BIFF, Day Seven: Still Walking

Today we are travelling to South America and Japan. One journey I will take only once, the other I can’t wait to take again.
The Colombian road movie Los Viajes del Viento has two strengths that make up for many of its conventional traits: It never descends into a too typical South American sentimentality and it has the luxury of taking place in a geography that is seldom seen on films. The story is about an old, taciturn accordion master who recently lost his wife, and the young boy who may be his son. The old master wants to travel across the entire country in order to give back his accordion to his master. As legend will have it, he once won the instrument in a duel with the devil. The boy sees apprenticeship with the old man as his only possibility to make something of himself and thus follows his unwilling companion stubbornly through some spectacular landscape and hairy situations.

While beautiful to look at, the film didn’t really stand out in any particular way. You could substitute the old accordionist with, say, a kung fu master, or a literature professor, or any old sage with a special gift to impart on the young, and the basic story would pretty much be the same. And in the history of films, God knows this has been done again and again. The accordion only really comes to the fore in an early duel with a younger braggart in a music contest. Like the rapper’s duels in Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile, the accordion contest consists in psyching out one’s opponent by rhyme and insult while sticking to the chosen accordion tune. It may sound far fetched, but this part of the film really worked.

The travelogue, or road movie, is often an excellent way of highlighting a country’s geography and supporting the local tourist industry. Often, the tourist industry will help finance the film if the country is represented as a series of tourist vistas. This being Colombia, I’m not convinced that the ploy will be entirely successful, but we, the audience, win anyway. Especially since most of us will not get the chance – or take the chance – of visiting the country, I can’t think of a better way to be able to experience Colombia’s breathtaking natural vistas than in the comfort of the cinema chair, where the most immediate danger is an aneurysm triggered by some popcorn-munching moron by our side.

Ultimately, the film is worth seeing for its depiction of nature and the very varied geography – or geology. The stone formations towards the end were a sight to behold, as was the endless salt flats, the village built almost on the lake itself, and the Indian village atop a mountain. I have not seen exactly these sights before and felt fortunate to witness them in this way. The film also strikes up some laconic humoristic moments and I did chuckle a time or two. As for the main plot, I didn’t feel that it resolved itself entirely satisfactorily, but, as is my habit in these posts about films that most have not yet seen, I shan’t be spoiling the end here. The titular symbol of the travelling wind has a double bottom, referring both to the literal wind that has shaped the country and the various wind instruments. There is a scene where the wind blows through a piece of wood with a whistling sound, perhaps telling us that the tradition of these men has its roots in nature itself, in a time before Man, and that all we contribute are complications of that theme.

Hirokazu Kore-eda has made some seven films, not including his TV-work and some short films. Unfortunately not all of these are readily available in the west. His first film, Maborosi, an Ozu-style examination of a young widow trying to find a new lease on life after the loss of her husband , had a limited international run. But it was his second feature, the often wonderful After Life, which made him into a household name, if that house was an art house. (Yes, I know, bad pun…) In 2001 he made Distance, perhaps inspired by the gas attacks of a suicide cult in Japan; the Aum cult’s nerve gas attack on the city’s subway system. Then came Nobody Knows, which got a wider release and was nominated in Cannes and won a number of Asian awards. The story of a group of children left to their own devices after their mother takes off, was a masterpiece of naturalistic acting. Kore-eda directed over almost two years, and the children visibly live in the film. There are scenes in Nobody Knows that should break most hearts that are not already irredeemably broken. In 2006, two years after Nobody Knows, he made Hana, about a samurai who doesn’t really want to be a samurai. He is no good at fighting and wishes he could spend his days helping the poor people of the village in which he takes up residence. His very latest film is Air Doll, about a blow up sex doll that turns human Pinocchio-style. I have not seen this yet, but those that have, comment that it is remarkable in that the film never is exploitative, nor even is interested in the sexual aspects of this offbeat story. The film is more about what it means to be human and the innocence of the non-human in comparison. The first thing the doll learns after becoming human with a beating heart, is to lie.

This lengthy introduction is spurred by my absolute satisfaction with Kore-eda’s penultimate film, made in 2008, and shown this day in the BIFF-festival. Still Walking is perhaps the first perfect film I’ve seen this year. I really can’t find any faults with it. The only film coming near it in quality is the Swedish Burrowing, which I spoke of in a former post. The two films have in common that they are influenced by other directors. In Kore-eda’s case, the spectre of Japanese master, Yasujirō Ozu, is present, but not overwhelming, while in Burrowing, Terrence Malick is perhaps an even more present godfather.

The majority of Still Walking takes place within 24 hours, but including the epilogue, the time covered is three years. The real scope of the film, however, reaches much longer, as both the past and the future is so implicit in these 24 hours, that the film nears an almost general understanding of the human situation, particularly our place in the everlasting links between generations, from the very first to the last. I was most impressed by the way in which the director achieved this generality from a very specific time in a specific family.

A man who has just lost his job brings for the first time his wife, who is a widow, and her son to the annual family reunion. He clearly is not on good terms with his mother and father; “you should call your mother more often“, the father tells him. “I can’t stand listening to all her complaints“, the son answers. The father is a retired doctor who feels useless and socially in a no-man’s land, as he hasn’t anyone to continue his practice, and therefore must still play the role of village doctor himself, even though he is not up to it.

Seemingly, much of the reason for the family’s strained relationship, is that the eldest son lost his life in a drowning accident many years before, while saving a young boy from the waves. This son was the father’s favourite, and is in hindsight made to have represented the hopes for the family’s future. Every time the conversation begins to run more or less easily, the mother mentions some details about the dead son, and the family is thrown back into non-communication.

The reason for the reunion, is indeed that it marks the anniversary for the son’s death. Also present here is a sister with her husband and two children, who the father finds noisy. We can only assume that had the dead son had any children, they would be just as noisy. This is a film where I don’t want to tell much about the plot, as much of the enjoyment comes from gradually piecing together the dynamics of the family and just what has gone wrong in their lives. It is never -apart from the death of the son, which paradoxically has brought them together – the big, life-changing events that make these people be who they are, what they have become. Kore-eda is a master in communicating much bigger truths by very small movements and glances. Sometimes he lets a phrase linger a bit longer than necessary in order for us to grasp not only the context of the phrase, the feeling behind it, but its consequences, insignificant as they may seem before we have the entire picture.

It’s a cliché, but movies is really a universal language. I almost can’t think of better ways for us to see the common humanity between us all, than by immersing ourselves in works by masterful directors like Kore-eda. I felt more recognition in this film than in any Hollywood work I can recall. Nothing sudden or life-changing happens in the film, yet I felt a wiser person after having seen it, perhaps even wanting to be a better person. In this film, the characters don’t have “arcs”, as they evidently teach in Hollywood script classes. The characters that we observe become persons more than characters, and persons, for the most part, don’t suddenly learn something or change just because they have attended a family dinner, even though a number of American Thanksgiving films want us to believe this. They go on with their lives, as best they can, or maybe not even that.

What makes the film magic to me is also a consequence of the characters not only being oblivious to their shortcomings that we as spectators can detect in them, but that they actually go on living as if there never was anything particularly important about the day we have spent with them. They just go on, or as the film says in its title, they are still walking. (This phrase also comes up in a song the grandmother insists on playing on an old record player, and which she says she has a special relationship to. The song so subtly illuminates something of the past of the characters that we don’t quite grasp it before a shot of the grandfather doctor’s later reaction. The world of memories and forgotten times that comes into light here is staggering).

The only hint of sentimentality in the film, is when the unemployed son’s voiceover comments on what has happened in the three years since the family dinner. The words are spoken very matter of factly, but that very restraint is heartbreaking in its seeming neutrality to the lives that are commented. I would love to present the importance of the grandmother’s speech about butterflies and how that speech is reproduced later on, but this is such an integral part of the experience that I must leave it for the individual viewer to assess.

Not only is Kore-eda a master of presenting the social interaction and directing the actors into an almost completely naturalistic style, also his setting of the story deserves some mention. The film is shot in Yokosuka, Kanagawa, a seaside town with streets climbing upwards the mountainside from the sea. Seeing the wonderful locations, I couldn’t help but think of the kind of streets so typical of Studio Ghibli films, particularly Whisper of the Heart. There just is something very magnetic to me about this kind of setting, some serene quality that helps convince me that this site is ideal for the family home, a piece of childhood we all will always carry with us. The lack of the typical features of the big city helps the film to achieve a feeling not only of timelessness, but of placelessness. While very much a Japanese setting, the feeling is more general, of the kind of place that we find beautiful in hindsight, but that we had to move away from. The reasons probably felt important to us at the time, but any place we have lived in our formative years is bound to hold the ghosts of our younger selves in some way or another, still offering us possibilities of who we could have been had we by chance chosen differently.

