PIX15: Hill of Freedom, Greenery Will Bloom Again, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus

New year, new festival. I'll review a bunch of stuff in different places, some in Danish, some in English. I didn't watch anything on day one, but today I saw three films.

Hill of Freedom (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2014)

I began the festival the same way as last year: With the newest from prolific South Korean director Hong Sang-soo. It's the perfect way to start a festival the way all Hong's films start: Bright colors, korean script, and the charming pianomusic by Jeong Yong-jin. Same as always. Last year I was utterly charmed by his Our Sunhi. I'd heard, that this new one, Hill of Freedom, might be his very best, so I was looking forward to it. It's good. It's obviously fun and charming and Hong-like. But I wasn't as hooked as I was last year.

As I wrote last year, Hong Sang-soo can go from being really tricky to not that tricky. This is him at his utmost trickiest.The actual plot is very simple: Japanese guy Mori travels to Seoul to track down Kwon, a women he met a few years back. While searching for her, he meets an assortment of other characters, most notably other woman Young-son, who he gets involved with. The trick is the way the story is told: Through a bunch of letters that Mori has sent Kwon, which Kwon unfortunately drops, so it's completely out of order. Chronology is jumbled, and a whole bunch of the film is apparantly dreams that Mori has, so when something happens, or even if it actually happens at all, is always in doubt. There is an obvious order to a lot of it, with small stories involving a dog, another boyfriend, a man in debt, but then there's a bunch of weird other stuff. A young girl lives next door to Mori, whom his friend gets in a fight with, and then she gets collected by her father. Mori's voiceover then says 'you were lucky you were in the bathroom' and the scene ends. What? The film is full of playfulness like that.

This trickery is unusually bombastic by Hongs standards, and the film-language is unusually busy as well. The camera is static as allways, but nearly every seen involves zooms and pans to keep track of the characters. Mori is constantly in motion - when he isn't sleeping his day away - and the camera most always keep track of him. It's beautiful as always, but it's as if too much happens, too many characters. It doesn't breathe the way Our Sunhi did to me. Watching these films, I learn what kind of Hong I'm most drawn to. Hill of Freedom is a lot like In Another Country from 2012, where a young woman wrote three different stories about Isabelle Huppert travelling to Korea, down to the famous foreign actor visiting the country - Ryo Kase was in Letters From Iwo Jima. I wasn't a huge fan of In Another Country as well. I prefer the simpler ones, like Our Sunhi or Nobody's Daughter Haewon or Woman on the Beach, which aren't less weird, but just in subtler ways. The repetitions of Sunhi is actually weirder than in Hill of Freedom, since the bizarre details such as many characters telling Mori he was right to fight somebody unseen, using the exact same language, can be explained away by the film being authored by Mori. In Sunhi, it was simply the world that was weird.

With a prolific director like Hong Sang-soo, his filmography will constantly be redefined. I thought he was moving in a less tricky direction recently, and was focusing more on female characters than male. But now Hill of Freedom seems like the summation of everything he has made this decade, and focus is squarely back on week men. I wonder what we will get to watch next year. I hope they drink more Soju, it just isn't the same with red wine.

Greenery Will Boom Again (Ermanno Olmi, Italy, 2015)

What I always want out of a film is seeing something I haven't seen before. One of the best things with that principle, is that ignorance becomes a strength. Like with this one: I was pleasantly surprised by this one, because it had features I've never seen before. I'm pretty sure that says more about me than it does the qualities of the film, but who cares, I had a good experience.

Ermanno Olmi is a legend, whom I've never seen a film from before. He is 83. He won the Golden Palm in 78 for The Tree of Wooden Clogs and the Golden Lion in 88 for The Legend of the Holy Drinker. His sixties work should be really strong as well. But I haven't been that interested in checking him out, and I probably wouldn't have seeked this one out, but it fit my program. It's a World War One film, that takes place in a small outpost in the alps, that have been completely snowed in. Their communications gets intercepted by the Austrians, so now the enemy knows where they are, and begins attacking. That's pretty much it.

