Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
When seeing La Science des Rêves last month, I was reminded that I had never seen Michel Gondry’s much lauded previous film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which of course I wanted to see as well.
The story about a couple wanting to have each other erased from their respective memories because things didn’t work out too well and then rediscovering their love in the process sounds a bit stale. But it is enriched by most of that rediscovery taking place in dreams where they have to run away from the erasing and where you can actually see the memories being erased.
I just loved the scene in the book store for example, where all the book covers were replaced by plain white covers over time. Also, the film is really good at giving you that ‘dreamy’ feeling by having relatively long shots and slow scenes.
All that – and the idea of doctors messing with your brain (technically it’s brain damage
) to erase those memories – is rather twisted. Add to that the whole environment with a the strange company doing the brain deletions and their dopehead employees, and you have something that’s quite funny as well.
And funniness brings me right to my main problem with the film – which may have well been the reason why I didn’t see the film when it was in cinema two years ago: the main character is played by Jim Carrey. And I just can’t stand seeing his ever grinning face. Just spoils things for me.
Harrison Bergeron
And while on the topic of manipulating brains, there’s Harrison Bergeron a film based on a very old (1960s) short story by Kurt Vonnegut. And as Vonnegut’s stories go this one is plain and simple, refreshing and very bitter.
A few decades in the future the American society has evolved to a fully egalitarian system. Everybody finally is equal. And those who aren’t equal are made equal. As things go this means all the creative, skilled or clever people are ‘handicapped’ rather than smartening everybody up. People have to wear some kind of device that interrupts their thoughts should they have any. And those who are athletic or otherwise physically able have to wear ‘handicaps’ to make them equal as well.
And then there’s Harrison, the son of a normal family who just won’t manage to graduate from school because his marks are too good. The state orders him to have brain surgery so he will be ‘normal’. But before that happens he is ‘kidnapped’ and given the opportunity to join a small group of smart people who actually run the country. With the egalitarian society, they of course have to work under cover but their work is needed because all the equal people just aren’t smart enough to keep everything running.
Of course that fact irks Harrison, but he also thinks everybody else who has to live with their limited intellects, the blandest daytime television (we can’t educate the kids on TV because then they’d have an advantage over those who don’t watch TV
) and finally uses the opportunity to give people a day of cultural television.
There are so many little twists in the film and you get to feel the tension: Yes, we love Beethoven (just as in Clockwork Orange or Elephant, it’s always good old Ludwig van in films…) and we won’t have any skilled composers or even performers in that brave new world. VS No, we can’t allow people to be smart, because the competitiveness of smart people started so many wars and years of misery. It’s really a great collection of heavy points woven to a light story.
Quite amazing and really worth the read or watch. The rather short story is contained in the volume of short stories Welcome to the Monkey House and is less fleshed out than the film. You can also read it online but as a fan of both Vonnegut and short stories, I’d say you’re missing out then.
La Dolce Vita
La Dolce Vita is another classic that I finally got around to seeing. Just shy of three hours, we have plenty of time to learn about the debaucheries in the life of the yellow press journalist Marcello. A few days of enjoying life and going nowhere by going everywhere.
I can imagine that the film was a bit scandalous when it was released in 1960, but with today’s background, it’s a bit hard to be overwhelmed by that and seems a bit like a rather long film in stunning black and white that has a number of cool scenes in it. And like a film from a time when you could call people ‘paparazzi’ in a non-derogative way.
Let’s say I can appreciate bits of it, but I didn’t like it that much.
Scoop
Whoa! It seems like Woody Allen’s previous film Match Point only came out a few months ago (actually it has almost been a year) and being the workaholic that he is Woody Allen already released his next film Scoop now (actually it has been released for some months in other places but only made it to Germany now).
It also seems like he got used to the niceties that are Scarlett Johansson and the English upper class – which both feature prominently in the film where American journalism student (with more than a passing interest in dental hygiene) Sondra meets the spirit of recently deceased journalist Joe Strombel and is told to follow rich kid Peter as that guy is supposed to be a killer.
All that happens during a magic show by Woody Allen’s character Sid – aka Splendini the magician – of course. And he pretends to be Sondra’s father, going with her to ‘research’ the topic while she falls in love with Peter. Sounds pretty confusing? Murder mysteries should be I guess. And naturally not without a sense of humour which ranges from Sondra being overwhelmingly clueless (very charmingly overwhelmingly clueless, though) to Sid tactfully mentioning that he was born Hebrew but then became a Marxist in smalltalk to the English upper class.
