My favourite Haneke so far

Strange things occur in a small village in Germany in 1913, right before the outbreak of World War I. A doctor gets injured in a riding accident that isn’t just an accident. A woman falls to her death. Children get abducted and abused. The deeds are random and cruel. Who is causing them? And what else is going on under the tidy surface? Piece by piece we’re putting together a puzzle through the eyes of the schoolteacher who is looking back on those events from a future perspective. This is the story of The White Ribbon.

The roots of evil
I’ve seen some reviewers claiming that this film should be seen as an attempt to explain where Germany was coming from, to show the soil where the Nazi movement later could spawn and flourish.

And I could see how you could make such an interpretation, but I also think that the movie works fine without the historical context as a study in the dark sides if the human nature.

People do bad things. Sometimes the abusers have been victims of abuse in the past and are so damaged by it that they’ll transfer it to the next generation. Sometimes you can relate it to the environment. People are governed by a political or religious system that has twisted their inner ethical compass. And then there is the third kind of evil, the one for which we lack good explanations. Like Kevin-evil. The village in The White Ribbon contains all forms of evil. With very few exceptions, it’s rotten to the core.

This movie was truly uncomfortable to watch, not to say harrowing, which might sound a little strange considering that it’s a very neat movie, if dark, shot in black and white, not containing much of gore or explicit scene. But there is a certain kind of creepiness that doesn’t require blood to be tangible – the same way as an abundance of blood isn’t a guarantee for a creepy movie (as I wrote about in a previous review of Suspiria).

If you’ve seen some of Ingmar Bergman’s darker movies, you’re probably familiar with this category of discomfort. Do you remember the horrible priest in Fanny & Alexander? He could definitely qualify as a villager in The White Ribbon. The difference is that there’s not just one of him, but several – some of them even worse.

Strange pacing
For how uncomfortable it was to watch, I really enjoyed The White Ribbon. The pacing is a little weird; sometimes the movie gets very, very slow, lingering in a shot of something that doesn’t move until you wonder if the DVD has gotten stuck or something. Sometimes the voice-over narrative gets into a quick speed mode and you need to pay attention to keep up with the development. But somehow the mystery kept me interested all the way through, even through the slower parts.

This is the second movie by the Austrian director Michael Haneke I watch and definitely my favorite one. While Benny’s Video felt a bit simplistic in its theme where a boy did terrible things after watching too much TV, The White Ribbon is less obvious and way more intriguing.

I don’t know exactly what happened in that village. But I’m still thinking about it, almost two weeks after watching it and I take that as a sign of quality.

The White Ribbon (Das weiße Band, Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte, Michael Haneke DE/AT 2009) My rating: 4,5/5

My first encounter with South Korean cinema

One of the best things about joining a local film club is that it gives you a little push to expand into new strange cinematic territories. Since you’ve already paid for the membership card, you want to use it as much as possible, so you end up watching a lot of movies normally wouldn’t have been your first choice.

It was solely thanks to my film club that I recently watched what – as far as I can recall – must have been my first movie from South Korea.

Before you say anything, I’m certain that there are those who will grumble at this. South Korean cinema isn’t small and obscure; it’s pretty well established and has a lot of fans all over the world as far as I understand it. But for me it’s new, so bare with me for being a bit clueless. And if you have suggestions about South Korean films that I “must” watch, by all means, go ahead and share them.

My first encounter with this film country turned out to be a fairly new one, The Housemaid, which is a remake of a Korean movie from 1960. Obviously I haven’t watched the original, so I’m afraid that I can’t make any comparison of how well this holds up against it.

The film takes place in the house of a wealthy family. In the centre of it is a young housemaid who gets into a sexual relationship with the father/husband in the house, resulting in the housemaid getting pregnant. This doesn’t go unnoticed, obviously, and other inhabitants of the house see their positions threatened and start plotting against the housemaid. It turns into a thriller with class, sex and power games as the major ingredients.

While beautifully shot and technically impeccable, I must admit that I found this film a little bit shallow and too much of a soap opera for my liking. Towards the end the melodrama takes over completely and one of the last scenes is so over-the-top that it left me scratching my head. “Where did that come from? Really? Are you kidding me?”

On the other hand it gave me a change of environment and the opportunity to see a bit of life in South Korea (although limited to the life of the upper class) and this element of exoticism was enough to keep me interested.

The Housemaid gave me my first glimpse of South Korean cinema and while I wasn’t overwhelmed by it, I wasn’t completely put off either. I’m ready for more.

The Housemaid (Hanyo, Sang-Soo Im, KR, 2010) My rating: 3,5/5

You’re the only one left on Earth – what do you do?