The film reminded me of submarine movies. The small outpost is plenty claustrophobic, and the men are sitting ducks while snipers snipe, mortars rain down, and a tunnel is being dug under them to undermine the place. The brass wants new communications, so a soldier is ordered to run outside, but unfortunately it's a full moon and there is no place to hide. He takes two steps and throws himself into the snow, and is immediately shot and killed. The next volunteer instead kills himself. What I realized was: I don't think I've ever seen a film told from the perspective of the defenders. I've only seen a few World War One movies: Paths of Glory and Blackadder Goes Forth is what first comes to mind, but those film revolve around the iconic notion of going over the top. This film shows the other end of that, the people sitting in their small dugout, waiting for the mass of men to come towards them. Undoubtedly, there exists films like that (I'm guessing something like Letters from Iwo Jima might be like that) but I've never seen them. And I was riveted.

80 minutes. The pictures are exquisite, color-drained digital. It looks cold and devoid of soul, as so much digital filmmaking does, which is very apt for this story. The men are pretty much indistinguishable from one another. The pace is slow, the mood is opressive. The men will adress the camera all the time, and tell small anecdotes about themselves, and I don't think a single one of them did anything to me. Actually, objectively speaking, this is not that good a film, I think. But I liked it anyway. A small surprise.

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (Spike Lee, USA, 2014)

Objectively, this was an even worse film than Greenery Will Bloom Again. Spike Lee is also a legend, and in my opinion his Do the Right Thing is the best American film of the eighties. But it's been a while since he was really relevant, and this one is extremely lowbudget and made through kickstarter. It's a remake of an indie-film from  1973 called Ganja and Hess.

There is a thing called 'late-period style', which is used about films made by old directors. Normally, it connotes austere style, concerned with aging and death. This is not that. And Spike Lee is only 58, still very young for a director. But there is this enjoyable freedom in the filmmaking, as if the director knows that only a fraction of people are still interested in what he does. He does what he does best. The film opens fantastically, with dancer Charles 'Lil Buck' Riley doing his gliding dance around Brooklyn to gentle piano music, an opening that mirrors the way Rosario Dawson danced to Public Enemy at the start of Do the Right Thing. Back then the mood was intense, this time it's elegiac. The film never becomes that good again, but there's a bunch of nifty scenes.

Dr Hess has inherited a bunch of money from his parents, the first african-americans to own a Wall Street firm. He collects and writes about African art. His unstable assistant murders him with an ancient Ashanti dagger, that was used in ancient blood rituals, but Hess doesn't die. He begins drinking blood. Ganja, an English black woman, arrives at the 40 acre lot at Martha's Vinyard, and the couple fall in love. He murders her as well, and she springs back to life. But can they live with themselves as vampires?

The symbolism is pretty simple, and was seemingly more pointed in 73. Dr Hess sucks the blood out of the black community, without giving anything back. He prays on the poor women - including Felicia 'Snoop' Pearson from The Wire! - whom he can get to do anything since his whole demeanor proves that he is loaded. In a late scene, he visists a former victim, and her demeanor is exactly like a junkie, making Hess into her dealer, another person who prays on his own community. All his victims are black.

The style has been described as 'exploitation', but that is way too easy. It's more like daytime soap meets an incredibly good and experienced director who knows exactly what he's doing, but has no money or time to do that much. The acting is inconsistent. The original music is cheesy, but the whole film is drenched in music, soul and hiphop from a bunch of unsigned artists, as well as a couple of Brazilian songs, which I loved. There is the feeling of a director doing exactly what he wants, and not caring what anybody says. Pretty much everyone in the film is shown naked at some point, men and women. There's a really hot scene with two women flirting, which is filmed in one shot where the camera keeps circling over and over and over, which then cuts to a women naked in the shower with sex-funk playing underneath.

Everything about this film is bad taste, but in a much weirder way than just b-movie aesthetics. I liked that. There's a warmth to the feeling, a sense of communality. It reminded me of Michel Gondry's The We and the I, which he made with a group of young art-students. That film is too rare in film. As is music by kickass Brazilian artists. It's worth your while.

GIFF day 2: La Sapienza, Goodbye to Language, Daughter... Mother... Daughter...