Add to that some classy scenes of deceased on their boat trip on Hades and you are well entertained. At least I was. And of course I stayed all the way through the closing titles once more. Woody Allen films always have those nice old fashioned serif titles. Every time I see them I do wonder which typeface is used there as it seems to be quite a conscious and constant design element of the films. And this time I remembered to Google it and found a nice post pointing to Windsor and providing screenshots of several films.
Interiors
Woody Allen has made so many films, that there will always be another one you (or at least I) didn’t know about yet. And now I can tick his 1978 film Interiors off that list. Having seen many of his funny films, this one was a let down at first as it starts in a rather dull way. People looking all 1970s-ish and us getting an insight into the life of a family with an obsessive mother who’s into interior design and terrorises (as in ‘just doing what’s best for’) her daughters with that.
Not too exciting, that. Just some tension between the mother and her daughters and the in-laws. But add a few levels to that tension by making her husband move out and eventually marry another woman and you’ve got some fine drama. Particularly if that new wife is as friendly as she is simple minded while the family is a bit on the intellectual side. In the end everything goes a bit wrong and yet there is no blame to be shifted.
Not the lightness I’m used to from Woody Allen, but quite a good study of the tensions. And somehow looking at all those perfectly designed and stale flats reminded me a little of the downtown flat they had in Match Point. But my memory may be playing tricks on me there.
Europa
Europa is another pre-Dogme 95 film by Lars von Trier. It tells the story about young American Leopold Kessler who comes to Germany just after the end of World War II to work as a conductor on night trains - in the spirit of helping out. He gets the job thanks to his uncle who is already working on Zentropa night trains (and otherwise mostly drunk). And soon he gets to know the owner of the railway company, fall in love with his daughter and end up in a messy situation with anti-occupation rebels.
The film is full of dark imagery and of course doesn’t evade the cliches you’d expect in a film in Germany at that time. The whole setup is amazing, with scenes in both black and white and colour in there, with a mix of German and English being spoken and with a narrator guiding you through the film who speaks as a kind of hypnotist to the protagonist.
Really an amazing Kafka-esque film that touches many difficult questions. It reminded me of von Trier’s Element of Crime in style – and it appears that’s not a coincidence as these two and Epidemic are apparently mean to be a trilogy. So I may need to watch that one as well.
Gerry
Two guys, Gerry and Gerry – aka Matt Damon and Casey Affleck – go on a wilderness trail. They get lost in the desert and things turn a bit dramatic. We get to see a simple and dramatic story in Gus van Sant’s 2002 film Gerry and with it’s very simplistic setup – a desert and two actors who don’t talk much – it could easily be a bit boring. Indeed the film is very slow. We have endless shots of first following the guys’ car to the hiking trail and then following them on the trail. And yet, in all that, suspense and drama slowly build and you get to start the fear of not being able to find and make their way back. It’s quite great and scary.
While not being exactly entertaining, the film has some drama that way and it’s cool to look at. All those long shots and the following of the actors on their trip. Holding the camera on them while they are walking. There’s a scene when they are shot from the side while they are walking right next to each other at the same speed and, which is quite cool. Add the odd bits of in-focus / out-of-focus shooting and the wide empty landscape and you have stuff to look at. One of the Gerrys wears a black shirt with a large yellow star on it – which reminded a bit of the great yellow shirt with the bull on it in Elephant.
Design for Living
Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or not to Be is a great classic. But it’s amazing to see that he actually made more than fifty films in total. I had the opportunity to see Design for Living recently. I think its English title is rather brilliant, while its German title Serenade zu dritt
(Serenade for three) seems appropriate but lacks a similar subtlety and cleverness.
The film is about an American girl, Gilda, who falls in love with two guys, George and Tom whom she meets on a train to Paris. They are artists, a playwright and a painter respectively, and share a flat and their love for Gilda. But instead of having a horrible rivalry between them for the rest of the film, Gilda suggests they just all move together and – having a background in advertising – does her best to turn the guys’ art into more commercially successful art while trying to neutralise jealousy as far as possible.
That works well and soon Tom has a successful piece in a theatre in London while George is making and selling many paintings. Of course moving to London means that Tom is away from Gilda and George and Gilda use that opportunity to come together – which reverses when Tom comes back to Paris for a visit. As things can’t be evened out thanks to jealousy, Gilda decides to marry her longtime rich acquaintance Max instead. But she’s unhappy in that new golden cage rather soon and in the end a surprise visit by Thomas and George solves everything for good…
Quite a funny film – and surprisingly progressive for a film made in 1933 (and more open minded than loads of the stuff you get to see these days) I’d say. With a number of good laughs in it, too.
