Picnic (1955)

A stranger comes to town and causes great upheaval. The stranger's arrival sets old conflicts in motion; old wounds are re-opened and repressed tensions come to the surface. This can be said to be a genre of its own in Hollywood movies, regardless of whether the stranger is a cowboy, a criminal or a don juan. Joshua Logan's Picnic is a comedy/romance/drama rolled into one, an unabashedly melodramatic tale about small-town neuroses. The elusive stranger is a drifter called Hal who jumps off the fright train in a town somewhere in Kansas to look for his old college chum. He's there to visit an old pal but one thing leads to another and Hal ends up in the storm's eye, at the center of social conflict and dramas involving business and romance. Hal is the cheerful guy who wants to be liked by everybody. The climax of the film is a picnic featuring rowdy drunks, dancing and fierce jealousy. Picnic could almost have been directed by Nicholas Ray - the same focus on social upheaval. Another point of reference is Arthur Penn's outrageous (but rather funny) The Chase from 1966. Completely over-the-top, but I must confess I enjoyed this rather clunky story (along with the wooden and/or overwrought acting) about the drifter and the beatiful girl and her mother. - - Good trash.

Rabbit hole (2010)

Rabbit hole (dir. John Cameron Mitchell) is a well-made and subdued film about grief and its effect on close relationships. It's a film without frills or big gestures, almost as far as you can get from Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It features some good acting - Nicole Kidman makes a good performance - and generally, the worst kinds of dramatic clichés are averted. The two main characters, a married couple in the suburbs, have lost their small child in a car accident. They do what they can to restore the routines and normalcy of everyday life. The film focuses on the distance between them and their inability to share their grief. They find fault with one another's attempts to be intimate with another and the communication between them constantly misfires (in this way, the film bears some similarities with another great performance by Kidman, Revolutionary Road). Kidman's character nurses a fascination for the boy who run over their child. The couple attend group therapy that the wife constantly questions the value of. The husband grows increasingly impatient with the marriage and finds a sympathetic friend in the therapy group. - - - This set-up may sound terribly formulaic and one can blame the film for not taking any risks, for sticking to the mature-film-about-life-pattern. Nonetheless, some scenes managed to capture the emptiness of the couple's life and the spouses' attempt to find a way out with a sort of emotional rawness. 

Pride (2014)

Pride (dir. Matthew Warchus) has sometimes been dismissed as a lighthearted feel-good comedy, a sugar-coated crowdpleaser. To me, it was so much more than this. To be honest, I have seen very few movies that express political hope the way this film does. It is true that the story about solidarity is couched within some genre conventions, but these don't in any way compromise or displace the urgency of this film. In fact, I thought the use of genre, the use of comedy and feel-good formulae, worked in a similar way as in Little Miss Sunshine. In these two cases, the familiarity of certain plot developments stands against the backdrop of a ever-difficult questions about hope and love. When people call a film 'uplifting' I usually respond with unease, but here I have nothing against that label: these two movies are uplifting, but not in a bad way: these film don't make me feel uplifted in a fuzzy way so that it simultaneously sneaks in lots of questionable baggage.

Pride celebrates the alliance between gay activists and coal miners in the eighties. A coal strike was struggling to overthrow the thatcherite policies. A group of gay activists decide that they should take part in the miners' struggle. After all, the characters in the film argue, they have a lot in common: their resisitance has similar features.The gang - in which friction is not completely non-present - heads off to Wales, where they meet their miners' and their families. In one sense the ensuing story chronicles the awkward encounter between urban and rural, but at the same time, the film shows the instability of these categories, and the ways encounters are much too unruly than we would expect in our gloomy preconceived ideas about differences and 'different interests'. What I liked best is perhaps how the film shows that this unruliness is something hopeful. A very limited part of the film's funny moments center around the clash between macho hicks and streetsmart gays. When we see such clashs, the aim is to reveal not the clash itself (haha, hicks and gays!!) but rather, the fragilities, secrets and hostilities at hand. Often, we see situations in which that type of clash never appears, and how people deal with this, to them, surprising openness.

One of the threads is the story about Gethin, who has left his homophobic village a long time ago. The film follows the struggle he goes through upon returning to Wales, and making an effort to talk to his family again. Small things matter. In one scene, the head of the committee in the village supported by the activists makes a phonecall and expects to talk to Gethin's boyfriend. But when she hears that she is talking to Gethin, she gently wishes him merry Christmas in Welsch.

I particularly appreciated the way the gender divisions both within the queer movement and the miners' community was dealt with. Perhaps the really good descriptions are of the wives of the miners, and the way they have formed a crucial part of the political struggle, while still being in a way subjected to a role in the shadows. The scenes in which the ladies from Wales head off to London to celebrate are marvellously moving in bringing out a sense of rebellion and freedom - but not freedom here described as 'the freedom of the city against the freedom of the narrow-minded village' but rather freedom as a celebration of life. Strangely, I come to think of the Ealing comedy Whisky Galore! (1949) and its representation of community, mischief and resistance.