La Sapienza (Eugène Green, France/Italy, 2014)

My plan this morning was to go and see Dominik Graf's three-hour Schiller-biopic, Beloved Sisters. But it turned out I misread the programme, and when I was ready to leave it had already been playing for an hour. I had a Plan B: Field of Dogs, according to the program a visionary retelling of Dante's Divine Comedy. But that one was sold out. So instead I went and saw this one, which played at the local business school, 100 m from where I was. There were a lot of tickets, and it was about architecture, which interests me. So that seemed a fine Plan C.

It was an amazing experience. The plot of the film is simple: A French architect named Alexandre travels to Rome with his wife to look at architecture by the great Borromini. On the way there, in Schwitzerland, they run into a young brother and sister. He wants to study architecture and she is sick. The rest of the film is the men looking at churches and the women talking. But the style... The style was like the rigorous modernist cinema of old, except in digital, and with a deadpan humour that never allowed things to get too serious. The actors walked around and declamated their lines like in the cinema of the great French filmmaker Robert Bresson. Many shots of only feet and hands of people also seemed Bressonesque. The rigourously composed symmetrical shots and long discussions with actors at times looking directly into the camera reminded me of the late-late-late period from 106-year-old-and-still-going filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira. With it's discussions of architecture and multilingual characters especially Oliveiras very great A Talking Picture (2003). And a large percentage of the images is just the camera looking at architecture, filming modern appartment buildings and factories from a distance, and contrasting it with loving closeups of the detailed, light-filled beauty of the old churches.

There is a tiny problem: The film depicts people fed up with functionalistic, modernist life and compares that to the baroque beauty found in Roman architecture, but the style of the film is kinda modernist and functionalistic as well. That is in and of itself not the biggest problem, and the film does critique it's own style as it goes along, slowly accumulating enough over-the-top characters, details and weird interludes, to carry on a sense of baroque-ness. And as the characters achieves the titular 'sapience' (which is a word for wisdom in some way, I don't really know) the style changes, becoming more rounded. But there was another big film recently about intellectuals looking for meaning amongst the old buildings of Rome: Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty. And while La Sapienza works with the same outmoded, modernist form that he critiques, Sorrention's cinema seems to strive towards a new cinematic language, perhaps more fitting to the critique. The GIFF-programmers wittingly describe La Sapienza as a 'rectangle-drama', a great description of a certain type of cinema. In contrast, Sorrentino's film is all curves, broken lines, movements, fluidity. When Alexandre describes a facade by his beloved Borromini as being 'always in motion', his description sounds more like Sorrentino than the static shot we get from Green. And also, Sorrentino's film was one of the biggest arthouse successes in recent years, and even won a Foreign Language Oscar, one of the few times that prize has gone to a truly brilliant film. There is no way Eugene Green's film will get even close to that attention. So in a way, this whole film might be a bit... superfluous...

But on the other hand. I watched this film with many, many people in a big theater, and the people laughed, smiled, and had a good time. Two of the other three showings are already sold out. I was also surprised to find, that director Eugene Green is an old and experienced artist, having worked extensively in theater and only directed four theatrical features before, but those films premiering at Cannes and Locarno. It took no more than ten minutes before I mentally made a note of checking everything else I could find by this weird and idiosyncratic director. I had no idea what I was getting. I will perhaps never get the chance to watch this or the rest of the directors filmography again, at least not on the big screen. This was a unique experience, one I didn't anticipate at all. And surprises like this are the reason I love film festivals so very very much!

Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 2014)

Ah, Godard. Trying to handle a late-period Godard film after only one viewing is a foolish task. And this one was in 3D, so there were twice as many layers. I'm mainly confused, and grasping at straws, trying to connect as much of this montage of sounds, words, works cited and images into something adding up to something. I saw and wrote about his first 3D short Les Trois Dés-Astres last year at PIX, so I might begin there. That one depicted 3D as a disaster for cinema, yet another in a lineage of failures for the medium (ranging from the Holocaut to the domination of Hollywood, because those two things can obviously be compared). Perhaps Goodbye to Language is about saying goodbye to the old language of film? The screen flashes Ah, Dieux at times, and the final time I understood it to be a pun on Adieu, but perhaps also on Un, Deux (if you say it with an accent?) There are of course a bunch of clips from old films, but not really anyone I recognized. And the main story is something about a woman and a man, and another woman and a man, and the women are naked a lot of the time, and the men are disparaging and don't really think much of the women. 'Women can't create evil', they say (or something to that effect). Then there's a scene with Mary Shelley, writing Frankenstein, reminding us that a woman wrote perhaps the first piece of horror-fiction. So there is that. I don't know, I don't at all get what the plot was about. There was a great dog named Roxy, though, I liked the dog!