Die Siebtelbauern
Hooray, I finally got to see Die Siebtelbauern (aka The Inheritors). Everybody really recommended it when it ran in cinemas back in 1998 but I never had an opportunity to see it so far. And people were right the film is quite good!
It is set in rural Austria some decades back. A farmer a killed and when his will is read out he first tells of all of his staff and peasants for being lazy and dumb but then goes on to tell his fellow farmers that they’re jerks and his former staff will inherit the farm. In a time where the peasants are considered a lower class that doesn’t go down well with the farmers who want to contest things.
With seven people remaining on the farm to run and own it, each of them is called a Siebtelbauer
(1/7 farmer). Despite them not being terribly educated, they manage to run the farm just fine. However, they do not get along with the other farmers who want to crush them. And of course the other farmers succeed. Being a large bunch of rich people who own the state in that region they get away with pretty much everything they do and so they send people to burn parts of the farm and go ahead to rape one of the women. All that without the slightest conscience of doing something bad because – sure enough – they are just wanting to put things ‘back to normal’.
It’s scary to see how some rich people can ‘rule’ their region. And in a way I’m pretty sure that similar – possibly slightly more abstract – things can still happen these days. If not with some rich people getting away with everything in Austria then with big corporations getting away with whatever they want worldwide.
There seems to be an English version of the film. But I wonder how the film works in English as those slightly funny Austrian accents used by the people in the film and the narrator Severin really add to its quality.
Matador
Matador is a film Pedro Almodóvar directed 20 years ago. And while you can tell the decade by the clothes and cars, it’s definitely quite modern otherwise. Once more this film is about obsessed people. There’s the ex-matator Diego who now teaches bullfighting and has is obsessed with killing, there’s one of his pupils Angel (played by Antonio Banderas – isn’t it odd how Almodóvar seems to be good at spotting actors who will be famous early on?) who lives with his religious mother and tries to rape his pretty neighbour Eva – who in turn is his master’s girlfriend – to lose his virginity and prove he isn’t gay.
But he can’t take that – and confesses his deed to the police the next day where he ends up confessing a number of murders as well, as if to prove his mum right that he actually is evil. Lawyer María comes to defend him, but she’s actually obsessed with the ex-matador Diego with whom she shares an obsession with death. And the film ends up focusing on the lethal story of María and Diego in the end.
Perhaps not Almodóvar’s greatest movie – particularly as the story is neither straightforward nor surprising, but not bad either. And surprising to see that even such an ‘old’ film already has plenty of similarities with the newer ones.
Arabesque
I thought Stanley Donen’s Charade was quite good in a recent fit of Audrey Hepburn-mania. And Arabesque was the film Donen directed right afterward. No Audrey Hepburn in there, but Sophia Loren instead and another fun spy story to enjoy. As the title suggests, the story revolves Arab circles and ends up being about everybody hunting a little sheet of paper with some hieroglyphs on it. In the middle of all that is Prof. David Pollock (Gregory Peck) who was told to decipher the text but involuntarily gets drawn into a big mess where everybody around him seems to be both untrustworthy and willing to kill him if he doesn’t play along.
Rest assured that there is a happy end with punting… and that the time it takes getting there is quite amusing. And keep and eye on the opening credits in Donen’s films. They remind me a bit of James Bond opening credits but they are more strictly graphical and thus cooler in my book.
Targets
Hehe, a film title that you can type with your left hand only – Targets. It’s directed by Peter Bogdanovich of What’s Up Doc fame, which is the main reason why I wanted to see it. It was the first film he directed (and actually wrote, edited and acted in himself) and it’s both good and disturbing. I also thought it looked rather modern and clean for a film from the late 1960s.
The film tells two stories in parallel. That of old and famous horror film actor Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff) who wants to quit his job. And that of well-bred youth Bobby, who collects plenty of weapons and ammunition, kills his wife and mum and then goes on to shoot people on a highway. In the end he shoots people through a hole in the screen of a drive-in cinema – and is finally stopped and scared to death by Byron Orlok who is to grace the screening of his own film and ends up talking to Bobby from both the screen and for real…
Seeing how easily Bobby can gather the weapons and ammunition is a bit shocking. But seeing him turn passer-bys into targets just for the heck of it is far more shocking. And while his killing seems quite cold-blooded, the fact that he isn’t all that cool about it and nervously loses parts of his ‘equipment’ as he moves on, makes you wonder what exactly made him go to kill all those people – starting with his family.