Sense of wonder. It’s such a beautiful phrase.

Do you remember the sensation of it?  Do you remember the sweet taste of the moment when all your illusions suddenly are turned upside down and a truth that you couldn’t have imagined dawns upon you? Do you remember the surge in the stomach, like a rollercoaster taking a quick dive, your mind reaching for the stars, and for one brief second you’re feeling as if you’re weightless, independent of the small and futile restrictions of time and space.

Sadly enough it’s a state of mind that I enter more and more rarely nowadays. As I’ve grown older, those dwindling moments have become few and far between. I think the more experienced we get, the more stories and ideas we meet over the years, the harder is it to trick us or make an impression. We become cynics and “sense of wonder” is – mostly – just a fond memory.

One writer who gave me many experiences of sense of wonder back in the days was Fredric Brown, a master at the genre of very short science fiction stories. I used to love his punch lines before I turned old and jaded. The shortest one he wrote is titled “The Shortest Horror Story”. It goes like this:

 ”The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…”

This story used to give me chills and I came to think of it as I recently watched The Quiet Earth.

Descent into madness
This is a post-apocalyptic science fiction movie from New Zealand where we get to follow a man who one day wakes up finding the world he lives in all deserted. It appears as if everyone else not only has died; they’ve disappeared as well. He’s all on his own.

What do you do in such a situation? How would you react? I can imagine I’d do pretty much the same thing as Zac does. First there’s the curiosity, the efforts to find out what has happened. Then there’s a time where he enjoys the freebies, the access to free champagne and other luxuries that gives him comfort. But as time goes by and he doesn’t get any replies to the messages he’s sent out, he’s starting to descend into madness. Until….

Well, I suppose I’ll arrest myself there in order not to spoil anything. While it’s not quite as twisty as a classic Fredric Brown story, you’re better off not knowing too much about it.

Obviously the movie is a little bit dated in the terms of technology. You see it everywhere. The computers are ancient, the telephones are clumsy and his alarm clock looks exactly like the one in Groundhog Day, putting a very distinct time mark. But if you disregard of that, you’ll find a very enjoyable little science fiction movie that I think holds up pretty well.

Based on a tourist experience
I especially liked the first half where we follow Zac’s explorations of the deserted world. It looks quite convincing considering the low budget they probably worked with. Perhaps they didn’t have to alter reality all that much to make it look post-apocalyptic, at least if we’re too believe IMDb:

“The Quiet Earth is actually based the one experience of an American tourist in New Zealand in the 1970s. New Zealanders always take the weekends off and sleep late. The tourist arrived in the center of Auckland on a Sunday morning and found it completely deserted. He later said he felt like the last man on Earth.”

Remembering what weekends looked like when I visited New Zealand in the 80s I can actually vividly imagine that this was the source of inspiration.

I also loved the focus on atmosphere and human behaviour rather than on action and cheap thrills. There is certainly an element of techno-babble (no science fiction is complete without it!), but you don’t need to understand it to enjoy the film.

Like most science fiction stories it has a great ending with a beautiful final shot, so impressive and memorable that this alone justifies watching the move. As I saw it I felt the tickling in the stomach, still familiar after all those years. It was quite discrete, more quiet than sensational and there was only a mouthful of it, so it didn’t last for long. But there was no mistake about what it was.

The sense of wonder.

The Quiet Earth (Geoff Murphy, NZ, 1985) My rating: 4/5

My first 5/5 rated movie of 2012

My firstborn daughter didn’t seem to want to be in this world for her first four months of her life. She had colic and she cried constantly – loud and heartbreaking. The only time she didn’t cry was when we put her in a car and went for a ride. It didn’t take two seconds before she was sound asleep and she kept sleeping until we stopped, when she woke up abruptly, ready for more hours of screaming and crying.

When Eva, the mother of Kevin in We Need to Talk about Kevin, stops by a jackhammer, seemingly getting a relief hearing the sound of the drill over the sound of her yelling son, I know exactly where she’s coming from.

In our case the problems were temporary. One morning our daughter’s stomach was back to normal, she stopped screaming and began to sleep, at least as much as other babies sleep. In a snap those horrendous months became just a far distant memory.

For Eva however, her problems have only begun.

She and Kevin just can’t connect, no matter how hard she tries. And Kevin certainly isn’t an easy child to love. He seems to have a dark passenger, but unlike Dexter he appears to lack a code of conduct keeping it under control.

Eventually something will happen that makes Eva’s life go from bad to worse. She’s going through events that are the worst a parent could imagine and she’s torn by guilt as well as the uncovered contempt and hatred of the people in the neighbourhood.