So much stuff on language. Over the end credits, a couple is 'speaking' in dog-language with a baby. There are a bunch of philosophical quotes on language. The two parts of the film are called 'Nature' and 'Metaphor', perhaps suggesting that the second part turns the first part into an understandable language? Except the two parts apparantly mirror each other quite a lot, and none of them are easy to figure out. There's a discussion of language and atrocity, one of the women tells a story of an SS officer yelling at a kid at the entrance to the gas chamber, that 'There is no why'. In the beginning of the film, a professor comments on the subtitle of Solshenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago: A Literary Investigation. What lies beyond language is atrocity. Horror. But also childhood, and nature, shown on screen through the many many scenes featuring the dog Roxy. There is also a scene where a painter tries to explain how to show depth through water colour, mirroring the way Godard himself tries to figure out the grammar of this weird new technology.

And Godard struggles with turning 3D into a language. As with many of his more recent films, he uses low-grade video and digital, and those blurry images create sheets of colour when the image is given depth. The film checks out the ticks of this new medium, for instance filming out of the windshield of a car on a rainy night, which creates floating specks of neon-light where the water-drops mirror streetlight. There are a couple of times where the filmmakers must have turned one of the two cameras needed to film in 3D to the side, making the image simply split, and forcing me to blink each eye to watch two films at once, until the camera turns back and the image connects again. There are other sequences where the effect simply doesn't work for me, where the foreground is too far away from the background, and all of a sudden what was a couple tablelegs turns into a ghostly seethrough presence. And at times there are only abstract dots and lines onscreen. Basic filmic grammar is also broken, as the camera turns upside down, the shadow of the cameraman is seen on the ground, the plot is achronological, etc.

Haven't got a clue. I read the book Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian by Michael Witt recently, and that book noted how perhaps Godard should be thought of as a mixed-media artist than a filmmaker, since for the longest time he has been working with collages of existing media, as well as video, installation, text, sound, etc. This film definitely blurs the limits of the new 3D medium, and is to a large extent about those limits. That is what I got from it on the first try. That, and an ever so slight headache.

Daughter... Mother... Daughter... (Panahbarkhoda Rezaee, Iran, 2014)

When watching a bunch of films over a short period, there will probably always be some that don't get full attention. I was tired, and the Godard mindfuck kept swirling round my brain. Also, this was a sloooow film, without dialogue, but with a beautiful soundtrack of music, nature sounds, and poetic narration in Iranian. Always the sounds of birds cheeping, water running, and a train passing by from time to time. It was hypnotic in a way. It put the person next to me to sleep several times throughout the seventy minutes.

It was a film on boredom, on being trapped in a life without any hope for a future. Grandmother spins yarn all the time, spinning spinning spinning. Mother walks around the wheat-fields, longing for her husband who took the train to get away. Daugher is sick and struggling to breathe, lying in bed all day, listening to the sounds of nature, dreaming of seeing the sky. There is a son, but he also leaves early on. The women are stuck - as many women probably are in Iran. Most of the film is longheld shots of each woman standing or sitting or laying alone, and then the narrator says something about them. We never hear any names. At times the women watch tv together, and we get old black and white clips, or perhaps it's new clips made to look old, I don't know. Death is never far from the family, and at times the women look ghostly covered as they are completely in black, walking the barren landscape. A shot of light streaming over the mountains is amazing, perhaps showing grace. There is only a single shot where the women interact, where the mother strokes the hair of the daughter, and then they cry. It's very cathartic, after having watched so much film without anybody showing any emotion at all.