Again, all this essaying runs the risk of making the film sound as if it could be boring. It is not. In fact, there are many scenes with a wonderful understated humour, not least in the comments by and about the grandmother and grandfather. As in any real grouping of human beings, be it a family or a group of friends, there is humour to be found in familiarity. Kore-eda, being concerned with reality, has the gift of finding the humour that springs from a common humanity, from recognition, even in the idiosyncratic. The actress You (yes, that is her stage name), who played the irresponsible mother in Nobody Knows, here gets the chance to use her quirky personality in a role that never seems as it is an imposed vehicle for her brand of acting. Her presence and comedic (her voice makes me think of a Japanese Meg Tilly) timing is so strong that when she leaves the film, we suddenly feel that we have been deprived of a comforting presence in what is, after all, a scary situation; reality. Or as close to reality as we want to come.

Offering us only a short glimpse into these characters’ lives, Kore-eda still makes us feel as if we’ve known them for a long time. His telling of this story is so effective that, even as we think that nothing very important happens, we get to learn everything that we need in order to fully grasp the situation as well as its ramifications. All the characters are given flesh and blood and lives that are not neatly solved by a contrived Hollywood script. Still, the miracle is that we don’t miss the solution, even though we’ve been indoctrinated to expect it. When all is said and done, we can leave and know that all is not said and it is not done. In fact, the way the characters are not able to come to terms with their shortcomings, or their disability to solve their conflicts, is the very thing that gives the piece such a powerful end. After this film, I really had to take some minutes to let the credits roll before I could or wanted to move. Those were good minutes.

BIFF, Day Six: 9 and Sin Nombre

I’m afraid I don’t have a great deal to say about the two films of the day. One of them was good, the other very good. They are both the first feature films of directors I think have the potential to make even better films.

9 is an animated film directed by Shane Acker. He is formerly known only for a short film, also called 9( you can see it by pressing link), which won an Oscar in 2005. I was a big fan of the short film and therefore had my hopes up for the expanded feature version. Unfortunately, the transition hasn’t been to the film maker’s advantage, at least not artistically.

What made the short film 9 such a unique creature was that it threw us smack into a world that seemed familiar and alien at the same time, never offering any explanations for what we saw or why. While having many of the characteristics of a post apocalyptic earth, the protagonist was a rag doll with the number 9 painted on his back. There were no humans in sight. Exploring this destroyed world, he came upon a monstrous creature that started an intense chase of the frail doll. He found a round metallic object that, put properly together, released ghostly forms of other rag dolls who faded away into the ether or afterlife. This was the plot, and I didn’t feel I needed to know more, really. There were no dialogue and this strengthened the pure chase concept. It was certainly clear that Acker had an eye for design and a good understanding of what makes animation work. His sense of movement and gravity in animation was particularly impressive.

For the feature length version, the chase of the short film constitutes the beginning of the film and yes, ghostly figures – souls of the dolls? – are released at the end. In between we have an hour of more chase scenes and so many stock situations that I wondered if the script writers had encountered some paint by numbers guide to how to write trite dialogue for scenes seen a hundred times before.

As in the short film, the character 9 starts out mute, but unfortunately that situation is quickly remedied. As soon as these dolls start speaking American, they lose a lot of mystery, but also intelligence, it seems. All of a sudden they spout feelings that are supposed to sound dramatic or even political, but comes off as something a child would say. And no, this is not intentional. “We must save him! You are a coward! I’m sorry! You can’t hide from reality!” For some reason, the script writers have only been able to think in exclamation points while writing the dialogue. The same heavy-handedness can be found in the plot as well; never offering dilemmas we haven’t seen many times before, spouting Disneyfied sentiments about the importance of sticking up for one‘s friends and reducing everything to a fight between the good guys and the bad guys, with no grey scales. This is where animation studios like Pixar and Studio Ghibli really excels, never going for the easiest solutions or indeed world views.

As the film, then, is never more than a question of getting from here to there, I found myself bored even by the generous amount of action taking place in the plot. What saves the film is that the animation is absolutely gorgeous and that Acker hasn’t lost his eye for design and for making the characters move in exciting and fresh ways. The world he has created is indeed fascinating and had the script been better, especially the dialogue, this could really have been something. As it is it is never more than entertaining, at times it is less.

I think I’ll blame one of the producers, Tim Burton, for this. Hell, I’m feeling magnanimous, I‘ll blame the other producer, Timur Bekmambetov, as well. For one thing, I guess it was Burton who made Pamela Pettler write the screenplay. She also had a finger in the screenplay for Burton’s Corpse Bride, so I assume her presence here is no coincidence. I have a feeling that all my objections to the dialogue should be directed to her, and to Burton. Let me take a moment to explain why I consider Burton poison to the film.

9 would probably not have been made without Burton’s name attached to it, so for that Acker must be grateful. But when did Burton really make a more than passable film? His latest, Sweeney Todd, had its moments, well helped by the dependability of Stephen Sondheim’s wonderful songs. Big Fish is a cinematic atrocity best forgotten. Sleepy Hollow should have been a horror film, but was turned into an exercise in style and quirkiness and never remotely scary. His two stop motion animation films, Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride, seem designed only to be different in concept from most mainstream animated features, but are they really that good? Sure, some of Danny Elfman’s music is catchy, but what is really the point of the films? That outsiders have feelings too? Burton is the cosy Goth, never daring to be different enough to be disturbing, intent on turning the borderline strange into the definite mainstream. Has he ever had any meaning behind his films other than the aforementioned call to accept the goth, the freak, the outsider? Subtle, he is not, and intelligence you have to search for elsewhere. After Edward Scissorhands, he should maybe have called it a day, realizing that he had made his masterpiece and not emulate the same formula again and again.

The point to make here, is that while the original short film of 9 retained much mystery and, by necessity of its format, perhaps, allowed the audience to actively make its own interpretations of what they were seeing. After Burton’s hands have fondled the package, every movement now has to be given a reason and that reason is never very interesting when you peel away the, grantedly, spectacular surface. Much like so many of Burton’s own films.

Pretty much all the protests I have directed at Burton’s cinema, I could also send the way of the film’s other producer, Timor Bekmambetov. He as well has made a career on pure surface, seemingly having little interest in what he is actually trying to say, or even accomplish, with his films. Daywatch, Nightwatch and Wanted all look very good, but have so many narrative problems that were they a person, Mel Gibson would seem sane in comparison.
While these big name producers ensured that Acker could bring “his vision” to the big screen, they also ensured that said vision would be severely diluted, turning all mystery into cliché and placing something that had aspirations of being original plump into the safety of the still waters of the mainstream. And that, my friends, is not where you catch the biggest fish, and certainly not the most succulent.

Sin Nombre is a film about people seeking escape because they have to. The young Honduran girl, Sayra, has no prospects in her own country and chooses to set out on the long journey towards USA with her father, who she hasn’t seen for many years. El Casper(or Willy, as he sometimes calls himself) is a young man – or boy – who has pledged his life to a local street gang, seemingly in perpetual war with the rival Los Chavalles. After he kills the leader for a number of reasons, he knows that his life is over, but chooses to make his way to USA as well, on the same train as Sayra. I don’t want to say more about the plot, again not to give away too much.

The director, Cary Fukunaga, has formerly made a short film about the subject of Mexican immigrants dying of overheating in a truck, trying to make their way into USA. However, Sin Nombre, separates itself from a number of films about the crossing over the Mexican/US border by treating USA almost as a MacGuffin. USA is some vague goal that we doubt will influence the proceedings in other ways than to bring the action forward.

The film is as much about the possibility of starting anew in a philosophical sense than in the particular case of USA as the necessary site of this renewal. More than that, it is about innocence and the limits of innocence; the mechanisms that taints us by some sin, some overstepping of a boundary we only realize that we have crossed when it’s too late to go back.

I hear that the director spent some time travelling on top of trains the same distance as the protagonists, in order to get a grip of what they are going through. This, if true, serves the film well, as the train riding scenes seem very realistic, while at the same time offering the director the opportunity to show how evil and good is often a question of the geography of chance.

I should not forget to mention that Sin Nombre works very well as a thriller. It shows us a world we don’t often see and there is not a false scene or sentiment in the film. The guns are primitive, and they don’t make the explosive noise of a Hollywood actioner, but they are just as deadly. And in many ways they are more fatal.