Apparently the story is based on real events that happened a while before, which makes things even more tragic. That and many more things can be learned from the extra commentary track that’s on the DVD. I’m not really into DVDs and loathe all those ‘extras’ – which mostly seem to be there to give film businesses an excuse for their absurd pricing, rather than being worth. But those extra commentary tracks giving you more background or pointing out little details in the film are just great. Particularly if you want to watch the film again.
I already enjoyed such a commentary track in Blowup where it highlighted how and why the film was considered a bit scandalous fourty years back. And in Targets, the commentary is by Peter Bogdanovich himself and he uses it to tell some stories about the shooting, pointing out particularly ambitious shots, explaining references to other films, admitting where they used little ‘cheats’ to keep the film affordable and giving credit to people inspiring him to shoot certain scenes. I really enjoyed that as well.
How To Steal a Million
OMG! More Audrey Hepburn goodness. And I really liked this one. Possibly even better than Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Audrey Hepburn is Nicole, the – ultra charming – daughter of art afficionade Charles Bonnet in that film. He forges paintings and takes great pride in exhibiting and possibly selling them. A dangerous thing to do, of course.
And things start being dramatic when a statue (forged by Nicole’s grandfather) is exhibited and is supposed to be scrutinised by the company insuring it. The statue has to be stolen… which Nicole does with Simon, a guy she got to know when she shot him after he broke into her house. Of course they manage to steal the statue from the highly protected museum. And even though Simon is an art expert trying to track down forgeries, the fact that there’s a certain romance going on leads to a reasonably cheerful ending.
Interestingly I didn’t think the film was boring although I tend to do just that with films that run for two hours.
Me and You and Everyone We Know
Me and You and Everyone We Know is a rather weird film. We meet shoe salesman Richard who just separated from his wife and moved to a new place with his kids Peter and Robby. We meet artist Christine who earns a living by caring for pensioners. And with them we run through ninety minutes of odd situations.
From Richard struggling to cope with his new situation, properly care for the kids and developing a bit of a fancy for Christine. To those young kids having kinky chats on instant messaging services – in a funnily innocent way. To Christine sending art videos to a gallery for her dreams. To seeing a beautifully dramatic scene of a goldfish in a bag on the roof of a car – on the motorway.
Not the most straightforward story perhaps, but full of cool, weird and beautiful scenes. And with ASCII art as well – the kids typing it on their computer. Reminding me that I once di the same – copying an image of Snoopy on a typewriter back in the 1980s.
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Professione Reporter
A saw Professione Reporter – aka The Passenger – in a quest to see more of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films after having loved his famous Blowup a lot and being less than impressed by L’Avventura. While lacking the ‘cool’ of Blow Up, Professione Reporter is definitely on the better side. A long, slow film once more. But one in a completely different setting.
We start following reporter Jack Locke – played by a stunningly young Jack Nicholson – on his way to interviewing some guerillas in North Africa. There’s a lot of desert and not much going on. Until an English businessman staying in the same hotel as himself dies. At which stage he swaps identities with that businessman – presumably to rid himself of the dissatisfaction he feels with his job. And after returning to Europe, he starts living by the businessman’s calendar. In the process of which we learn that the ‘business’ in question is selling arms. And we see David follow appointments nonetheless.
While doing so he gets to know a good-looking architecture student in some Gaudí building (holy shit, I never thought they’d look this cool, I have to go!) who joins him on the rest of his way which consists mostly of hiding from various people looking for him and ends in a semi-eternal scene where we see all those people converging in front of his hotel.
While the film again seems slow by today’s standards (and at more than two hours it is quite long), it’s still filmed carefully enough to not be boring. I also really like the way local languages are used extensively in the film without the need to pretend that everyone in the world just happens to speak English.
Netto
Running on TV recently and recommended highly by our daily paper was Netto – according to the paper an ultra low-budget film school film (by a student of the infamous Rosa von Praunheim apparently). It didn’t look too cheap though, and it had quite a bit of drama in it.
We get to know Marcel, Angelika and their son Sebastian. They lived in Eastern Germany and Sebastian was born just before the wall came down. Now he’s fifteen, his parents have split up and he decides to move to his dad’s as Angelika moves in with her new husband. At first he’s shocked at how his dad is still stuck in ‘old’ thinking. How he can’t take things seriously – let alone write a decent application letter for a job. So – after initial struggles – he helps his dad out with that using what he learns at school.