This was artfilm. Very lowbudget I think. High res digital pictures, no cameramovements at all, all sound added afterwards, only four people in the film. I love seeing such a small and personal projects, and I liked listening to the Iranian poesy. Had it been much longer than 70 minutes, it would probably have been too much, though... Also, googling the director, his name is apparantly spelled a bunch of different ways in the west, and his other features have names like A Cradle for Mother and even Daugher... Father... Daughter... Now I'm intrigued, and would like to see if his films might make more sense through accumulation.

Note on language, apropos Godard: I like Iranian cinema, I've seen quite a lot of Iranian films, which means I've seen a bunch of Iranian writing rolling over screen at the beginning and end of a film, and it has always seemed like curves and not like words. But all of a sudden, tonight, in the blink of an eye, I could make out letters. Not that I understood anything, it just looked like a language all of sudden. Weird how that works.

Also Seen:
Another film from competion, Susanna Lenken's debut feature My Skinny Sister, which I will write about elsewhere. A fine debut, a great depiction of two young sisters.

CPHDOX day 9: The Lack, Horse Money

The Lack (Masbedo, Italy, 2014)

CPHDOX is amazing at blurring the boundaries between documentary, art and fiction, showcasing hybrid films as well as putting stuff in other contexts. But then, at times, because the festival overall is so amazing at considering docs as an artform, the series devoted explicitly to art-films might suffer. When amazing art-cinema like Lav Diaz' Storm Children or Pedro Costa's Horse Money is playing in the main competition, it's reason for aplause, good for not keeping artfilm confined to a ghetto of sorts. But the films left behind might suffer a bit.

The Lack is a fine film, but I'm left with the feeling that it's really regular artfilm-making. Working from ideas I gather was gathered from psycho-analysis, the film showcases six women through four dream-like episodes, where their needs, dreams and frustrations are visualized. It's very beautiful, and the sound is great. The first and the third were filmed in Iceland, the second on the Aeolian islands, as a tribute to Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, also concerned with the appearence of a 'lack' so to speak, though in that case a lacune left by the dissapearing woman. The first episode showed a woman in a white dress waiting for a man, realizing he'd stood her up once again, then driving into a landscape with a gun and shooting at the dress, which had been gifted to her by the untrustworthy man. As this retelling should make clear, it's not the most subtle thing. The other episodes were better, more poetical. One has a woman named Xiu travelling to an island with a heavy projector in tow, carrying it up a hill and creating a beautiful light. Not subtle, but the final light was very very beautiful, and beauty is what this type of film needs. Third episode, back in Iceland, had two women travelling to a floating glasshouse. Fourth episode concerned therapy explicitly, and included some crazy shots of a naked frightened woman going down a dark tube on a stream of water, like a water-slide, filmed from the inside. I can't explain it, absolutely crazy how on earth they did it.

The directors from the artgroup Masbedo were two men. As you can imagine, a film made by men, about women and what they are lacking, is balancing on a knifes edge. The men talked about wanting to show a different type of woman than the 'Berlusconi'-woman dominant in Italy, but it turns out, being a better feminist than Berlusconi might actually not be enough to impress an audience of young Danish women, who had some quite pointed questions afterwards. And the film is a bit weird. Like, it's quite easy to see it as a film about penis-envy... 'Lack' is a Lacanian term, and it can be used quite subtly and universally without much gendering but... Yeah, pscyho-analysis is weird, man.

Horse Money (Pedro Costa, Portugal, 2014)

One of those films that could perhaps have been in the art-category is Pedro Costa's new weird Horse Money. In any way, I don't think it should be categorized as a documentary. The film has been called the fourth film in what is now known as the 'Fontainhas'-tetralogy, which for it's first three films, Ossos (97), In Vanda's Room (00) and Collosal Youth (06), took place in the now demolished Fontainhas slum in Lissabon. But grouping these films together perhaps minimizes the big differences between the four, and naming them all for Fontainhas glosses over how much the films, especially the last two, are concerned with the immigrant experience in Portugal, and the hangovers from Portuguese colonialism, something also present in Costa's Down to Earth from 95. Actually, In Vanda's Room is the only one that seemed truly documentary to me - though it's also the only one of the four I haven't finished, so perhaps it changes after the first half. At the Q&A, Pedro Costa talked about having worked in the same method for 15 years and 3 films, that is after Ossos. And this method - shooting with a minimal crew and on digital, developing films together with his subjects - aren't as much used for documenting raw reality anymore, but for getting into the heads of the subjects of the films, for basing the narrative on their desires, memories, histories. All in all, I feel we might have to reevaluate what Costa has been trying to do, and I also feel that the old narrative of his work has harmed the reception of this new one. Because this new one isn't really a documentary, it's heavily fictionalized and stylized, and it doesn't have a lot to do with Fontainhas, and yet it builds pretty logically on Colossal Youth. But from some of the confused reviews I've read of this film, it doesn't seem as if the critics were prepared for it anyway.