BIFF, Day Five

The festival is beginning to take its toll on me, especially as I also have to work during these afternoons, so I only managed to fit in two films in my schedule. By shear chance, both of them were South Korean and both starred the always good Kang-ho Song.

Song is one of Korea’s biggest moviestars, but he also is a very competent and versatile actor, often adding a touch of humour in his roles. I first became aware of him in Swiri (from 1999) by Je-gyu Kang, who five years later made the good war film Brotherhood. After Swiri, Song did J.S.A. Joint Security Area, which was his first collaboration with Chan-wook Park. Park used Song in his next project, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, as well. Park went on to make the internationally acclaimed Oldboy, without Song this time. He gave him a cameo in Sympathy for Lady Vengeance before granting him the undisputed lead in Thirst, which is the first film I saw today.

Thirst is a gorgeously filmed vampire story. For the first hour it is really good, at times exceptionally so. There are scenes we haven’t seen before and the protagonist is definitely not your typical vampire. Song plays a devout catholic priest who becomes a vampire through a tainted blood transfusion after having briefly died as a test subject for an experimental vaccine. He soon realizes his predicament, and not feeling it is a sin, as he didn’t ask for this to happen to him, he considers it an illness and not inherently bad in any moral way. There is initially no big change in his personality and he makes sure that he doesn’t harm anyone in order to procure the necessary quantities of blood, tapping blood from coma victims at the local hospital who are not likely to miss a bottle or two of the red stuff.

Soon, however, he is introduced to Tae-joo, a young woman forced into servitude of her sickly husband and mother in law. The priest, soon to be ex-priest, and Tae-joo begin an erotic relationship which is very well represented in the film. The scenes of love making all seem natural and as a result comes off as truly erotic and not the silly wish fulfilment fantasies of countless Hollywood films. Unfortunately, it turns out that his love is a bit of a femme fatale who uses him for her own ends. From this point in, I felt the film became overlong, dwelling too much on its grantedly beautiful frames, but not advancing the plot in any surprising ways, or at all. I won’t spoil the film, so I’ll limit myself to saying that for me, at least, the film didn’t reach its potential. I saw where the film was heading and it didn’t make any meaningful detours from that direction. As a result, a short trip felt far too long. What made this second half of the film worth staying, was the stellar work of Ok-vin Kim, an actress I’d never heard of before. She really made the character of Tae-joo a full bodied creature, upping the menacing aspects of her arc in the film. I’ll recommend the film with caution, as it is very well made and looks fantastic, with some really breath taking scenes. Just be aware that the recommendation is not unconditional.

The Good, the Bad, the Weird also stars Kang-ho Song. In this film he plays almost an amalgamation of the two characters he has played in the films of my favourite Korean director, Joon-ho Bong. I assume anyone with an interest in Korean films has seen Memories of Murder, in which Song plays a policemen with a temper and some intellectual shortcomings. I personally found this even better than David Fincher’s Zodiac, being a very similar story. Song also played in the environmental monster film The Host, which was a bit of a hit internationally as well. Here he played a well meaning buffoon, possibly short of some marbles.

As The Good, the Bad, the Weird gives Song the chance to essay a character who seemingly has two personalities, he can really let loose with his two most typical screen personas. Song, of course, is the weird one of the title.

The film is directed by Ji-woon Kim, who among others has made the solid A Tale of Two Sisters and A Bittersweet Life. Kim is a very visually oriented director, often presenting tableaus which are easier to admire than really like, but in The Good, the Bad, the Weird, he uses his considerable talents to give us the purest entertainment this side of Indiana Jones (disregarding the fourth near-abomination). The title of the film makes the countless nods to Sergio Leone quite clear, but more than a Spaghetti Eastern, I felt this was an adventure film, an action film like they don’t make em anymore.

The plot is all a bit of nonsense, with a treasure map serving as a MacGuffin for countless inventive chases and spectacular fight scenes, not with kung-Fu, but guns, cannons and everything that can be fired from a steel tube. In between the action scenes, we get to know the characters just enough to care about them. There is also a sub-plot regarding how Korea has been stolen by the Japanese, and as a result the three protagonists are men with no country, all now making a life lived in the eternal present in a soon to be mythic Manchuria. This gives them the chance to reinvent themselves, something Song’s character has done most successfully, gladly accepting the role as a happy-go-lucky small time thief and adventurer. Again, I can’t say more, as it would spoil a plot point towards the end.

The plot, however is not the important thing here. The unbridled entertainment on display is all that counts. I laughed out loud many times during the film and too often during the action scenes, I found myself sitting with my mouth open for a longer time than is considered proper in polite society. The only thing that was a let down was the ending, which I felt was too abrupt and disappointing in its stock situation. I felt that it was unnecessary to emulate Leone to such a degree at this point. That particular scene can probably never be bettered anyway, so it was a bit of a suicide attempt for Kim to try to get away with it. Be sure, by the way, to watch some minutes into the credits, as some resolution can be found there. Heartily recommended, but not for those who feel that all art should be slow moving, reflective and involve the deeper meaning of life, come hell or high water.

BIFF, Day Four. The Festival Strikes Back.

Such a good start of this day! The Swedish Film Burrowing (Man Tänker Sitt) is the first true masterpiece of the festival. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen a better (new) film this year. Experiences like this make everything worth it; the amount of mediocrity and pretentiousness (hello again, Un Lac!) one usually has to wade through in order to happen upon small jewels like this. The film is directed by first time directors Henrik Hellstrøm and Fredrik Wentzel. If they stick with their partnership, I can’t but think that we have much to look forward to in the coming years.

This is a small film, both in length and, I presume, in budget. This means nothing more than that every scene is the perfect length, everything the film wants to tell, it tells admirably and with confidence. Hellstrøm and Wentzel has made a true film, in that the sentiments it wants to communicate are not easily reduced to words, but created by images and sound. The result is at times heartbreaking. More than being just a simple back to nature fable, the film lets us see people interacting with other people and how they have each discovered an emptiness in the world that perhaps has no remedy, but that in nature can somehow be reduced. A society needs rules, but when these rules take over each aspect of human interaction, they have a deadening effect on the soul, and personal identity becomes suspect.

I feel that it is difficult to address these issues through formal language, as the very uttering of the sentiment is based on a need to be understood by as many as possible, an agreed upon system. This is where Burrowing so admirably does the job better than I can in this review, as the film is not easily reduced to a clearly delineated argument. Some of the best novels of the world has talked about these issues, the estrangement of man in society is one of the oldest tales and constitutes an important part of what we call tragedy.

The film starts with a quotation of Henry David Thoreau, famous for his Walden, about a man retreating from civilized society into the wilderness, into nature, for two years and two months. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”, he says in that book, which could have been used in the film as well. Instead they use another Walden quotation, from the economy chapter: “The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior“. The film then cuts to a young boy walking along a lake. We hear his voice narrating. This innocent, yet wise in its way, voiceover will intermittently accompany us to the very end of the film. And what an end it is! Damn, if my eyes didn’t fill up… I could write about the poetry of the scene and how well the words illuminates all the preceding scenes we have witnessed, but that would be to deprive you of the pleasure of finding the beauty of the film for yourselves.

As I mention an innocent-sounding voiceover and a longing and fascination for nature, I guess most will come in mind the films of Terrence Malick, and they wouldn’t be wrong. If Malick had been raised in Swedish suburbia, this is the film he would have made. Or something close to it. There is a scene of the boy walking through high grass, or weeds, while his voice tells of his understanding of the grown ups’ world, partly naively, partly containing a wisdom that disappears with the death of innocence, of the Eden of childhood. Soon enough the boy will be put in a suit and forced to nod politely to meaningless conversations about meaningless non-topics. It is at this point he reaches a decision. That decision has to do with the other small tragedies we witness.

One of these is the estrangement in a young man “without direction”, always carrying his baby in his arms. The scene where he changes diapers in a parking lot and is accosted by a well-meaning woman who threatens to report him to the social services seems very real and true. She doesn’t know anything about him, but has a vague feeling that society will punish her if she does not report such an obvious break with society’s norms. The young man is seemingly unable to take “control of his life” and thus has no place in the world of humans.

Then there is the Russian émigré who meant to stay a few months in Sweden, but has now lived there thirty years. He spends his days trying to spear fish in the small brook that runs between the houses. Who are you?, a suspicious neighbour asks him. He laughs, as if he has been told a joke.

