a non-risky business. Hans Zimmer has re-used some of his old pompous scores and McQueen opts for the dramatic focus characteristic of mainstream Hollywood. The merit of the film is that it shows how slavery was upheld by very different people, well-meaning cowards, economic opportunists and deluded sadists. Sadly, it is the sadism McQueen lays most of the emphasis on, and for that reason, 12 Years a Slave may still be seen as a flawed attempt to re-open a discussion about slavery, as a system, not only as a form of personal corruption.

The story is interesting and captivating, of course. A musician is hired by a pair of showmen. He is drugged and then he finds himself kidnapped on a slave ship. His reaction spells horror and exasperation; he has rights! But he is taken to a place where he has no rights, no voice. We see slavery through his eyes, the eyes of a person to whom this is an alien system, an alien form of life. The film points out how different his position is from the people who were born into slavery, and what this means for rebellion. The film follows the man, Northup, as he tries to deal with his situation, to survive, to break free. The film elicits our identification with the man: his suffering and his bewilderment is ours, we see with his eyes. Maybe its this way of taking on the subject that makes the film so conventional. The problem with identification of a specific sort that I think this film can be charged with is that one gets lost in one's own reactions, one has no time to linger on anything; one worries about what will happen next, so to speak. In watching Northup suffer, I feel the whip, I wince, but too often I don't see the man and his circumstances (one of the few scenes that contains another sort of intensity shows Northup at a funeral, and we see him join the other slaves in song). McQueen evokes - he rarely shows, he rarely makes me attend to what I see, he rarely makes me pay close attention. But I'm not sure whether that's a fair description. 12 years a slave works with close-ups; these close-ups evoke emotions, but the setting of these close-ups is perhaps too comfortable, too "cinematic" as graphic violence watched very closely is paired with panoramic images of natures. It is somehow as if McQueen wants to allow his viewers moments of respite so as to be able to stomach the next physical scene. 12 Years a Slave is a powerful film, and McQueen is a director who knows how to work with images that shake the viewer.

12 Years a Slave probes into an immensely important topic and it places powerlessness at the heart of the story. But my complaint would be that despite McQueen's sensitivity for the different types of slave-owners and the different background of the slaves, he fails to pay sufficient attention to the milieu of slavery: I would have liked to see a film that digs deeper into the self-understanding of these slave-owners, or the relations among the slaves. The moments of melodrama and Hollywood-style Big Speeches (some of which are delivered by populist-acting Brad Pitt) that the film contains underlines this flaw. There are very few scenes in which we get a sense of everyday life for the slaves, and their masters; McQueen is too busy crafting scenes with a striking message. 12 Years a Slave showcases many insightful moments of outrage, but as a whole, the film does not quite achieve what it tries to do: in my view, it is compromised by the desire to tell a specific type of Story, and to deliver a specific type of Message - perhaps the film is a bit too conscious of its own singularity in American movie history? Rather than compassion and inquiry, 12 Years a Slave remains at the level of meticulous composition and well-meaning gesture.

Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Charlie Kaufman epitomizes 'quirky' and mostly I think he represents the good kinds of quirks. This is also true for Synecdoche, New York, a movie starting out as a quiet family drama about a marriage about to fall apart and an artist who agonizes over his lack of independent artistic vision but grows into a very idiosyncratic tale about the craving for control and self-involved hang-ups about identity. Actually, I think that Synecdoche, New York captures the problematic core in ideas about authenticity that can be found in for example the writings of Charles Taylor: the quest for authenticity plays out within an unhappy dialectic or tension between an attempt to find out who one really is and thinking about identity as a creation, an invention - what the movie shows is how these two aspect blend together in the melancholy worry that one is not somehow in control of one's own life.

I admit I lost track a few times, but that doesn't bother me - I will watch this again; both the form and the content are compelling. The form of depth in Synecdoche New York could have veered off into grad-student self-important musings about 'identity as construction' but luckily the film didn't quite go down that road.

The main person, a troubled playwright and director (oh no! not yet another film about a troubled artist, you might sigh, but hold on) is involved in this new project, some sort of story about his own life, and well, that story encompasses EVERYTHING - the meaning of life, reality, truth, identity, relations.... And so, one might say, does the film. The play starts out as one aspect of the director's neurotic life. The play is a mere idea, that is somehow to be realized. The location, a huge warehouse in New York, has been chosen, and it's here that the director is to form the perfect story about his own life. The actors play his friends and lovers, and himself. Months pass, years pass. The play remains at this preparatory stage while everyone become different people, while the director is at pains to pin down the story of his life. What the hell IS his life? This is the important question, a soul-searching one. Who am I? How do I related to other people? The director wants to tie it all together into a neat package, strictly defined roles and some sort of progression. But it goes out of hand, life can't be compartmentalized in that way.