Alas, the film does have it's share of problems, and some of them derives from it's deviation from the earlier films in the trilogy. The loss of Fontainhas is deeply felt. That claustrophobic neighborhood was an extremely filmable location, where the personality of the group of people who'd build it could be sensed almost everywhere. In Colossal Youth, when focus moved to the new, sleek, white apartments that the government would be giving the inhabitants in return for their demolished homes, you could feel the loss of history, and the absence of anything substantial given in return (if there was any sense that living conditions would improve, obviously it would be worth it, but the sense I get is that nothing was done about the root of the problems, it's just that people were moved from a neighborhood where their squalor had become too visible). Horse Money is shot in studios, in abandoned factories, in doorways and elevators, and the visuals don't work like they used to. Not exactly. Costa still uses light better than pretty much anyone, so most of the film is still an aesthetic delight, but there isn't the same sense of lived life in the pictures.

Further creating problems: The film dives deep into the head of Ventura, the lead character of Colossal Youth as well, where he wandered around and talked with his 'children'. This time he's been out in a hospital or prison or asylum, it isn't exactly clear, and he talks as much with doctors, soldiers and specters of his past. Ventura remains a striking presence, though he's gotten much older since last we saw him, and the traumas and losses in his life is interesting to explore, but while there are some other immigrant persons in the film - a woman named Vitalina, arriving from Cape Verde; Ventura's 'godson' whom he sings with a bit - there isn't the same sense of a communal epic being told as there was in the two earlier films. Further exacerbating this problem is the short runtime by Costra's standards, only 105 minutes, hardly enough to establish the landscape where used to from earlier. (yeah, I know: "Such a boring film, and way too short as well!")

I was a bit dissapointed in this film, but understand me correctly: Pedro Costa is one of the most important filmmakers working today, and my dissapointment only means the film is not as good as Colossal Youth, one of the best films of last decade. Horse Money is still a unique experience, extremely beautiful, and important in the way it gives voice to the outcasts and shines a light on history we might want to forget in Europe. The film shines a light on the fact that the Portuguese Carnation-revolution, which toppled the dictatorship in 1974, was done by the same soldiers who'd comitted dreadful atrocities in Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde, and that this development might have been an extremely frightul one for the immigrants. In a sequence towards the end Ventura is trapped in an elevator with a soldier in full camo gear, whether he considers Ventura fellow countryman or enemy is hard to tell.

It is a good film, one that needs to be seen and discussed, and one that hopefully will help give Pedro Costa, Ventura, and the rest of the Cape Verde immigrants more exposure. But I'd hoped it might be the film of the year, and it's not.

CPHPIX day 7: Small Homeland, The Quiet Roar, Life of Riley, Story of My Death

Small Homeland (Alessandro Rossetto, Italy, 2013)

Notice the music from 45 sec onwards. It's used very well in the film.

Another film from the New Talent Grand Prix. This one started out a bit violently, with a man and a young woman playing what seems to be half a sex game, half something more unnerving. The young woman takes some money and runs away, we could be in some sort of thriller but then: Lethargy. The title sequence combines aerial shots of the northern Italian landscape with a song for male chorus, and a shot of a cow relieving itself. We are in Veneto, Northern Italy, close to Venice. Luisa and Renata are two young girls working in a modern hotel. Luisa lives with her parents and has a boyfriend, Bilal, from Albania. Renata is more alone. She is the one from the opening scene, and seems to be prostituting herself at times. Luisa helps create a damning tape, in an almost Lynchian scene. There are aspects of plot in the first part of the film.