There are others, all with a restlessness they seem unable to put into words, even in their own heads. Everyone stretched so thin in the need to show their neighbours “good behaviour”, that something is about to break, to break out into violence or self destruction. I think this is a feeling that is not limited to Scandinavia and their political model of social democracy, although I assume that plays a part in it.

I’ll end my recommendation by talking briefly about the music used in the film. I have never before heard of the composer, Erik Enocksson, but the way his music was used in the film made him an integral part of the experience. He has composed some almost Bach-like polyphonic and beautiful songs. They are very explicitly linked to the theme of the film. I think all the songs are in Latin, and although I’m not exactly fluent, I was able to discern some snippets.
Somnio, somnio, I heard repeated some times, meaning “to dream“, or “imagine follishly“, I think. Other lines were “Hic non serenitas regit”, which I think means something like “There is no peace/serenity here”. Hic qui virem regit, I think can mean “Here where Man – or perhaps Green – reigns“. Non Qui Periculi Imminent must be translated as something like “There is no danger here”. And other lines about wolves and bears, possibly star signs. The final line I was able to work out was Non Spiriti Mali, “there are no bad spirits here“, or something to that effect. I mention these lines as they can tell a bit about the simple, yet complicated feelings that the film addresses.

All this might lead you to think the film is boring. It is not, certainly not if you think that you can contribute a bit yourself to the little plot there is. The film is really put together like a series of situations that are linked by the characters’ mutual discontent, albeit for different reasons. Apart from the wonderful images, there are situations bound to draw a smile or a tear out of recognition. The film will have a Norwegian premiere in November, and hopefully other countries will also be able to see it outside festivals. It deserves a much bigger audience than I fear that it will have. Please see this!

The next film of the day was the Australian claymation film Mary and Max, by Adam Elliot. This is a bittersweet tale of two outsiders, who find comfort and the possibility for a meaningful life in each other’s correspondence. One is a young unattractive Australian girl, the other an older fat New York Jew with Asperger syndrome. The result is a kind of 84 Charing Cross Road for extreme outsiders. The film is by no means as depressing as it sounds, although it deals with depression and many of life’s tragedies and setbacks. In fact, it is very funny. I think the entire cinema was laughing every two minutes. I really liked this, and the animation – or claymation, to be correct – is fantastic. And it’s for adults, so the filmmakers deserve credit for making a film in this format that doesn’t depend on millions of children or unethical merchandising to keep the production afloat. Recommended!

After Mary and Max, I had to go to work, so I was unable to see more films before the last film of the day. This was the Danish Fryktelig Lykkelig, Terribly Happy, directed by Henrik Ruben Genz, most known for his TV-work. Terribly Happy wants to be a Coen brothers film, but is no such thing. A policeman is transferred to the countryside where the local village is peopled by all kinds of weirdoes and the Danish version of Texan good ole boys. The protagonist is a bit of a moron right from the start, and thus his fall from grace doesn’t contain any grace to begin with. This makes for a very bad story, clichéd and contrived. For some reason this was among the most popular films in Denmark last year, even among critics. Don’t, I say, make the same mistake as the Danish. They tell me there is something rotten in that state. Had this film been on TV, I don’t think I’d bothered to watch it through. I guess it is passable entertainment, or rather, hardly even that.

However, even the mediocrity of the Danish couldn’t take away the satisfaction of the Swedish neighbours’ Burrowing. Remember this title, should it present itself to a cinema near you. Or even at some distance.

BIFF, Day Three

Due to circumstances beyond my control (work), I didn’t get the chance to see that many films this day. I did, though, have an unpleasant encounter with a member of the film jury, which – if not anything else – convinced me that the winner of the festival’s jury prize will be left entirely to chance and incompetence. I wish the festival leaders had considered their jury choices a bit more carefully. More on this later.

I first became aware of Belgian director Jaco van Dormael with his 1993-film Toto the Hero, which generally got rave reviews and which I liked. I seem to recall that I felt it put an unnecessary sentimentalism to the world of the child protagonist, but I think that was part of its theme. Not having seen the film since its cinema run 16 years ago, I don’t want to compare it with his latest work, which was my first film of the day.

Mr. Nobody is by far his most ambitious project to date. It cost close to $50 million and features at least B-list Hollywood actors. It is filmed at several locations; Belgium, the famous Studio Babelsberg in Germany, in Canada and at several other places. Most of the money, though, must have gone to the impressive special effects which are very, very good. Very complicated fx shots integrate seamlessly with the “real” world and a number of editing tricks and film styles are on display.

The film is not only ambitious from a financial or technical perspective. The story seeks to sum up the entirety of the universe’s existence, and not only this universe. It is at times a period film, a science fiction story and a contemporary love story. It is about storytelling, parallel universes, time travel, religion, immortality and death. Most importantly it is about love.

Jared Leto plays the grown up version of the protagonist Nemo Nobody and he does it well. I think this is his first leading role in a film of this magnitude. Then again, there are not that many films of this scope. In a way I felt the film was never quite only itself, but borrowed from a number of films and from the history of film. Perhaps it had to, but I felt at times that the director had seen the works of other directors he admired and tried to emulate them and, by combining their tropes, hoped to find something personal enough to call his own.
There is a bit of Darren Aronofsky’s the Fountain here, but on an even bigger thematic scale. Kubrick’s 2001 is quoted in some images. In a scene depicting humanity’s pre-existence, the moments before we are conceived, Van Dormael used the Melanesian music from Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line while at the same time putting this music to images of white and black children playing innocently together in a heavenly innocent state. So, in other words, welcome to the beginning of The Thin red Line! The basic concept of splitting destinies – of turning into several future versions of oneself – based on a choice made while standing by a train, is found in the less ambitious Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Sliding Doors. The drowning in a car scene reminded me of Lars Von Trier’s Europa (By the count of ten you will be dead, as Max Von Sydow laconically narrates in that film). In a way Mr. Nobody is two and a half hours awaiting said count. I could go on, but you get the point.

It is not easy to sum up what this film is about. When the protagonist is forced to make a faithful choice at the age of nine (I think), he is separated into two persons, depending on which choice he makes. Within these two possible characters comes a further three choices – which makes it six characters(?) – based on his choice of girlfriend as an adolescent. One version of himself turns out to be a lecturer in astrophysics, who sometimes enters the action to lecture the viewer about the history and philosophy of the universe. He says there are seven dimensions in the universe; six of these are spatial, while the seventh is temporal. He then poses the question of whether the temporal – time – inhabited more than one dimension. (I take this from memory, so forgive me for any inaccuracies!) To complicate matters further, another one of these personalities takes up writing, creating a fictional world that in the film is presented as just as real as the non-fiction worlds. This fiction takes the action to space (to Mars) and the future. However, another future is also depicted in the film, a future where the protagonist is the last mortal human alive (and thus, the last who remembers love and lust; you don‘t need children if you live forever…) There is a point to this, but I won’t discuss it here, so as not to spoil the film.

While the plot of the film seems incredibly advanced and ambitious, to its credit, we are never lost and most times understand perfectly where we are in the story and what is depicted. Actually, I had no problems with the science fiction elements of the tale. They are well thought and very well executioned. It is in the way the film revolves around the concept of love that I feel it loses itself a bit; it becomes a bit too much.

One kind of love that is decisive for Mr. Nemo Nobody is the child’s love for his parents. Another kind of love is the puppy love between nine year olds, then the lustful love between adolescents and finally the emotional, during and at times hard and stressful love between spouses. Put together, this becomes a whole lotta love, as the song says. Now, if the love theme had been presented a bit more smartly, I wouldn’t have any problems with it. (While it is presented in a complicated tale, this doesn’t make the kind of love on display any more “intelligent” or new to the viewer). Especially irritating is the extremely cliché ridden music the director has chosen for the soundtrack. There are just so many times you can hear Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream… Almost every scene has music that has been used so often before in films that it brings you as a viewer out of the film’s universe and at least I began pondering boredom and references rather than the action taking place before me.

Another unfortunate effect of the music has to do with its placement. When the protagonist as a young boy sees a girl his age, nine, swimming, a lusty soul-number is played, thus turning her into a kind of sex object. This is disturbing and can’t have been the director’s intention. While he wants to tell us that the protagonist falls in love at this moment, there must surely be better ways to sonically enhance this element!

Then there is the fact that all of Nemo’s love stories revolve around three girls that he meets as a young child. I find it a bit far fetched that these same girls shall also be his only interests in adolescence and in marriage. The film is, then, not only about premeditation, but about an emotional stiltedness, as if Nemo doesn’t really evolve during the film and this is the reason for his future being so clearly delineated into his separate possible selves. The name Nemo, by the way, does not refer to the captain of the Nautilus. You’re better served by reading it backwards.