While this doesn’t solve Marcel’s problems right away, we see him gaining both a bit of hope and a perspective for his future as well as establishing a relationship with his son – who in turn is keen on establishing a relationship with a girl he met in his dad’s house. Which means we get to see the guy who self-confidently improved his dad’s application letters, act more like you’d expect a teenager to act in other places.
There’s a lot in this film. It may not be mind-blowing but it’s well done. Worth seeing, I’d say.
Volver
I quite like Pedro Almodóvar’s films and thus was keen to see his current work Volver when I heard about it in spring. As usual, it took a while to make its way here. It’s once again a film with the wonderful Penélope Cruz and it has once more those Almodóvar looks with rich dashes of colours everywhere and lovingly crafted sets that make you want to watch the film for the wallpapers alone.
With just a single prostitute and all-female protagonists, the film is a refreshing change from the numerous shades of gay or transvestite there usually are in Almodóvar’s films. Instead the good old family-topics of child-abuse and incest are dealt with. The film starts with Raimunda coming home after her daughter Paula has killed her step-father who tried to rape her.
While dealing with that problem in a very matter-of-fact way, an aunt dies back in Raimunda’s home town and in the course of mourning her together with her sister Sole, they discover that their own mother who was believed to be dead is still alive and had been supporting the dying aunt for the past years. This unexpected blast from the past, unravels more history and painful memories.
I’m still not sure how much I like the film. While I appreciate the greater subtlety in this one along with all the small tragedies that add up, I also found that it starts off many little stories… about the neighbour, about the restaurant, about the singing… which aren’t picked up again and make things like they were constructed in a hurry with too much of the artificial construction shining through.
Little Britain
I watched some episodes of Little Britain when visiting Dan earlier this year. And now my flatmate got the first series on DVD from a friend. The show is just an extremely painful piece of television.
It’s quite funny in some places but just annoying in others. And with a whole season to go through it’s rather repetitive as well. While each characterisation they do is funny the first time around, that wears off rather quickly. Particularly if the people involved do pretty much exactly the same thing in each episode – just in a different surrounding.
But that may just be a German guy not ‘getting’ British humour. I mean, I’m not supposed to, am I? And I really fail to see what’s particularly comic about pretty much everyone in the show playing roles where they are guys who are old, fat, ugly, dressing up as a girl and most likely all of the above.
Uh, and one more thing: While we were at Haldern, someone brought up the topic of MILF (which was apparently popularised by the film American Pie… guess who just burnt his Google record with that search!), which is a topic that’s pretty hard to get rid of once a sufficiently large number of drunk people are involved. And seeing Little Britain afterwards, we so had to think that the Gary and Jason sketches were – err, GILF?
Bande à part
All right, Bande à part is apparently a classic of the nouvelle vague and I’ve read that it’s supposed to be the ‘most accessible’ film by Jean-Luc Godard. Ah well, thank you very much. Being the ignorant that I am, I only thought about seeing the film after listening to Nouvelle Vague’s sophomore album by the same name as the film with yet more ‘bossa nova’ cover versions of 1980s music (partially sweet but the idea is wearing off, I’d say).
It’s a quiet film from the 1960s in black and white. Two guys, Franz and Arthur want to steal a bunch of money from the house of Odile who attends their English class. Around this many things evolve. But I have to be hard pressed to use the word ‘evolve’, as mostly it seems that things aren’t all that strongly connected. They have some idea here and some other there and they follow some of them. They don’t listen to each other when discussing things and mostly ignore Odile, yet both the guys fancy her and they eventually go through with the robbery but fail at it.
As I pointed out earlier, I seem to lack the historical background to appreciate all that. But besides some nice moments, the film just felt like it was assembled together without a real flow and even the frequent voice-overs which claimed to ‘explain’ what’s going on seemed to be doing nothing like that. So what am I missing out on here?
What surprised me was that in one scene there were what looks like cleared ‘placed’ products in the film. Not exactly what I expected in an old froggy arthouse film. And it was also great to see the scene with the run through the Lovre which was talked about and copied for The Dreamers.