But boy, this film goes meandering. I liked that. To begin with, the plot is just subservient to scenes of everyday life: The two girls shop for clothes, Luisa's father goes to a political meeting with a group seeking indepence for the Veneto region. Most, but not all, of these scenes are very beautifully filmed, but still feel real. The nighttime photography, of which there is a lot, is amazing. There is a sense of a dead-end region, of recession and small hopes for the future. Luisa's father is mad at immigrants. And then, a long interlude finds Luisa and Bilal travelling to Venice for a few days to help Bilal's cousin escape immigration police. This is a long stretch of film, with only two of the characters of the film, which seemingly has nothing to do with the main story. But it has some of the best characterwork, and another beautiful night-time scene with dancing at a small-town festival. Line-dancing has to be the dumbest thing ever.

And then. We're back. What little plot was brought into place like, an hour before, is suddenly brought into play again. And the film, slowly and methodically, becomes the semi-high-stakes drama the beginning threatened it would be. It's a brilliant construction, and the slowness pays off in the final moment. Boy, this film nails it's final moments. It could have had the feel of a Greek tragedy, or of Romeo and Juliet. The klichéd version. Instead, it brings us to exactly the point where we cannot but accept the brokenness of the people in the region. And then it stops. Bravo!

The Quiet Roar (Henrik Hellström, Sweden, 2014)

Looking at Scandinavian cinema, you would probably be surprised to learn that it's a region with mountains. Swedish cinema is famous for Bergman's Farö-films, Lukas Moodyson's small towns, and cities like Göteborg, Stockholm or Wallander's Ystad. Fjords, perfect for nude swimming. The best Scandinavian mountain-film I've seen in recent years was the Norwegian film The Troll Hunters. That one remembered that parts of Scandinavia is still very much wilderness. Henrik Hellström's film is first and foremost valuable as the best mountain film anyone's made in ages.

The plot is a bit silly and pretentious: An old woman named Marianne is terminally ill, and to take her mind off things she takes a drug, which causes her to flash back to her youth and time spent in the mountains of Norway. That's it. It's all about the look. Oh, those mountains. Caught in crisp hi-def digital, it's sublime, rugged cliffs meeting gray and threatening clouds. And in the distance, a glacier. Streaks of ice. The modern wooden cabin with panoramic glass windows. This is worth the price of admission.

Marianne was depressed. She felt so sad, but was never able to tell. Her marriage fell apart, and she ended up not seeing her kids. The mood of the film is dark and heavy, and the dialogue, between young Marianne, old Marianne, and her husband, is a bit writerly and unnatural. Also, some might be put off by the pretentious-ness. I was captivated, but I did notice in retrospect that an insane part of the film was in slow-motion... Make of that what you want. It's a simple film, which simply manages to use a landscape we don't see enough of artistically. As such, it's a reminder of how rugged Scandinavia can actually be. And as a Scandinavian, I love that. So many boring small towns and middle class problems. God, it's good to see something sublime every now and then.

Life of Riley (Alain Resnais, France, 2014)

Alain Resnais is the Maestro'est of the Maestro's on the program. By far. His career stretches back to short documentaries in the fourties, one of which, on Van Gogh, won an Oscar in 1950. His trifecta of early masterpieces, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad and Muriel, will keep him at a central place in the film-history books for all time. And his career after that, though less acclaimed, is filled with different styles, different experiments, different kinds of film. This year at Berlin, three weeks before his death at the age of 91, Life of Riley won the Alfred Bauer Award for 'opening new perspectives on cinematic art.' That is pretty well done. Unfortunately, the film doesn't really deserve that award.

A lot of later Resnais was inspired by theater, and Life of Riley belongs to a subset of four films, adapted from the British playwright Alan Aycbourn, along with Private Fears in Public Places and the diptych Smoking/Non-Smoking. Of these films I've only seen Smoking, but my guess is that the jury hasn't done much better. Because Life of Riley is pretty much like Smoking. We're talking a stylized, theatrical version of cinema, with typical Britishes humor and a story of people in small towns dreaming of getting somewhere else. While Smoking used model landscapes in the background, in Life of Riley the backgrounds are painted cloth. Nearly every scene in both films takes place in gardens, and there's the same sort of painted establishing shots, and written explanations on the development of time. It looks like a development of an earlier theme not a 'new perspective'. Nothing neccessarily wrong with that, though.