We Need to Talk about Kevin is the first movie I’ve watched in a theatre this year to get a 5/5 rating. It was an amazing movie experience and I’m pretty sure it will be in my top 10 list of 2012. And as so often happens to me when I really, really love a movie, I find myself in a tough spot to explain why. True love is wordless. But I’ll make a five list to at least give you a few ideas.

Five reasons to love We Need to Talk about Kevin:

1. Because of Tilda Swinton
I can’t imagine Eva in any other way than how Tilda Swinton played her. It’s an amazing performance, on par with for instance Michael Fassbender in Shame. It’s beyond my comprehension why she wasn’t nominated for an Oscar.

2. Because it’s beautifully cinematic
We Need to Talk about Kevin is the opposite of “filmed theatre”, which I talked about in a post a few days ago. It uses the film medium to its full potential, showing rather than telling. It’s a movie that speaks to all of your senses. Even if it isn’t a “4d” movie, it was so sensual that I almost could feel the smell of tomatoes and paint and jam in my nostrils. It’s a mosaic of impressions and fragments of memory, forming a picture that isn’t complete until the final shot. The cinematography is breathtaking. While the topic is serious, it’s a joy for the eye.

3. Because it offers a new approach to an old topic
The story about what Kevin eventually does is one that has been told several times before in movies. But this isn’t yet another movie in that genre. We Need to Talk about Kevin is more than anything else a movie about Eva. It’s about what has led her to the point where she is now; it’s about what’s going on inside her – her depression, her guilt and her frustration. And it’s about how other people react to Eva and how she reacts to them. This is a perspective that I hadn’t given much thought before, but which I think is necessary to talk about. It’s thought provoking. Many people hold for true that evil deeds is something that doesn’t come out of nowhere, that it’s something that is caused by a crappy childhood. But how true is that?

4. Because the artfulness never is allowed to overshadow the storytelling
While the movie is very artistically made, it isn’t cryptic, hard to follow, overly subtle, slow or ambiguous to the point that you don’t know what the movie was about, which unfortunately sometimes happen with small arthouse movies. We’re jumping back and forward on the timeline, but it’s never hard to figure out where you are. And there is an underlying tension that made me feel fully awake, alert and eager to see what would happen next. It offers the perfect balance between being artful and engaging.

5. Because it haunts me
Some movies are just for the moment. Others stay with you, haunting you for days, months or even years to come. I have no doubt that We Need to talk about Kevin is one of those that will stay with me. It’s not only the stunning images or the creeping personality of Kevin that lingers in my mind. It’s also the perspective. The entire movie is done from the perspective of Eva, just like Martha Marcy May Marlene took Martha’s perspective. This is her recollections, her way of watching reality. But if you asked someone else, you would probably get a different story and how would that look? How much of this is real and how much is just going on in her head? I’m still wrestling with the thoughts over it and if you split the ticket fee on all the hours I will think about it, it certainly gives good value for your money.

And I’ll leave it there for now but if you want to hear more about my love for this film, you can listen to an upcoming episode of The Matineecast where Ryan McNeil and I gush over it. I’ll let you know when it’s up.

We Need to Talk about Kevin (Lynney Ramsey, UK, 2011) My rating: 5/5

Reader question: What is bad about “filmed theatre”?

I got a letter from a long time reader Syrien, who raises some questions about the relationship between the movie medium and traditional theatre.

“Hi Jessica,

I have a movie-related question and I thought I’d try ask you, since I really enjoy reading your musings about movies (and I trust you feel free to answer as much or as little as you feel like).

The question is related to Carnage, which I saw at my local cinema tonight. I’d read a newspaper review or two and they were lukewarm, but decided I wanted to watch it regardless, partly because I have enjoyed both Foster and Winslet in previous movies they’ve been in. And I found it very funny and enjoyable. What was striking though, was how the reviews I had read said something fairly negative about this being “filmed theatre”. I don’t think it’s a wrong description, but I have trouble catching what is bad about it. And it made me wonder, would you say that a movie lover is as likely, more likely or less likely to like live theatre? Do you enjoy live theatre as well as movies, or is the magic more in the silver screen?