The Wooden Camera
The Wooden Camera is a recent (2004) South African film. In it we see two boys, Sipho and Madiba find a dead body while playing at the railway tracks. With the man they find a gun and a video camera. While Sipho takes the gun and starts being cool with some gangster types and a lifestyle of stealing and drugs, Madiba takes the camera and starts filming. To hide the expensive toy in their poor neighbourhood they build a wooden case around it to make the filming look like child’s play.
Madiba makes a number of fascinating and cool shots with the camera and discovers the girl Estelle in a store where he films her stealing a book. Being from a rich family it’s not that she couldn’t afford the book, but she’s in a phase of rebellion against her parents who do their best in bringing her up in their own old-fashioned racist ways and hence forbid her to be friends with Madiba.
The two of them meet after all, though – at Estelle’s cello teacher’s place as the teacher also tries to bring music to the homelands. He sees and appreciates Madiba’s films and encourages him to go on filming. Which may be just what he needs.
Perhaps the film is a bit simple in the way it portrays the split up between Sipho and Madiba, between crime and art as a simple choice that the protagonists make. But apart from that it’s a sweet story. And the ‘wooden camera’ footage really is quite interesting and seductive – looking somewhat arty and being nice and rough enough to lack the slick professionalism. Oh, and the film features one of my favourite spots in Cape Town. The place where they started building a bridge for the highway to run on but never finished it (I’ve heard people say that’s due to some property in the gap being owned by someone stubborn, but I have no idea whether that’s true). So for many years now there have been two ends of a half-finished bridge right next to Cape Town’s city centre:
Le dernier métro
Le dernier métro is a highly lauded film about a theatre in Nazi-occupied Paris which tries to keep on running despite the new censors. In particular the theatre’s boss Lucas Steiner who is jewish is hiding in the cellar, while the theatre is being run by his wife and performs one of his pieces with a fake author name.
The film touches many different topics. Such as the artists’ struggle to find the right balance between playing the game of censorship and suppression while keeping their self-respect and life; and the different answers that the various characters find for that question. It also shows us that Gérard Depardieu hasn’t always been old and fat.
In total, I wasn’t too impressed by the film, though, and found it a bit lengthy and conventional. Solid, but not great.
Cannabis
Another supposed classic with Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin is Cannabis (apparently also known as French Intrigue
or The Mafia wants your Blood
). Killer Serge comes to Paris to do some work for his bosses in New York. Things go wrong and his friend Paul comes over as well to sort things out while they’re staying at the place of Jane whom Serge fell in love with on the plane to Paris.
It remains a bit unclear what their real business in Paris is, but instead we get Paul waxing lyrical about being alive and smiling all the time (I bet he was a ‘beau’ of the 1970s) while Serge is mainly occupied with shagging the hot Jane (who’ll even undress for the occasions) every ten minutes or so.
So apart from Jane Birkin this sounds a bit lame, but there are a few fun scenes in the film (most notably Serge and Paul having a gunfight with their enemies in a chicken battery farm – who would’ve thought that chicken farming already looked quite bad back in the 1960s? in France?) and with the Gainsbourg music in places it’s all right to chill out to.
Element of Crime
I love the band Element of Crime and ever since I learned that their name comes from a film by Lars von Trier, I’ve wanted to see that film. But it still took me many years to actually do that.
Not-so-surprisingly it’s a somewhat weird film. And one with strong visuals as well. It was released in 1985 – i.e. well before the Dogma ‘95 era. But also well before the great TV mini-series Riget (a.k.a. Geister, a.k.a. The Kingdom), which it reminded me of quite a lot in both style and a number of scenes.
The whole film is shot (or edited to be) in very dark and reddish tones. That makes it quite mysterious just from looking at it. And it goes with the story of the cop Fisher (strangely the film and its names are very English while everything else seems Danish or even German) who returns to Cairo from a case he had in Denmark and visits a hypnotist to explore his memories from that job. Hence everything is experienced in a dreamy state and from an outside perspective.
With the main story of the case he has to solve back home being that his mentor had written ‘The Element of Crime’ and describes as a technique for solving a case that the investigator has to follow the criminal’s mind and think like him to figure out what is going on and why. Unlike all these modern ‘profiler’ TV series, von Trier sees this kind of technique more as a way to madness than to well-dressed people solving cases by pressing buttons on computers, using science magic to find evidence and investigating crime scenes with torches in the dark rather than simply turning on the light.
In fact, the lights aren’t turned on in The Element of Crime either, but Fisher follows all the traces in a world where every place seems to be flooded, wet and muddy, where paper coffee cups invariably lose their handles and where none of that appears to be remarkable.