In closing, I’ll venture to say that the word ambitious will surely be used in pretty much every review of this film. (It wasn’t finished in time for Cannes, so it hasn’t been shown that many places yet). While it is certainly intricate, it ultimately doesn’t convince me. While I’m perfectly willing to take any leaps of logic that the film requires of me, I’m not sure that it ultimately adds up. I have a strong feeling that there are internal discrepancies within the fantastic logic. This should have been worked out a bit better, but I think I will need to see the film a second time to really pinpoint these errors. (And the ones I could point out would ruin the ending, so I’ll refrain).The problem is that, as much as I admired the film for what it’s trying to do, it was just a bit too long and ultimately not all that it could have been, so a second viewing will probably not take place in the immediate future. But if you are in the mood for a lengthy love story told in a brilliant technical style and with a basic sience fiction concept underlining it all, by all means take a chance on the film! I think it deserves an audience and it is without doubt a much better film than The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which was half the rave at this year’s Oscars, and which it also shares some sensibility with. Being the better film of the two, I’m also sure that it won’t find half the audience of Fincher’s unfortunate detour into drivel and mediocrity.

While Mr. Nobody may be flawed, it is at least interesting enough for me to have given it more attention and space than most films. This is more, much more than I can say for the next film I had the misfortune to attend this day. I guess I should have seen the warning signs; it being French the clearest.

Un Lac – A Lake – is a minimalist work about an epileptic boy, his sister and family in an unknown wintry location. This is the second film as writer/director for Philippe Grandrieux, his fourth as director. On this film, he also serves as cinematographer, so he is an auteur in the real sense. The problem is that he is just not a very interesting one. Most of the actors are, for some reason Russian, and it is filmed in France and Switzerland. And the landscape does seem wonderfully oppressing and beautiful at the same time. That is, if any of the images had been in focus. (The images of the brother and sister found to the left are pretty much the only two clear images of the film)

Grandrieux uses a handheld camera style that is extreme in its use of closeups and movements following the characters so closely that we are supposed to see the world as they themselves do. The mother of the family is blind, though it took me some time to decipher this. Many of the scenes are filmed in near darkness and the ones that are not are foggy and out of focus. The brother has a close relationship with his sister, possibly incestuous, but I was never able to tell for sure. His epileptic fits grows in frequency. He is at times very happy for no apparent reason, at times he is moody. One day he is by the cold lake that seems to be the only contact with a wider world. A young man arrives. He says his name is Jurgen. Soon this man starts a relationship with the sister and finally they sail off on the same lake. This is the film. Or what I managed to see of the film.

Do not misunderstand me. I have no problems with challenging films, be it in narrative or in film style. This film, however, is ridiculous, very boring and unbearably pretentious. The dialogue is almost non-existent. Perhaps this is a good thing, for when they speak, they speak platitudes. “You are my sister”, the brother says. Then he adds: “I am your brother”. Yes, well, you had me at sister…

Of course one can read something symbolic out of the minimalist setting and action. The more minimalist a work is, the easier to regard it as symbolical of something. But here even the symbolic meaning is trite and clichéd. Perhaps the director wants to deal with archetypes, with a biblical simplicity. If so, he fails miserably. Is he interested in hidden pockets of humanity, of humanity’s place in an unforgiving and uncaring nature? Well, he doesn’t come even close. Perhaps he wants to talk about female sexuality and awakening. If so, he says nothing new and certainly nothing of interest. – If you want an arty film about this, watch Picnic at Hanging Rock again! You will be grateful for it. Do not waste your time with Un Lac. With the basic setting of these characters in this kind of nature, you have to be pretty incompetent not to make it even slightly interesting or even beautiful even in a harrowing sense. Unfortunately, competence has no place here.
It strikes me that writing even disparagingly about the film, I make it sound better than it is. Give me a camera, this location and these characters and I would have made a better film. Look away, there is nothing to see here! By the way, this was a film I had high hopes for and that I really wanted to like. More the fool me.

BIFF, Day Two

For Day two of the festival, I dragged myself out of bed after about five hours of sleep to watch Iranian film About Elly by Asghar Farhadi. I still haven’t quite recovered after the lack of sleep, so I am very tired as I write this. The comments will thus be brief.

While initially giving the impression of a feel-good drama about three couples – plus one in the offing – vacationing at the Iranian sea side, About Elly changes gears midway, becoming something closer to a crime film. While some of the characters’ dilemmas are related to cultural codes, they are so never to the extent that they feel unfathomable for a westerner. If anything, one of the joys of the film is seeing Iran from a very different perspective than the media normally will offer us. In a way, the film seems unifying in that it stresses common human frailties and our common capacity for making mistakes. Focusing on relationships that have the same kind of dynamic the world over, the film seems much more true than any well meaning documentary about the infamous axis of evil. Thus, eliminating any us versus them theme, the viewer can be free to follow the story and empathize without feeling that he does so through a cultural lens. The film treats well how small lies can build into something graver. None of the characters are evil, they just don’t realize the consequences of these small trespasses of honesty. In this, they are not alone.

Later in the day, after having slept an hour, I caught Dutch director Alex van Warmerdam’s latest quirky film, The Last Days of Emma Blank. This is very much a black comedy. I found myself thinking of the Coen brothers quite some times during the film. While having no moral centre – or indeed any wider meaning outside its strange little universe – there is a weird truthfulness in the way the film presents its characters and situations. I especially liked the director’s role of Theo, the man who is forced to play the role of dog in the freakish family dynamics. While the situations are exaggerated, the characters live them with straight faces, making the outlandish seem positively indispensable and logical. Everything makes perfect sense within the film’s universe, I’m just not sure the film offers more than the satisfaction of seeing a well executed plot and a good time at the movies. Granted, a very good time.

Later in the evening, I felt I deserved some Hollywood entertainment after considering the art house alternatives. Funny People, Judd Apatow’s third outing as a feature director, was surprisingly good. In fact, I liked it a lot. Lasting almost two and a half hours, this comedy-drama is rather longer than the genre normally allows. Luckily, the film easily supports the extra padding. Adam Sandler is the comedian who is told that he has a rare form of cancer and who, facing death, realizes the emptiness of his life – and perhaps of life in general. Sandler handles this role very well, bringing a bitter naturalness to the part. The film has more good jokes than ten normal comedies and has a heart and intelligence seldom seen in the genre. I liked Apatow’s first outing, The 40 Year Old Virgin, but was not quite won over by his sophomore film, Knocked Up. Funny People is an unequivocal improvement on both these films. If Apatow can continue to deliver films of this quality, he will be the most important comedy director of the last twenty years, and possibly of the next ten.

BIFF 2009, Day One

Bergen International Film Festival tries to market itself as a documentary festival. However, the program sports plenty of fiction films as well. Some of these are the usual festival circuit films; i.e. independent films and foreign films with small chances of a wide distribution. And then there are early premieres of films that will see a regular distribution later on, normally Hollywood films or films directed by relatively big art house names.
I admit that I’m not a big fan of documentaries per se. In my experience, it’s seldom that a documentary manages to be original either in subject matter or in execution. And I’m so, so tired of Michael Moore. I have enjoyed some of the work of Errol Morris and the occasional other documentary, but films like Super Size Me just seems a dumbing down of subject matters best left for newspaper articles. Often documentaries struggle to escape their talking heads format and even more often they are extremely self important, seldom if never allowing competing realities in their narratives. This works in propaganda, but a good documentary would often be better with a bit of balance in its presentation. For some reason documentaries generally get better reviews than fiction films even though they can be just as trite in execution as well as in choice of topic.

I was initially disappointed upon glancing through this year’s program, but after some rumination, I have picked some 25 films that I plan to see. I don’t expect every one of these to be masterpieces, but it would be nice if at least 2 or 3 of them will cut the mustard.

Yesterday, day 1 of the festival, I started what will surely be a more or less exhausting cinematic week by catching Terry Gilliam’s latest personal project; The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. While overlong and probably plagued by the death of Heath Ledger towards the end of the filming, I liked this. It is certainly much better than the work for hire he did in the Brothers Grimm. Perhaps Gilliam could have needed some script revision from, say, a Tom Stoppard, who whipped Brazil into shape, as Gilliam left to his own devices can be a bit much whimsy. I hate to say it, but as much as unbridled imagination is what gives Gilliam’s films their particular qualities, a bit of streamlining on the plot-side of things would probably have helped the film. The risk is always that his films can lose some of their Gilliamness in this way, but perhaps that wouldn’t have to be an unqualified bad thing. There are scenes here, though, that make me excuse much of the meandering in the dialogue and the “real world”-segments, and the actors are all very fine. Just don’t expect a Twelve Monkeys kind of hit, as this is a more idiosyncratic feature.