I remember when I was a teenager, that I had this understanding that movies were cool, while theater was.. uhm.. cultured? (I was not cool, and strange enough to want to go to the theater with a friend rather than grown-ups at 16. I enjoyed movies too though). But since then, so many of the nerdy things I liked, like comics and computer games, have become totally mainstream. Watching this movie and considering the reviews really got me wondering what was different crowds, what was just different art forms, and what was, I don’t know.. something far above my head I understand that a movie is not the same as theatre, of course. But at the same time, if you have a favourite actor, you’d probably not say no to seeing that actor in a live theatre (I keep wanting to call them RL theatres..), so there has to be some connection too, right? “

And here is my reply:

“Dear Syrien,

I’m afraid I haven’t spent enough time in the world of cinephiles to be able to make any judgement about the status of live theatre versus plays that have been adapted for the movies. For my own part I think that live performances – either it’s in the form of theatre or music or dancing – has a certain form of magic that movies never can reproduce – namely the feeling of that you’re experiences something that only will happen once. No performance is exactly the same as the other. There will always be differences from day to day in how an actor perform, how the audience response. And there’s this special tension in the air, that something could go wrong, which adds a nerve to it. On the other hand there is a magic in movies that can’t be reproduced in theatres. There’s a different freedom to it, the possibility to go to places that only exist in our imagination, to jump back and forward in time and space, to play with perspectives and moods and effects. If someone tried to make a staged play out of Inception I can’t imagine it would be anywhere near as good as the film.

For me it’s not one thing or another. They two different art forms and both are enjoyable and respectable for their own reasons. But films are way cheaper and more easily available, so for every time I go to see live theatre, I’ve probably watched a couple of hundred of movies.

I agree that there is something negative in the expression “filmed theatre”. And I think this is related to a wish and an expectation on movies to offer something different than a traditional theatre. Since we have all the magic, all the possibilities of a different way of storytelling, it seems like a poor choice not to use all those options.

Of course you can just use the camera to document a performance and give a bigger audience a chance to see it. This is done more and more nowadays as some cinemas are showing filmed opera. But no one would think of calling this a “movie”. It’s just a documentation, a “next best” option for someone who couldn’t make it to the live show.

When the negative criticism comes up, I think it’s because a movie feels “stagy” when it doesn’t need to be that way. Many movies are built on plays that have been performed in theatre, but have been adapted for the screen so well that you have no idea of its origin. A good example of this last year was the Canadian film Incendies, which takes place in a fictive Middle East country on a number of different settings. I was really surprised to learn afterwards that this was built in a play. There was no way I could have guessed that. It was so cinematic, conveying a story not just in dialogue, but in moods created by cinematography, score and editing.”

But now I leave the floor to the guests of The Velvet Café. What do you make of Syrien’s questions? How is the relationship between theatre and movies? Is it necessarily a bad thing that you can spot the theatrical origin in a screenplay? Let’s have a conversation about this!

I give you free drinks. You give me your thoughts.

Cheers!

It’s a long fall down from Dogtooth

The higher they climb, the harder they fall. I came to think of the saying as I watched Alps, the new movie by the Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos.

He’s the director who did Dogtooth, which was one of my favourite movies from 2011 (we got it late in Sweden). It was bizarre, disturbing, not like anything I previously had watched and I was grabbed by the story of the young adults who had been imprisoned by their parents their entire life, fed with lies about how dangerous the world was outside of their protecting wall. While opening for many interpretations, it also worked as a drama bordering to horror movie. I was equally fascinated and appalled and gave it one of my rare 5/5 ratings.

With Dogtooth in fresh memory I had pretty high expectations on Alps (and not just referring to the title.) I had heard that it was about a group of people whose job was to impersonate people who have died for a period to help the people who stood close to them handle their grieving. It sounded like an in interesting concept for something along the lines of Dogtooth. I imagined something that pulled towards science fiction, perhaps a parallel world like the one in Never Let Me Go, a place where the ethics and way of living had developed in a different direction than in our universe.

Sadly enough I was wrong. Whatever I had expected – Alps wasn’t it. God knows what it was. Frankly I can’t remember last time I watched a coconut movie with such a hard, unbreakable shell. Don’t ask me what it was about because I haven’t got a clue.

Disengaged reading
To say something nice you could say that Lanthimos has a style of his own. For instance he’s instructing the actors to read all the lines as disengaged as possible. This is not something I’m assuing; I heard it in an interview. And if this is his aim, he has certainly succeeded. They all sound like school children reading aloud from the text book with monotonous voices that don’t care about intonation and punctuation. But for what reason? I have no idea. Can someone please explain?

The cinematography is also quite special. Every once in a while the camera focus shifts and halts at something in the foreground, a person or an object. Everything is completely blurred out and there is no depth in the image whatsoever. Maybe it’s supposed to mean something, but all I see is someone posing for the sake of posing.

This is so bad that I really don’t know what to say more than to warn you. This is not a new Dogtooth. It’s crap. I don’t use the word pretentious so I won’t do it now either but I don’t think I’ve ever been as close to using it as in this review.