So, yup, it’s a bit strange, but probably worth seeing. Particularly if you enjoyed films like Naked Lunch as well.
The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice
I’ve heard people say that The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice (a.k.a. お茶漬の味) is a Japanese classic. And in the 1950s black and white sense of the word. So I was curious to see it – although I wasn’t sure I could relate to the vastly different time and culture. In the end I was surprised how ‘Western’ many things looked in the film.
The film is very calmly shot and only uses a few repeating stage setups and the camera doesn’t move between cuts which makes the film look very calm from today’s point of view. The film treats the topic of arranged marriages. Both the existing one of the rich girl Taeko and her hard-working ‘dumb’ husband Mokichi and one that is to be arranged for their niece.
While Taeko lies to her husband to be able to go out and have fun with her friends, he tolerates that to have his peace and live the simple life he prefers – rather than her life full of luxuries which he finds stressful. Once their niece fails to turn up for meeting her potential husband, the situation in their home turns stressul. Mokichi seems to support or at least tolerate his niece’s unwillingness to give in to the arranged marriage, while his wife wants to the rules and good manners to be followed.
Over that they get into a row – which amazingly leads to them finally understanding each other better and something like love or at least understanding entering their marriage… which they find over a meal of green tea over rice.
That’s supposed to be a very simple dish. But now I wonder how to make it…
Uh, and I was surprised that Japanese people sing ‘gaudeamus igitur’. But then again, Chiho learned to sing ‘Sah ein Knab ein Röslein stehn’ at school, which is just evil as the word ‘Röslein’ is pretty much impossible to pronounce for people who grew up speaking Japanese.
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To kill any anticipation: chances that he could make another film as brilliant were pretty low. And those chances were right. He missed that by far. Still, Dear Wendy remains an OK film. A film about guns. A film about young people trying to love guns without loving to shoot people. They have their ideals, they try hard, they mean the best, and they fail.
Unlike the Dogma films, Dear Wendy looks well filmed and nicely lit and coloured. The few scenes with (deliberate) blurriness in them look out of place. Lars von Trier receives writing credits for this film. But looking at it reminded me of von Trier’s recent films Dogville and Manderlay: The whole film takes place around a single square in a small town. And while there are real buildings in Dear Wendy, those aren’t all that important. And in between we even see a map of that town square with all the house outlines visible on it – making it quite similar to the stage setup used in von Trier’s films.
Lee is cold as ice
Grant is hot as hell
I think they are both real nice
And I hope it all ends well
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And the U.S. play a central role in the Film. In fact it is said the be the second of an American trilogy by Lars von Trier after Dogville. It continues to tell the story of Dogville’s protagonist Grace who isn’t played by Nicole Kidman this time and drives through the country with her father. They happen to pass a place where slavery still exists seven decades after it has been abolished. Being the good girl that she is, she wants to change that and free those black slaves – much to the dismay of her father who tells her that just freeing them won’t do much good to the people.
And of course things look like they’d go downhill pretty fast, so Grace decides to stay around and make sure the former slaves learn enough about free life before having to face its tough sides. All this takes place on the farm which is now operated by the former slaves and which, just like Dogville, is put on stage-like without any buildings but just their outlines drawn on the floor.
During the year that Grace stays pretty much everything goes wrong. From disagreements to incompetence on both her and the former slaves’ sides. From hunger to theft to murder or death penalty. And in the end to the majority agreeing that their former state of slavery was actually good and wanting to re-instate it. A step that seems as understandable as it seems wrong.
So, after a somewhat lenghty 139 minutes of film, you’re left with that bit of drama and fade over to David Bowie. I wonder how you’d perceive the film if it ended without those photos and with Me and Bobby McGee playing.
In the end I found the film a bit boring and more distant than von Trier’s other films including the formally similar Dogville. Perhaps his scheme of making a film look like theatre is wearing off quickly or his clever background voice is a bit too clever for its own good. I just don’t need ironic little comments for everything. Particularly not those which I can come up with myself pretty easily.
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But that’s not what the film De Fem benspænd (Five Obstructions) is about. Rather, it deals with the 1967 short film Det perfekte menneske (The Perfect Human) by Danish director Jørgen Leth. In 13 minutes and clean black and white, it shows a man an a woman. Dressing, eating, moving.