Some reviewers have suggested that Pride is a nostalgic yearning for a time where things were more black and white. I disagree quite strongly with this. For me, the film represents a moral possibility with us now more than ever. A possibility of solidarity beyond identity, of politics beyond identity politics. Pride does not turn a blind eye to the difficulties such solidarity meets: smugness, self-interested indifference or internal rivaries. But it also shows that things C A N be easy, and that holding on to the idea that things MUST be difficult is extremely dangerous.

Zorba the Greek (1964)

Anthony Quinn plays a shy Englishman that goes to Greece and ends up in a business enterprise with a jovial Greek playboy. While the Englishman is pallid and timid, the Greek is a dancing whirlwind who has his way with the ladies. ... Already from this description, I hope you realize what kind of movie Zorba the Greek is. Greece is depicted as a very, very exotic country with almost zombie-like villagers, and then this Zorba, who supposedly is to embody the good spirit of Greece. Michael Cacoyannis directed the film and I suspect he had non-Greek audiences in mind when he made the film. Basically, the film revolves around Zorba and his unruly Life Force that cannot be tamed. The business he and the Englishman has together seems to be a mere plot device in the movie that is there as an excuse to show off the old man's courtship charm and dancing moves. Exuberance, exuberance, exuberance. The only thought in my head while watching Zorba the Greek (it's a mystery that I was actually able to finish this movie) was this: can you imagine a female Zorba? This unstoppable, unabashed life force of a person? Have you ever watched such a movie? There is a representation of female - what should we call it? - lust for life in the movie. She's an old 'coquett', an owner of an unkempt inn. She recalls the old adventures and the men that used to court her during the war. Stories of sex and romance. In all these stories, she is the recipient of male attention, and it is this role that is upkept through the film, in which Zorba of course does not hesitate to try out his charms on her. But when Zorba moves on to other female territories, the inn-keeper is shattered: without a man, she is nothing. It's not the same with how Zorba is shown in the movie. He's Zorba, and nothing can take his life energy from him.

Butterfly Kiss (1995)

Michael Winterbottom is an uneven director. Butterfly kiss is one of his better, stranger films. It's also his first one. A nihilistic tale about two people running amok. We are taken to some of the rawest landscapes of Britain: harsh winds, grayscales, motorways and filling stations. The people in the film fit the landscapes. It turns out Butterfly kiss is a grimmer, well - a lot grimmer - version of Thelma & Louise. Eunice is a tough 'un. She wanders from filling station to filling station, looking for a woman, a lover of old. She hooks up with Miriam, who runs away from home and basically dedicates her life to being loyal to Eunice, no matter what. The emphasis lies on 'no matter what'. Eunice turns out to be a killer. Miriam shakes off her nice-girl habitus and grows into Eunice's partner, which also means her partner in crime. Butterfly kiss is a troubling and troubled film about crazy love, love gone wrong. Miriam is insecure and clings to Eunice. Eunice is cruel and puts her to the test. Perhaps just for the fun of it.

Stylistically, the film offers a hash palette of colors and a merciless roadmovie among filling stations and diners. The characters speak with a heavy accent and what they say is not nice exactly. I didn't really warm to (ok warming to anything in this movie is maybe a misplaced description) the 'religious' theme: Eunice wants to be punished, but she goes on a killing spree without being punished. Butterfly kiss is a messy film but its rawness is convincing; the locations put you into a particular mood and the story of crazy adoration strikes a chord (even though I am not all too sure which one).

The Corridor (1995)

As much as I wanted to like Sharunas Bartas' The Corridor, I couldn't help feeling that this has all been done before, in a far better way, by Bela Tarr. It's interesting to note that Sátantango and The Corridor were made the same year, so at least Bartas cannot be accused of stealing Tarr's ideas. Like Tarr, Bartas works with an austere b&w cinematography and an approach to film-making that comes across more like a sort of cartography than as storytelling. The problem is that Bartas in this film lacks Tarr's eye for the sardonic, or the monumental. They share an interest in dishevelled landscapes and grizzled human beings. The Corridor has no dialogue. The camera moves from people's faces to their surroundings. Most of the film takes place in a run-down building. There is loneliness, but also lovers and even some dancing - the dancing is of course yet another similarity between this film and Satantango. Still, the tone is mostly lugubrious. I get the impression that Bartas tries to capture a state of in-between, limbo, a society that isn't going anywhere, a society of shock. Even though the Corridor contains a number of haunting images I never felt captivated by it as a movie. The images remained precisely that, images. In other words, the film did not, for me, have the power to introduce me to a world. Perhaps there are references and hints arcane to me that open up this film for other viewers.