Popcorn
Is there anything good about it, anything at all? Well, that would be the final song. All of a sudden they played Popcorn. Yep, that Popcorn, the good old dance song that lasts forever and ever, my earliest childhood memory of pop music. It played in my head on my way home and it cheered me up a little. Then it kept playing for yet another day and I got annoyed. Once you got it in your mind it’s hard to turn it off.

Alps on the other hand will be easy to turn off because it gave nothing. Ask me in a week about it and I promise you I won’t remember a thing.

Alps (Alpeis, Giorgos Lanthimos, GR, 2011) My rating: 1,5/5

I’m going to get some crap for this review

Judging from the reactions of the Swedish film blogging community, War Horse is not going to be a hit here. Everyone seems to hate it and I’m not talking about some halfhearted disliking. They hate it with passion.

Fiffi, for instance, describes in her usual entertaining style (unfortunately not easily translatable to English with Google Translate) how sick she felt after watching it, claiming that she would rather had spent 146 minutes at a painful dentist appointment or standing on glowing charcoal than seeing this.

Sometimes Fiffi and I are like imagined twin sisters, loving and hating the same movies. But on some occasions the sisters disagree vehemently and this is one of those.

I hesitate to say it aloud since I expect to get a lot of crap for it, at least from my fellow Swedes, but I actually liked War Horse quite a bit.

What worked for me
I think there were a few things that made it work for me where it didn’t work for Fiffi.

1. Fiffi compares it to the classic Little House on the Prairie series that we both grew up with. The comparison is absolutely relevant, but while she seems to do it in a rather pejorative way, I do it in an appreciating way. War Horse is just as sentimental, celebrating American ideals of sticking together and never giving up, no matter how hard the circumstances are. It’s a brew that I as a grumpy, realistic, down-to-Earth Swede only can stomach in small portions. It would be unbearable to live in a world where all movies were like this. But once in a while it’s wonderful to get a bit of Little-House-ness.
2. Fiffi apparently doesn’t like horses. I do. I read the books about The Black Stallion repeatedly as a child and I could see a bit of a connection. They’re both stories about the magic bond between a horse and his owner, a bond that will make them overcome all sorts of obstacles and hardships. They’re both stories about a horse that keep surpassing people’s expectations.
3.  I was in a terrible shape when I watched the movie due to a stubborn cold that had deprived me of sleep for days and didn’t seem to go away anytime soon. When you feel that way – feeling sorry for yourself, in desperate need for someone to parent and take care of you – you regress mentally, in my case to about the age of a 12-year-old. And since the movie apparently is intended for that age, it couldn’t really have been much better. All my shields were down.

My hang-ups
I won’t deny that there are a couple of things about War Horse that feel a little bit odd to me.

1. First there was this score by John Williams (who shockingly enough seems to be alive and still going strong). It felt rather invasive. Whenever something happened on the screen there was a response in the music. Field in the sunset with galloping horses? Get on with the violins! More violins! Yet more! Someone does something that is supposed to be a little bit funny? Enter a funny clarinet tune! It didn’t break the movie for me but it took me a little while to get used to.
2. With the exception of some really harsh battle scenes from the muddy fields where soldiers are dying left and write and the horses struggle until they fall down dead on the spot, there was something slightly artificial about the look of the film. It made me think of the illustrations in the publications that some Christian groups spread trying to make you join. Everyone has sparkling eyes and perfect skin and teeth. This is probably intended. If it looked like a gritty, realistic European movie, you couldn’t bring your kids to watch it.
3. Finally I couldn’t fully embrace that French and German people spoke English between each other. Once again – if you’re going for a young audience, it might be the way it had to be, as long as they’re not used to subtitles like we are where I live. So I forgive it, though I don’t like it.

A boy and his horse
In the end War Horse isn’t intended to be a documentary. I think it can bring a bit of insight to young people about the horrors of war and the nastiness of WWI, which I think is fairly unknown to most 12 year olds of today. And that’s good.

But most of all it’s a fairy tale about a boy and his horse. It’s told in an oldfashiond manner, which is a nice change to all the fractured, non-linear and ambiguous storytelling we usually see in modern films.

Does Spielberg “manipulate” the viewer, pulling strings to get emotional responses? Hell, yeah! But there’s nothing wrong with that. I was entertained and I got tears in my eyes once in a while and as the movie ended and the auditorium took up a spontaneous applause I was close to joining them.

I’m a little bit nervous about the next meet-up with the Swedish movie blogging community though. I’ll be alone in a land of haters, that’s for sure – pretty much like Joey the horse in the battle field. I can only hope I’ll do as fine as he did. Wish me luck!

War Horse (Steven Spielberg, US, 2011) My rating: 4/5