Jørgen Leth seems to be considered a teacher and mentor by Lars von Trier – which is where the film begins. Both directors meet and von Trier challenges Leth to remake his film five times with obstructions that he poses. Not the typical Dogma obstructions that we’ve seen many times by now but arbitrary ones. And indeed those obstructions seem arbitrary and hard, but soon you learn that Leth deals with them rather well and that obstructions can serve as a guide that may actually help the work.
The first obstructions were probably the harshest, with number one being that not uncut bit should be longer than twelve frames. That’s half a second. How could that possibly work – particularly keeping in mind that the original film (scenes of which are shown during the film as well) is very slow and with rather long shots. But then, we live in the days of music videos and half-second scenes aren’t all that unusual anymore. But Leth’s film is a bit more clever than a music video: He cuts together what looks like different shots of the same scene, or reversed parts of the scene or several repetitions of the same shots. A bit like assembling music from tiny samples.
Next up, he’s supposed to film in a horrible place which takes him to a red light district in Bombay. It doesn’t look particularly horrible, but apparently the director who also doubled as the actor in this section, was quite stresses and scared. I didn’t find that too convincing. And neither did von Trier – who initially wanted to send his colleague back to redo the film, but failed. Von Trier’s objections were that not all of his orders were respected, though.
Third was possibly the coolest film. A cartoon-style remake. Which was particularly funny as both directors agreed that they absolutely didn’t like cartoons. And while I’d say that that Leth didn’t quite stick to the order to make a traditional cartoon that von Trier would have loved to be bad, he rather collected footage from the previous shots and had some cartoon people manipulate the images, making the film from that. As can be seen below, those episodes even had their iPod moment…
Fourth is a remake with the obstruction being no obstruction at all. And indeed after all the orderly rules for the first three remakes, this suddenly seems like a harsh order. Leth is supposed to make a 2003 version of his film. I didn’t get it. Or it wasn’t too good. The most freedom for the director led to the episode I liked least.
Fifth and last, the obstruction is that Leth can’t do any filming, but von Trier will assemble prior footage from their discussions to give the film with Leth just reading a text that von Trier wrote. Leth’s name is given as a credit for this which of course kicks of a lot of thinking about what those names mean, how a film can be considered ‘Leth’s’ or ‘von Trier’s’ and whether that matters at all. The text deals with their differences in style – von Trier’s very close one and Leth’s very distant one.
Altogether this was an enjoyable film, a cool original – which I’ll have to try and have a look at in the original –, and an interesting idea. Probably one can go on for hours contemplating about the extent in which different styles matter for film and what the effect of such restrictions are. Are they liberating because they allow the director to focus narrowly on his subject rather than getting lost in style or are they actually restricting? Are Lars von Trier and his whole Dogma thing thus particularly clever because they manage to focus on what’s important or are they just lazy bastards using a shortcut rather than thinking things through in the ‘big picture’? I’m not sure. Most likely a bit of both, although von Trier’s films give me a bias to his version. Give counterexamples!
Finally, on a not so nice note, I need to say that the film was in Danish with German subtitles. Bad subtitles. Why are there so many subtitles without a proper ß for the font they use? It’s not like it’s an unusual letter. And it seemed like the subtitle people didn’t even watch the film once. In many scenes there was a white background, which made the white subtitles (with an extremely narrow to non-existant black border) very hard to read and much more distracting than they need be.
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It is a three hour long theatre like ordeal for a very slender Nicole Kidman who comes to a distant village and wants to hide there, being open and nice to the people in exchange – offering help wherever she can. As time goes by people get used to her abusing her. In every chapter of the film things get worse without anyone admitting it. Eventually she has been raped by the most of the male population of 'Dogville, that town of decent and nice people and is chained to a millstone. At the end she has the opportunity for revenge.
Many interesting things in the film. The whole theatre-style set is quite cool. As the film goes on, it is really hard to tell when exactly borders are crossed and things start going wrong and why they do. Have people been too prejudiced from the beginning? Did things just accidentally go wrong? &c All of the above? Possibly. At the end of the film you really start wondering who's good and who's bad. Tricky one.
The film was good but a bit too long. I don't think it was von Trier's best. I liked The Kingdom or Dancer in the Dark much better. This film also is non-Dogma and lacks the 'immediacy' that I find Dogma films to have.
Strangely, the film is set in America. And critics have made the point of claiming it to be anti-American, particularly considering the Music and images that come with the closing credits. I am sure this was done on purpose to provoke people a litte. Within the film I didn't find the people to be particularly 'American' – whatever that is. Perhaps the inhabitants of the village could be characterised as 'protestant' – that was my impression at least.
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