The Ape (2009)

The Ape is one of the most unsettling movies I've seen in a long time. This is not because of the explicit violence that the film features, but that it is so unclear what is really going on. The churning machinery takes us to a hellish place. The film takes me places but I'm not sure where. From the get-go I learn that something is deeply wrong with the main character, a weary-looking guy called Krister. He's a driving instructor and we sense that this guy is going to explode, or is what we see some kind of gruesome aftermath to events we haven't seen? Gruesome things follow and the film follows them, well, quietly. I end up feeling shellshocked, unable to take it all in. The film works as a dream, and so images are so startling that now, thinking back, I cannot really recall them other than as a fuzzy memory, like the memory of a dream. As with regard to dreams, I can't piece things together. I remember an atmosphere, a car. What makes Jesper Ganslandt's The Ape such a strange viewing experience is that somehow places me in a zombie-like mode where I witness really violent stuff as if in a state of half-sleep. All the time, when I watch the man's harried and scared face, I can't make myself ask the relevant psychological questions (what the hell, why the hell, etc.). I just watch. Or: the film does not elicit watching, it elicits squinting, a sort of horror that is expressed in glimpses, rather than a full-blown disclosure or revelation.

Jane Eyre (2011)

Cary Joji Fukunaga's adaptation of Jane Eyre is sombre, entertaining and sticks close to the material in the book. (I mean, in comparison with Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights this way of making film pales.) It's an adaptation that doesn't take risks: it does what we expect it to. There are the moors, the repressed feelings, the crazy lady in the attic and the strange love btw Jane Eyre and Rochester. What I really appreciated, however, was the casting. Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender and Judi Dench are simply great choices for the roles of the three leading characters.

Mr. Turner (2014)

Making a film about an artist's work is a risky venture. The transformation of one form of art into another is a challenging task that requires distancing from clichés about what the making of art is like. Mr Turner, Mike Leigh's film about William Turner, does not manage to dodge these difficulties altogether. It sometimes falls into the trap of emulating Turner's paintings - and that emulation is bound to fail. Beyond that, Timothy Spall embodies the role of Turner in a nuanced and complex way that makes us look away from the usual representations of the travail of the genius. Yes, there are a couple of scenes that capture Turner as the 'misunderstood artist' but many more sides of his person are explored as well, fortunately. What I will remember from this movie is not so much the scenes of the film - even though Mike Leigh's improvisational techique works as well here as elsewhere - as the bodily presence Timothy Spall conjures up. My own hunch is that it is very uncommon for male actors or male roles to have this kind of presence - and this of course is very revealing of our culture. (My counter-example would be Harvey Keitel who has had many untypical roles.) Spall's Turner grunts, shuffles around the room and gestures to signal his dissatisfaction. This bodily presence characterizes the role of art as well. Instead of art becoming a strange emanation from the genius's head, it is rendered into bodily exertion - daily craft, the embodied gaze, the ageing hand. The transcendent immenseness of Turner's painting is thus placed in a framework of human bodily frailty. This is what I mainly appreciated about Mr. Turner as a film.

The River (1997)

Tsai Ming-Liang makes movies about loneliness, about people occupying the same space without interacting. These films reveal the pain of loneliness as much through an investigation of lived space as the characters' trembling attempts at human closeness. The River opens with a bunch of seemingly disconnected scenes of three different people. Gradually, we learn that they are son, father, mother. The son is afflicted by a mysterious pain in his neck. The father tries to solicit partners at a bathing house. The mother is taking home leftovers and meets a lover in an anonymous room. We see them inhabit spaces of their own. Even when it dawns on us that they are related to each other, their isolation stands out even more. The routines and slow events of ordinary life is the core of this, and other films by Tsai Ming Liang. In a number of scenes, the father tries to collect the dripping water from a hole in the roof. The variations of this minimalist theme have the effect of a melancholy chord. As The River progresses, the young man's neck pain takes on an almost metaphorical meaning. It's a pain that has no clear explanation and no cure seems to help. The son is taken to various doctors and healers and even participates in a ritual, but nothing helps.

The cinematography creates a woozy, yet austere atmosphere. Bright colors and spare locations with next to no human action. What are we to look at? The River is a difficult film as it directs its attention to a puzzling symptom. The viewer is offered several elements and the task is not to piece these together in a neat assemblage. The challenge is to understand the kind of isolation Tsai Ming Liang depicts. What is it that afflicts these people? How is the silence of the film to be understood? An example: two guys ogle each other in a neon-lit arcade from which we see a McDonald's restaurant. Nothing happens in the scene, except this silent watching, their restless presence. The camera observes them, framing them from a distance, swallowed up by the neon-lit commercial environment but without losing the focus on the strange, silent communication.