The plot is simple: Three couples react to the news, that school-teacher George Riley is terminally ill with cancer. It riles up the past, makes them reconsider the present and the future. Riley is never seen. Actually, except for the last scene of the film, only six actors are in the film, though they are constantly phoning or shouting at people outside of the frame. It's all playfully irreverent and amusing, but I still feel like there's something I don't get. I don't get the fetishisation of Northern England, which is really what one has to call it. Maps, roads, small houses, cottages. I don't get what Resnais sees in it, but he seems obsessed. I don't get why Resnais, this grand master of cinema, who worked with Duras and Robbe-Grillet in the early days of his carreer, has made four Aycbourn features, and why he was apparantly preparing a fifth when he died. It's fine, but...

It's quite fun looking at it in relation with the rest of his filmography, though. People might see the film as obsessed with death - and the final frame of the film seems very grim in retrospect - but it's not something new. His first films were obsessed with trauma from the unacknowledged dead, of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Nevers, Algeria. If anything, he became more okay with death as he came closer to it. In the earlier features, the trauma of dead people are holding people down, it's what they have to escape. In this film, the spectre of death opens up the structures in the group. It riles up the past, opens perspectives for the future. The future lacune where Riley is now in the present becomes an escape route through which the characters seek to rearrange their lives. It's almost like a liberation.

Overwhelmed with sadness over the news of Riley's illness, one of the characters says: It is always those full of life who die young. The people who get old are boring and dull (quoted from memory) In Resnais' case, that is quite obviously wrong. This is a film full of life, in bright and glorious colours, with little stylistic flourishes like a series of monologues delivered in close-up against a white screen with black scratches. It is really strange comparing this film to the stark black-and-white of Hiroshima Mon Amour, made 55 years ago. Life of Riley is a lark, a very minor movie. I can't find anything in this film I haven't seen before in Resnais. Still, a pretty fun way to go out. RIP.

Story of My Death (Albert Serra, Spain, 2013)

Boy, this was boring. The plot is Casanova vs Dracula, how boring can it be? You'd be surprised. 148 min with almost nothing happening, people talking, eating, sitting around. Grainy pictures, lit by candlelight.  People were falling asleep in the theatre. This is probably the film I've seen so far, which is most an aquired taste. If you've read my other writeups of this festival, you might think that it sounds like my kind of film. And yeah, you'd be right.

More than most trailers, this captures the essence of the film quite well.

This is not a film to be understood, this is a film to be felt. The mood is so sad. Casanova spends the first part of the film talking about his sense of a coming revolution, it is quite clear that he has become old and a has-been. But he can't stop living, eating and laughing at everything. There is litterally a long scene of him laughing while shitting. It is a sad laugh, though, one I can't get out of my head. The first long stretch takes place at Casanova's castle, until we move into the country, where Casanova and his servant Pompeu settles down at a farmer's house. This is where they come across an old, bearded man, with intense eyes, who's mainly around at night. And some bored girls, who's drawn to all the visitors.

I was constantly drifting throughout this film, I didn't get that much of what they were talking about. But I don't think it's important. What's important is the sense of sadness and I did feel that. Such overwhelming sadness. The candlelit pictures are incredible, looking a bit like Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. Casanova's laughter is so striking, and so sad. He is an old fool, if he just decided to retire and be old, he would be okay. But he can't stop living, lusting, etc. And it makes him seem so sad, even while fornicating with beautiful young women. And then there's Dracula. Who can't stop killing. The two characters really seem like opposites, life vs death.

Nearly nothing happens, and I'll bet I've forgotten quite a lot of scenes. But when something all of a sudden happened, 90 minutes into the runtime, it gave me a shock like I've seldom gotten from cinema. Because I was in a state of half-sleep. And the dark and disturbing parts of the second half hit that much harder in this kind of cinema. I don't know if this is a 'good film'. All I know is that thinking back on the experience, I get a churning feeling in my stomach. I find it disturbing how much certain aspects of this film is seared into my mind. And my gut. This is not for anyone, but if you're in the right mood, and willing to lower your defences, it cuts like a knife.