The documentary Reporter, by Eric Daniel Metzgar follows the New York Times journalist/columnist Nicholas D. Kristof to Congo. It attempts three things: To be a kind of portrait of Kristof, to examine his methods of reporting atrocities/catastrophes and finally to question whether this kind of reporting has a future in the modern world of media with cut backs and less resources for this kind of journalistic enterprise. While it is impossible to remain unmoved by some of the things we witness in the film, I have to say that it misses all three of its aims. We learn little about the journalist; apart from a brief biographical sequence early on. The film seldom asks the eponymous reporter any illuminating questions and his reasons for which places to go, what cases to report, as well as his personal stance and reflections, never quite comes into focus. As for his methods, at one point the film maker says that he has begun to question Kristof’s insistence upon finding the worst cases in order for his readers to maximize their sympathy with the sufferers. That is the only critical question in the film, and it is not even put to the Kristof himself. Tellingly, the director never picks up this thread later on.Thirdly, the part of the future of journalism is kept to two sentences lasting about thirty seconds at the very end of the film, and are put there almost as an afterthought. Needless to say, in that time it would be impossible for anyone to say anything that would be news to most people. I’d suggest you see the last season of the Wire, flawed as that season is, for more insight into this matter.

In a way I found this film to represent many of the things I dislike about the documentary genre, particularly documentaries that try to say something about human rights, relief or third world problems: It is so easy to show us images of starving people and make us vicariously suffer. And certainly I found myself touched by the destinies we meet. However, I don’t know if this makes for a good film. Kristof has received much acclaim for being an insistent reporter; even though a crisis is out of vogue or has been reported upon many times before, he continues to press the matter home, reporting on many similar incidents that, by themselves, are perhaps not news in the hard news sense. In his quest to do so, he tries to find those special cases that can sum up the larger suffering of a people in the extreme suffering of single victims – of starvation, war or usually both. I would at least venture to suggest that this method is not without problems; perhaps even unethical both in a human and journalistic sense. Kristof claims that the end justifies the means: to activate “the people back home”, the readers of his articles. I won’t say that he’s wrong, but surely it would be worth looking into while making a documentary of this type! As it turns out, the film only serves as an extension of Kristof’s own methods and concerns, and as such it presents itself as something which it is not, which only makes the single line of objection in the film pathetic and dishonest.

After the horrors of Kongo, I found myself in need of some escapism, and what better way than a celebration of some of the most tasteless films ever made? OK, I exaggerate for effect. The documentary Not Quite Hollywood charts the so called Ozploitation wave of the 70s and 80s. The Australian film industry was almost non-existent until the late 60s, when more or less shady characters began to produce B- or C- films with cheap titillation as its main effect and goal. After a while Australia got a reputation as a serious film industry with films like Peter Weir’s wonderful Picnic at Hanging Rock and Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant. Concurrent with these artsy and serious period films, there thrived a sub-industry based on lowbrow humour, tits, gore, ridiculous action and over the top car scenes. This, as you have guessed, is what Not Quite Hollywood is about.
As a documentary, the film is no great shakes. Various talking heads talk in 10 second snippets, offering the odd anecdote, but never any real reflection. This is interspersed with a generous offering of short scenes from the films mentioned. Quentin Tarantino is there, of course, Mad Max-director George Miller, Wolf Creek’s Greg McLean and most of the players of the time, including Brian Trenchard-Smith, perhaps the biggest name of Ozploitation. In a way I felt as if this could be the extra features on a DVD disc; any DVD of the films “discussed”. While never pretending to be more than a presentation of the type of films of the Australian exploitation scene, the film is pleasant enough and entertaining – at least for those with even a marginal interest in the subject matter.

After Summer: Reading and Laziness

Yes, I have been lax. Summer has gone and autumn done come without this journal having seen any considerable advance. With HBO’s competent miniseries about John Adams still relatively fresh in my mind, I’m tempted to quote Benjamin Franklin’s bon mot that “a life of leisure and a life of laziness are two different things“. I’m afraid that in the matter of keeping up this blog I’ve erred on the side of the latter. All is not lost, though, as I have put my energies, such as they are, to pursuits perhaps equally worthy during this time, the results of which I’ll hopefully see come December or thereabouts. Let that be sufficiently vague. (No, it is not an offspring!)

But enough self-recrimination! Laziness is not what it is if a purpose can be glimpsed. To that end, let’s bring on another quotation that better illuminates how I prefer to view these past hazy days of summer: “Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying or meditating or endeavouring something for the public good“. Thus, validated by one of my favourite monks, Thomas à Kempis, I can rest assured (bit of a pun there!) that I have not, indeed, been entirely idle.

One thing I HAVE done during these months is reading. – And writing, supplemented by the occasional meditative moment (which I like to describe as staring emptily into the wall while waiting for a sentence not completely crap to fall down from a place not unlike heaven. If there is prayer involved, it is silent and hidden). As for the public good, well I have voted and not murdered anyone while visiting the local cinema, no mean feat, that. So there, Kempis.

(Kempis is thought to have written the mystic devotional work The Imitation of Christ, in which we learn that “at the Day of Judgement we shall not be asked what we have read but what we have done“, a phrase which rather takes the sheen off his former statement about the merits of reading. Kempis, though, was himself an avid reader, to put it mildly, and a writer, praying and meditating and so on, so I suspect that in both cases he talks more about himself and any general validity, then, is merely hoped for. Much like any religion, organized or not.)

All this hullabaloo, and the only purpose of this post is: These are the books I brought with me and read during the summer:

Marilynne Robinson: Housekeeping. I can’t think of many – if any – novelists alive today with Robinson’s command of language, her eye for the perfect sentences. This was her first novel, released in 1980. I had only read her second novel, the wonderful Gilead, from 2004, which deservedly won a Pulitzer. It seems that she has now picked up speed, for her “sequel” to Gilead, Home, was published last year. I plan to read soonish her book of essays, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998), which, I’m sure, will be a hoot and a half. A rash and probably inexact description of Robinson would be to place her somewhere between Flannery O’ Connor and Harper Lee, both thematically and stylistically. However, that would be lazy, so let’s not do that, shall we?

Knut Hamsun: Mysterier (Mysteries). This was the second (real) novel of Norway’s best author, released two years after the more famous Sult (Hunger). For some reason I had not read it before, and I planned to really like it. It is, of course, well written in the inimitable Hamsun-style, and there are psychological insights in the book that are surprising of its time. And it is actually very entertaining. However, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that I would have liked the book better had I read it at a younger age. I found it hard to share the novel’s concerns other than in a very vicarious way, which perhaps is true of all books, though I think not. These days I find that I much prefer Markens Grøde (Growth of the Soil). Even though it is by far a perfect novel, it has a power and a will (dangerous words to use while talking about Hamsun…) and a direction; a goal, something the author seems to need to be saying. It also has plot holes the size of a Frenchman’s ego and severe narrative problems, but these matter less than the mere existence of the work itself. Growth of the Soil insists upon its place in the world much like its protagonist. I haven’t read Hunger in quite a few years, but while reading Mysteries, it struck me that perhaps that book as well will be best appreciated by being read at a younger age than mine. (I liked it a lot when I was 20 or so). Still, these are quibbles, as all the Hamsun books mentioned here are masterpieces of a sort.

Kazuo Ishiguro: A Pale View of the Hills. I really, really liked this first novel. Having formerly only read An Artist of the Floating World, Ishiguro’s second book (which this novel closest resembles) and When We Were Orphans, I had great hopes for this and was not disappointed. Ishiguro, while having a Japanese name,and having lived in Japan till the age of five, is very much an Englishman, and the Japan he observes in his first two novels is very much a mediated Japan. One gets the feeling that he has studied the films of Yasujiro Ozu with the interest of someone a generation removed from the society and geography that these films represent. As he has added his own literary sensibility to this second hand understanding of Japan, he is able to describe both the society and the results of that society in a way that he maybe could not have accomplished had he lived there himself his entire life. The English reserve and traditional virtues (as seen in Remains of the Day) actually go very well together with the Japan of Ozu.