If you've seen - and most probably you have - Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Being John Malkovich you know what kind of mind-bending adventure you are in for. These all share some themes, and does themes also re-surface in Synecdoche, New York: most of all, it's about compulsion and the way life is not definable in terms of identity. Kaufman transforms the heady material into a beautiful, hallucinatory and sad cinematic experience. All of it doesn't work, there are a couple of scenes that try to encapsulate the 'message' in the film in a too explicit way, but most of the time, the surprising editing, the way the story collapses and picks up again, and the good acting works magic with this fragmentary story about what happens when we age and when we re-consider our place in our own lives. I was also surprised at how emotionally involving it all was: the sadness felt real, a sadness that manages to have a sort of progression to some kind of clarity while at the same time a whole world crumbles.

Almanac of Fall (1984)

I tried hard to like Almanac of Fall - it's a Bela Tarr movie (I usually love his films) and the use of colors and shapes was simply marvellous. But this was just not that good a movie, despite its aesthetic brilliance (which is a reason why you SHOULD watch it!). It seemingly emulates the gloom and cynism of Fassbinder, but there's little of Fassbinder's social critique in Almanac of Fall. That is, as far as I can see, but I guess one could read a critique of the capitalist unit of the family into it and perhaps one could say that Tarr shows a recurring set of relational formations in which paranoia and reality coalesce. Distrust is the order of the day. The claustrophobic feel of the movie - which takes place in one slightly dilapidated apartment - never reveals anything. As a viewer I'm thrown into that sense of crammed space, locked relations, plots and scheming. The characters all have tangled, often erotic, relations with each other. There's the ailing matriarch, her nurse, the son, the nurse's lover and an alcoholic teacher. The only glimpse we get of their lives is through their constant quarelling, their constant suspicion and bitterness - ceaseless consternation. The amour going on here is of the doomed sort and its center of gravity is the nurse, who is depicted as the leathal femme fatale - and believe me, there is more than a hint of sexism in how women's sexuality is treated here: female sexuality as dangerous, deparaved and voluptuous - female sexuality opens Pandora's box, yes we've heard that before. The existential sordidness - greed, mostly - on display churns and churns and churns. In that sense, the movie does not have much to offer, as Tarr seems to have very little insightful to say about these relations, or the characters' malaise. It's just there. In later films, Tarr's pessimism attains an altogether different level of communication, so that he lets the visualization itself conjure up an often elusive sense of apocalypse or social catastrophy.

But hey! Let's talk about the colors! As Tarr usually works in b&w, I was overwhelmed how good he is with colors - I wondered why he chose the b&w format later on? Tarr uses a palette of greens, blues and reds which are often contrasted in very striking ways, often to - and well, this may be cheesy - underline a certain tension in the situation. Camera angles are also used for a similar purpose, and here I once again think about Fassbinder and how he evokes a creepy social universe by tilting the camera or making us look at the character's from a strange perspective.

Departures (2008)

Departures (dir. Yojiro Takita) opens with a meaningless transphobic scene involving a funeral ritual and a bunch of bereaved relatives who fight about the deceased person's life. That didn't give me much hope about the movie. But the quality of the film improved for a while, so I watched the whole thing. It turns out that the main character is not the person in the coffin, but the young man, an unemployed cellist, who is preparing the body in the ritual. We learn that he has returned to his home town and applies for a job despite not knowing what the job is about - it has to do with "departures", maybe a traveling agency. When he is in the know, it's too late - he was hired on the spot by his elderly boss. In Japan, we learn, this profession is considered to be shameful and the young man doesn't even reveal the nature of his job to his wife. The film follows his initiation into the profession: this is by far the best part of the film where we stick to the work routines and the small workplace. The last part of the film takes a dramatic turn and the movie goes down the drain as there is an attempt to tie all threads together into a neat bundle. Departures is interesting while it observes the Japanese rituals of preparing corpses for death in the presence of the close family and it shows how gracefully and skillfully these two deal with the deceased. I start to think about the strange reasons for why their profession, undertaking, is taboo - in the ritual, death itself is not at all taboo as the corpse is prepared in front of people and they get to say their goodbyes. Here, the film was a quite subdued affair and kept close to its subject: the young man gets accustomed to his job and learns to develop a professional attitude towards it under the guidance of his wise and experienced boss (I liked their scenes together - moving, somehow). But apparently this topic alone was not relied on - something more dramatic seemed to have been called for (why? I don't see this) and at this point Departures assembles the Big Musical Score and the Panoramic Nature Images in order to drive home the points about family secrets and forgiveness.

In the Company of Men (1997)

If you want to watch a merciless, all-embracing critique of masculinity, you might want to give In the Company of Men (dir. Neil Labute) a shot. It's far from a perfect or even good film, but its unflinching criticism of sexism is praiseworthy. It's hard to come up with a film with a more detestable asshole than Chad, one of the two main characters: he's a guy with an enormous self-confident belief in himself and his own skills, both in the world of business and the world of, well, what shall we call it, men's pursuit of women. He teams up with his pal, the slightly more timid, and a lot more self-pitying, Howard, in a game of masculinity. They view it as an innocent, fun little diversion while working for awhile in another town: they will both pursue a woman in the office, but they will keep their secret. Labute places these guys in a sterile surrounding of offices, dull corridors, coffee-machines, anonymous hotel rooms and boring restaurants. The film brilliantly establishes the film's universe in the very first scene, in which we see a sparsely decorated airport-lounge. The men gossip and complain while planes rumble in the background. As the film develops, they find their victim, a woman who seems fragile and vulnerable because she is deaf, and they both start dating her. And then they laugh at her behind her back. The fun, obviously, will be that this is just a temporary thing, and they will then leave her, supposedly devastated. But of course reality turns out different. But the film offers no consolation: these are types who will not go through magical transformations of maturity or sensibility. Chad and Howard are supported by an entire machinery of gender roles and corporate power: their positions are safe, and if they don't get what they want, they turn bitter, self-loathing and hateful. The anonymous nature of the places they occupy is a backdrop of lives taken up by power and careers. Labute's film falls short in one sense: it gives a too one-sided image of these men's relation to other people. Now, we only see what one could call an instrumental attitude, people used for pleasure or for consolation. What we don't see, or what is only hinted at, is the way these guys repress and distance themselves from the way other people approach them. The power relations here are suffocatingly cohesive and all-encompassing. Even though the story prsents a very realistic image of two different responses to power - the ruthless guy and the guy who wants to convince everybody that he's 'the good guy' - I would like to see other sides still, what happens when these power structures are challenged. What we have here, and this is perhaps not a bad thing at all, is a film that shows how power is upheld in many guises, and how it is upheld and spread. It's a gloomy, but familiar, sight.

Naked Island (1960)

It's always risky to re-watch a film that has made a great impression on you; will it hold up, will it let you down, will you be abhorred about your own bad, bad judgment? Watching Naked Island (Kaneto Shindo) again was not painful at all - the film is as marvelous as it was the first time: repetitive, strange, beautiful. Even though a description may make this film seem like a formalist experiment (a slow study of work and habits), there is nothing studiously experimental about Naked Island, nothing self-important, nothing contrived.

The basic set-up of the film is the daily toil of a family of four who inhabit a small island on which they have crops that need tending to and water needs to be fetched from another island. Without sentimentality or overblown emphasis on scarcity, the movie follows the family members' everyday life, the rowing, the fetching, the carrying of water, preparing food, etc. All this is chronicled in flowing images that place the human being in her environment. We start to look at the environment, the sea, the island, the city, from the perspective of the character's active gaze, from the perspective of their activities. But we also start to focus on the way these human beings lives are formed by and conditioned by the environment. Few films contain this meditative attention to methodical action - the only comparison I come to think of is Akerman's Jeanne Dielmann, but that film is done in a completely different spirit and the latter film gives us a very different image of the role of routines in human life. In Naked Island, routines never seem soul-crushing or monotonous. The camera follows the woman and the man carrying water in buckets. We learn to recognize the paths they laboriously have to climb, and we see them gently pouring the water on the crops (these images do not conjure up the illusion of real time, but they make us feel the duration of what is done). The same chores are repeated over and over again, but through a cinematic technique that all the time shifts angles and perspectives, we sense that their toil is a way in which their life continues, and life is never the same.

Its interesting how work and repetition is rendered so radically different on film, depending on what angle the director chooses and more importantly how work is conceived, or rather, in which connections work is placed.

Shindo pays close attention to survival, not as a primitive mode of merely "living" in a naked sense (the island may be naked, but life is not), but as a form of life, a form of life that is contrasted with the life of the city which is hinted at as the family members sell a fish, dine out on a restaurant, look at a dance performance on TV, and take a trip with a ropeway (the life on the island is hard to pin down in terms of historical periods, but the city life reveals specific models of cars, technology and fashion). Up till now I haven't mentioned one of the peculiar traits of Naked Island: it is a silent film. Not in the sense of music-and-intertitles but in the sense of there being no dialogue. I am surprised that this doesn't appear like an eccentric ploy a desperate director comes up with trying to think of something new to sell his latest flick. The silence is almost always an organic part of the film; instead we hear the rain, the thundering wind, steps, flowing water and so on - or the distant chatter of city-folks. And then there's non-diegetic music, a beautiful score that frames the on-screen drudgery magnificently. We learn to know these people, the family of four, on other terms, and I never experience the lack of speech as a lack, or as something that forces me to guess at what is going on. I don't think the point is to make the islanders' life look 'primitive' or 'changeless' - we see their lives changing, there are sudden breaks in the everyday rhythm of work (one scene in particular is a jolt) and we see subtle strains in their relations, and speech is not needed to convey that.