While these reflections may seem boring, in A pale View of the Hills, they are definitely not. There is an extreme tension in the telling, everything so seemingly mundane and matter of fact, that one comes to suspect that Ishiguro’s narrator is perhaps not all trustworthy. Every little event is thus filled with a kind of dread, as if the masks, not only of the society, but the one worn by the narrator herself, might slip at any moment and the result will not be comforting. As the action takes place in Ishiguro’s birth town of Nagasaki, where the atom bomb had been dropped not that long ago, there is a curious mix of traditional Japanes idyllic scenes and an almost post-acopalyptic landscape. This underlines the tension between tradition and the foreign; the new; the rootless so to say. These are people living in an environment where they have learned that everything might disappear in seconds; what does this mean for the traditionally so stoic Japanese mindset? Rather than say more, I urge everyone to read this small wonderful book.

Haruki Murakami: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. While Ishiguro is an English writer looking to Japan for inspiration – and possibly his “roots” – Murakami is certainly Japanese and looking to the west and particularly to USA. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was originally a serialised novel, meaning that the author wrote it without having the luxury to go back and change things. This one can certainly see, as there are innumerable plot threads that are never picked up. Lots of scenes seem to be without consequence to the story and this even after the book has been through a kind of editing by the translator, Jay Rubin. Still, it is maybe the most enjoyable book I’ve read this year, and one of the few instances that I’ve not wanted a book to end (This almost never happens. I want most books to end as soon as possible, even the good ones.) as I was having a helluva time with it. In Rubin’s translation, at least, Murakami’s language sounds very polished and elegantly post modern. In fact, I found myself thinking that this is the book that Paul Auster would have written if he’d had any interesting ideas the last 20 years. After having finished it I went straight out and bought 3 more books by Murakami, an author I would have read long ago if I hadn’t been so sceptical to literary fashions and of seeing his books everywhere these last years:

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. A collection of short stories, none of which I seem to be able to recall a mere two months after having read them. I remember I enjoying some of them, but frankly, while they perhaps were my cup of tea, I had screwed up the order and gotten a rather bland bag. The fault is possibly mine, as one should not read a short story collection in just two days.

Norwegian Wood. Murakami himself didn’t want this novel translated, even though it was a sensation in Japan. But as the Norwegian publishers desperately wanted the book released (because of the title), the American publishers produced an English version for the purpose. The novel is not more than passable, but never dull.

Michael Chabon: The Yiddisch Policemen’s Union. I read this immediately after having read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and possibly that explains the near fury I felt upon reading the first chapters of this. Murakami at his best is indeed a hard act to follow. I’ve liked many of Chabon’s novels, but this one is almost irredeemable. I really can’t explain how something like this can be published. (Actually the publishers almost forced Chabon to publish the book before he felt that it was ready…) The language of the book is amateurish and irritating, the plot never rising above the clichéd nature of the popular fiction it tries to emulate. “The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot”, as Salvador Dali said. There are rumours that the Coen-brothers will make this parody of Noir into a film. I can actually see how The Yiddisch Policemen’s Union can work better as a film than as a novel, but I have my doubts that any medium can save this mess. At least without some serious rewriting.

After some 100 pages I did begin to warm up to the concoction, but not enough by a long shot to forgive its considerable shortcomings. Whereas Murakami’s imagination and elegance of writing made me overlook the holes in his plot, Chabon is just too much of a journeyman to pull the novel off as an anecdotal trifle. He tries to translate Raymond Chandler to a Jewish Alaska (!), and frankly he is no Chandler, not even an Alistair Maclean. In this novel I find that he is not even himself.   I could – and perhaps should – back up this critique with examples from the text and try to formulate just what I disliked so much, but frankly I can’t be bothered. Life’s too short. I do hope, though, that Chabon will be able to redeem himself, as I know that in his best moments he writes popular prose of a high order.

Richard Ellmann: Yeats; The Man and the Masks. This biography of Yeats was originally written in 1948, a mere ten years after the author’s death. It is considered something of a key text in the understanding of Yeats’ life and literary universe. Ellmann later wrote a highly regarded biography of Joyce, which I’ve not read, but the view he presents of Yeats here doesn’t alltogether convince me. While he covers Yeats the Mystic and makes a case for a perpetually insecure man with no fixed identity, I never felt I got to know Yeats The Man, which, after all, is what one comes to a biography for. Perhaps more inexcusable, I didn’t get to know Yeats The Poet. Almost all of Ellmann’s readings seem determined by how he has chosen to perceive Yeats and allows little leeway or room for what I would call the poet’s genius. (I generelly avoid this word like the plague, but will make an exception in Yeats’ case) That is to say, how he managed to write so many good poems that seem timeless and almost universal even though Yeats himself was very much a man of his times and interests (mysticism).

The book, as it was written with important contributions by Yeats’ widow, never seems to dare to be impolite or, well, daring, and the biographical elements as a result end up less interesting than I suspect they could be. I don’t expect or want sensationalism, but this biography seemed almost reductionist. As for the poems, for example the famous but widely misunderstood The Second Coming, Ellmann seems only interested in the gyre of the poem’ first line, as this term is discussed in Yeats’ A Vision and thus is a key term in Yeats’ mysticism. As for what the poem itself might mean, or why it is a great poem, Ellmann has little to nothing to declare. This is a solid biography, but an artist of Yeats’ stature deserves more than solid.

Andrei Tarkovsky and Stalker

Another brief interruption in my Studio Ghibli series…
Stalker is a film from 1979 by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. His films are generally considered art films, that is, not easily accessible to the layman. I have at times struggled to keep awake during some of his oeuvre, and have immediately afterwards felt that while meticulously framed and containing some striking images, the stories themselves have not been all that. However, as time has passed I have found myself thinking back on his films, and so large portions of them have remained in my mind, that I’ve come to realize that the fault lies entirely with me for not recognizing their greatness at first view.

Now I feel his masterpiece is his portrait of the iconic painter Andrei Rublev – iconic in that he painted icons (duh!) – and I can find myself shuddering whenever I recall the fantastic spectacle of the resolution to that film. The effect is achieved by having the three hour film unfold slowly in black and white, with the protagonist toiling in mud and darkness for the last half of the film, only to reveal at the very end his art in glorious colour.

However, I digress, as the point at hand, is Tarkovsky’s maybe most famous film, Stalker.

The director (in)famously shot the film two times (with different script, props and for almost no money the second time) as the first version was ruined in the processing, maybe due to a sub quality Kodak-stock or maybe because of sabotage. It is rumoured that the first version stuck more closely to the science fiction element of the story, while the re-shoot necessarily was more transcendental due to the lack of money. The story can be summed up briefly: In a post-war country, if there is such a thing, some happening – be it a meteor or extraterrestrials – has created a mysterious zone. The government of the small country in which the action takes place, has decided that access to The Zone is forbidden. There are those few, though, that specializes in smuggling people through the army-lines into The Zone, and after having gained access, guides them to “the room”, which is a place our innermost wishes come true.

Tarkovsky claimed that the Zone had no further meaning than its literal representation in the film: “The Zone doesn’t symbolize anything, any more than anything else does in my films; the zone is a zone, it’s life, and as he makes his way across it a man may break down or he may come through. Whether he comes through or not depends on his own self-respect, and his capacity to distinguish between what matters and what is merely passing”. First of all, Tarkovsky contradicts himself as he does indeed say that The Zone is life, and as such he already has offered an interpretation. Secondly, as Tarkovsky was a believer in audience participation in his films, to say that a thing means only itself seems to be contrary to his purpose: “Anyone who wants can look at my films as into a mirror, in which he will see himself”.

And herein lies much of the power in Tarkovsky’s best work. While he is so adept and meticulous in presenting strong images, images that stay with us long after the witnessing, he also leaves us with a basic void: The images does not mean more than themselves unless we choose to look into ourselves for answers. We can feel that they strike a chord in us, but are often unable to explain exactly why or how. It is first by our active participation that the void can be negated, so to say, that some meaning can occur. This is also, I think, why his films stay with us, even though they at first impression fail to convince us that we have seen something truly worthwhile. They take time, as reflection takes time, and even though the films may be long, the period of contemplation must always be longer. The reward is bound to not be immediate.

Stalker is perhaps the best example of this. In my next post I shall try to suggest a few reasons why.

Studio Ghibli Part 3: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

Two years after the release of The Castle of Cagliostro, Miyazaki-san began his first and so far only manga: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. By 1984, he had finished the first two volumes and wrote a script for a feature length anime based on these volumes. The full story of the manga was completed in 1992, so – needless to say – the film is very much an abridged version of a longer work. That is not to say that the film is not complete unto itself.

After having completed his script, Miyazaki-san took the directing reins himself and the rest, as they say, is history. For the first time the master was able to write a story from scratch with his own characters and one has to marvel at how his directing abilities had blossomed in the four years that had passed since his last directorial venture. (In the meantime, he had, together with Isao Takahata, tried his luck in the US through the co-production of a film called Little Nemo. However, the Japanese delegation pretty much abandoned ship because of the differences between the two countries in how to produce a movie – and not least, what the movie should actually be about).

This is the first film that really has the full “Miyazaki-touch”. It’s both an ecological fable, an anti-war film and a grand adventure story. It features a complicated heroine, Nausicaa, who is no damsel in distress, to put it mildly. More than that, the villain of the piece is hardly a villain at all, not in the one dimensional way, at least. She as well is female, and one has to admire Miyazaki-san’s belief that the audience of a predominantly male genre will accept a story in which both the protagonists (and antagonists?) are female – and as far from bimbos as one can possibly get. While the feminism of Miyazaki-san’s stories stem in part from a much stronger tradition in Japan of granting females roles as strong – and often headstrong – characters, I think that his consistent use of female protagonists in his films also points to his societal concerns.

Also, I suspect that he wishes to erase the sometimes artificial borders that the Japanese put up between different forms of manga/anime. Shonen, for example, is supposed to be manga stories that appeal to the typical young boy, with space crafts and robots; s/f-motifs and general adventure stories. Shojo is meant for girls and young women, featuring romance stories, female super heroines or depictions of girls working together (such a group is called sentai, with military connotations). Bishojo are comics that feature pretty single girls, as far as I can understand, while seinen is meant for boys or young men too old to read the shonen. I could go on, but you get the point.

Thus, a part of Miyazaki-san’s project seems to be to move past the separation of comics – or films – meant for only boys or only girls, but also to move past the barriers around what these films can depict. While this can initially seem strange for a westerner, as we don’t have these barriers as pronounced in our culture, I’ll venture that they still exist, we only haven’t been smart or calculated enough to put names to them. Well, that is not entirely true. The media has long since coined terms like “chick-flicks” and most recently, in desperation I suppose, “Dick-Flicks”; about stories of platonic male romances. This, though, has more to do with marketing and the decline of the Western civilization, and is thus slightly too wide a topic to cover in this post.

Of course, the problem with western films is that they are pretty much all shonen or shojo, with the majority by far being the former. (Although, as I’ve pointed out in an earlier post, for every 300 or The Dark Knight, we now increasingly seem to have a Sex and the City and Confessions of a Shopaholic. The problem with this has less to do with making genre films predominantly for only one sex, but the quality of the product and the depiction of women in the “women‘s films“).

But I digress. Miyazaki-san consistently uses young girls as his protagonists, and intermittently women as the antagonists. As a man, I’ve never cared one way or the other while watching the films, meaning I’ve never had any problems identifying with the plight of the characters, their desires or joy of life, their ways of acting in the world they inhabit. And, while this may put into question my manhood, I think that’s a part of the reason he has done so. (Not to put my manhood into question, but to create stories that go beyond sexually grounded consumerist definitions).

He is showing us by example of his stories that separations between the sexes, as well as between groups of people, are artificial and easily overcome by all that we have in common. The real enemy is lack of imagination and what causes said lack. Work is such an antagonist, if work is not heartfelt, if it is not based on something one enjoys. Certainly, the capitalist system is questioned, both as an alienating force which removes us from a sense of ourselves, but also as a downright destructive force that is eating away at the ground beneath our feet; our connection to the earth, and thus to where we come from. Often the steps to adulthood is seen as a crisis for his characters, and his films celebrate a more natural state in us, something that made us more human before we became human in society’s definition. Innocence, another word for nature, is grieved with its passing, not with fey sentimentalism, but by showing us the consequences of a world too grown up to see whence it grew.

I’ll try to be more concrete, and I’ll begin by returning to the film at hand. Miyazaki-san has surely taken the name Nausicaa from the character in The Odyssey. A young girl, wiser than her father, introduces Odysseus (Ulysses to some of you) into her society through the help of her mother. While she clearly has love for Odysseus, the relationship is never made sexual. Also, Miyazaki-san mentioned in an essay that he was inspired by the “Princess Who Loved Insects“. This is a Japanese story that takes place in the Heian period. The story revolves around a young princess who prefers to study insects and other creatures rather than finding herself a husband. In the essay he very much hints that his Nausicaa is an amalgamation of the two.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is a post-apocalyptic tale that takes place some 1000 years from now. Large parts of the Earth is uninhabitable, as the land has been made toxic by “the sea of decay”. What we see of the human world is mostly primitive, with different states having access to different kinds of technology – of differing sophistication. The states seem to be ruled after a monarchical/ feudal model. We don’t know how the world came to be this way.

We first encounter the young heroine as she is out in the wilderness, exploring the “sea of decay”, collecting samples and traversing the overgrown remains of some former civilization, now almost undistinguishable from the seemingly chemically ravaged nature. Upon returning on her “glider”, a flying apparatus that she controls to perfection, she comes across an “Ohmu”, which we learn is one of the more intelligent creatures to have evolved from the wastelands. It is very fast when it wants to and is armoured and looks like a gigantic caterpillar. Nausicaa seems to have a knack for communicating with the Ohmu.

The film is actually very plot-heavy, so I’ll limit myself to some introductory remarks. Back home in her village, or “The Valley of the Wind” of the title, we see her at work, experimenting with growing plants picked in the contaminated areas. Her findings lead her to believe that only the top soil of the wastelands is contaminated, and that by letting the insects (nature) do their work, the world can again be inhabitable. While at heart a pacifist, she is also a warrior princess and when her father is killed by the invading Tolmekians, she goes on a rampage and kills a large number of the enemy before being overtaken. This dichotomy in her character lifts her above clichéd and Disneyfied portrayals of young females. (Although Mulan is perhaps an exception from the Disney norm of the last 40 years).

The leader of the Tolmekians turns out to be a woman, Princess Kushana, who is like a dark grown up twin, or a version of someone Nausicaa could turn out to be if she didn’t have her love for nature to ground her. It turns out that the Tolmekians are there to secure a weapon of mass destruction that ended up in the valley by accident, namely the embryo of an ancient giant warrior. Their plan is to grow the embryo into full size and use it to destroy the sea of decay. Thus, two perspectives arise; that of Nausicaa, who wants to give nature a chance to fix itself if humanity leaves it well enough alone, and Kushana, who wants to fight fire with fire, so to say, to impose her own will on nature under the guise of wanting to restore it. Nausicaa’s approach is accepting, penitent and almost Buddhist in its non-confrontational way. Kushana’s way out of the human-made disaster is very human in its belief that humanity can restore what it has destroyed, the irony being that it must do so through further destruction.

In a sense, both of the characters do what they believe is best, not necessarily for themselves, but for humanity. As a consequence, it is hard to view Kushana as a villain, and she is certainly not a one-note bad guy. Both of them want to see nature restored, but they differ in their view of what place humanity should have in the restoration as well as in nature itself.

The ecological theme of the film is just one aspect of it, but it is the one that informs all the other elements that the film entails. Narrative doubles such as war and pacifism, love and duty, religion and myth are all given attention, but are very much connected to – and perhaps subservient to – the overriding views on Nature. An example is Miyazaki-san’s handling of Nausicaa as a messianic figure. While she certainly has elements of the christian and redeeming Christ, it is treated here more like a fulfilment of a mythical prophecy. Through Nausicaa’s bond with the Ohmu and the rest of the entomology of the “sea of decay“, she gets a kind of vision of what the earth itself needs. When she sacrifices herself, it is not to save humanity, but in service of a nature that is complex, in that it is partly already contaminated – much like the church’s view of humanity itself, one might interject – and seen as at least as important as the people populating Earth. (By the way, I am not giving away the ending here!)

There are so many things I could say about the film, but I fear it would ruin the appreciation for the first time viewer, so I’ll stop myself here. A danger of offering interpretations of films, is that it will make them seem more clear cut and boring than they are. Let me assure you, that this film is anything but boring. Even if you don’t care an iota or an inch or at all about the above, it is perfectly possible to view the film for its imagery, the unbridled joy of soaring above the fields on quiet wings, or for the adventure of it all – a princess defending her people in times of war – or its high quality animation; in short, for telling a better story than you are likely to see this or pretty much any year.