Dragonflies (2003)

Eddie is a chubby beardy bear of bloke living out in a big wood timbered farmhouse next to a lake with his young girlfriend Marie; far away from everyone and everything .”All i want is you” says she. “And i want you” says he. Cushty. Maria is up the duff.

But somebody is going to ruin this lovely life in a minute. Cue Kullman. He too wants some of what they want.

“You have a good life” says Kullman envious. “Want to play a game?” He gets them both to close their eyes.  Boo! “You knew something horrible was going to happen. And then it did. That’s what makes it so terrible” says Kullman. Maria doesn’t want to play. She’s sussed his game.

After this I’m suspecting Kullman is going to be a menace in a psycho nutcase kind of way. And as if to confirm this suspicion he’s deliberately sliced his leg with a chainsaw to get to stay longer. She knows. Then neighbours dog is in boot of Kullmans car dead. Claims he ran over it. Next, a nearby barn is on fire.

“She’s too good for you” says Kullman to Eddie. And for a while Eddie goes a bit bonkers with jealous rage.

A distinct change has taken place: it’s Eddie – rather than Kullman – who is “ruining everything” stamping about and chucking tiles off the roof. His aggressive old thuggish self is jumping about, scaring Marie off. Kullman, by contrast, seems like a little boy lost, just wanting to belong, be accepted, be included; share in some of the good stuff Eddie has been having (living here in this rural idyll with the lovely Marie) The Bad Guy role has been subtly switched. Gradually, I’m feeling more sympathetically inclined towards Kullman – which i guess is what i was meant to feel.

At the end Eddie comes back to his cuddly -huggy baby- bear self again. Although he does give a metaphorical slap to Kullmans face: “You were never really a friend, not really“. And Kullman is left there, friendless, alone, unwanted, rejected. Yes, i did feel sorry for him.

Its a relief the film hasn’t got all silly with contrived thriller genre plotty twists and potty turns. It’s kept true to its melancholic undertow, mostly – stayed close to its quiet Norwegian roots.

Dir: Marius Holst, Norway,

6.5/10

Christmas in August (1998)

Bespectacled photographer with fatal illness indulges in hapless hopeless non romance with meter maid.

“Why are you smiling at me?” she asks. Yeah, why is he? And flippin laughing all the time. Having this terminal cancer (or whatever it is) is dead funny.

But he doesn’t look very ill, seem ill, act ill. The ugly pain of dying from this mystery malady is mostly airbrushed out.

Is his Shy Smiley Man persona a way of keeping people out? Putting an ever so brave and humble front on? Or a genuine expression of joy at the preciousness of life? Or an absurd abreaction to how funny-odd life is? (when death is all there is at the end of it)  Or a surreptitious wink of denial, contrived to con the people around him to lighten up, and smile – cus I’m dying man! (but I’m being a brave little boy by not making a great big song and dance about it)

I’d quite like him to stop doing that stupid little laugh. Its not funny. Its ingratiating. This diffident shy charm act is fake mate.

But he still carries on insinuating the phony feel-good happy vibe with clueless girl. Smiley smile, noddy head: “Look I’m nice. I’m gonna die but i can’t stop being nice about it. How happy dying makes me feel. I’m making you (meter maid) want to fall in love with me. But I’m not going to tell you. I’ll keep me – and the actual Truth – quietly to myself thank you very much. I won’t let love in and i won’t let love out. I won’t share what is really going on with me. By staying passively withheld, and impassively withdrawn, i’ll hang onto some kind of sad self-effacing virtue. Which of course will make all of you watching me go “Awww” and want to give me a nice little hug”.

Personally, to get more empathetic response from me I’d have needed him to drop the phony nice guy act, stop the twee smile and the ingratiating laugh, stop the wanting me to feel sorry for him (as watcher of film) – and get real. Be in authentic engagement with the people around him (in the film) Tell the girl the truth instead of doing this tepid half baked withheld involvement thing with her.

If i think about it – its the actors performance as much as his character i couldn’t buy into. Too smoothly pathetic. Pathos superficially acted out but not internalised or deeply enriched from within. The bland smiley facade was all Suk-kyu Han’s.

Overall, Christmas in August is disingenuously sly. The suffering is synthetic, not sympathetic. The sweetly winsome little soundtrack strokes you to be sad every 5 minutes; pouring sugary sad sentiment into the gaps were engaged characterisation should be, enlightening script – and genuinely involving, involved emotion.

A manipulative little sham this film.

Dir: Jin-ho Hur, South Korea

4/10

Life in a Day (2011)

A mish mashy melange was my first reaction on watching this. Then i watched it again and could see more coherence in it.

It’s structured around all the ordinary small stuff we have to do to get through the every day: waking up, washing, brushing teeth, shaving, making breakfast, lunch and so on.

And then there’s the bigger life-events like coping with illness, getting married, having babies.

Questions are asked like, “What’s in your pocket?” or “What do you love/fear? A lonely guy loves his cat… another guy loves his fridge.. another guy fears his hair falling out… a woman fears “not being a mummy”… and so on..

At times the editing is very fast: periodic montage sequences whizz by a conveyor belt of transient images like a Planet Earth ad break.

But then there are several personal pieces that follow individual situations. I liked these slower stories better, such as

The post-graduate returning to Essex to catch up with his “old man” dad, both sat in the car, sharing a burger.

The gay guy coming out to grandma on the phone (“I love you too” he’s saying to her)

And the sad scenarios: of the father lighting incense at shrine of dead wife – and the little sons perfunctory remembrance of his mother; or the “Family project” of mother dying of cancer, trying to help her anxious young son make sense of it; or the thankful – tearful – Aussie in hospital after major heart surgery “I’ll be out there again, doing crazy things, and enjoying life” he says. But you sense he probably won’t.

There’s smiley bits too, like the Peruvian shoeshine boy; the rude wedding vows read by the English vicar.

And some nasty bits, like the slaughter of cow, its throat being slashed into to let blood – and there’s a rapidly cut together montage of scenes of violence and fighting – deliberately rushed through so as not to dwell too long. The shoplifting Russian/Slav is a bit dismaying too (firstly, that he’s filmed getting away with it; secondly that the clip gets sent to be included in the film; and thirdly – that it is included!)

Throughout, is the continual narrative thread of a Korean cycling around the world for the last 9 years – feeling homesick for Korean flies.

Come the afternoon outdoor pursuits – like skydiving out of planes – and Life in a Day has got to feel exhausting.

So much packed in, so much to pack in. I think a million sub-editors were needed to prune the 4500 hours of submitted footage into a mere 90 minutes – just a blink of the Earths eye really.

To begin with i was wanting not to like it, but come the end i was won over. Out of all this mashed up diffuseness something cogent got produced. Although I wonder how much actual directing input Kevin MacDonald did to it. It looks more like a cut and paste collaboration, the chopped up product of countless hours of endless editing – rather than something that’s been singularly created.

Question is, would selective clicking on any YouTube vids on any day of the year produce the same result? No, cus this is more of a polished product. But watching a load of randomised clips would probably seem as arbitrary as this film feels. And the effect would feel similar: trawling in too much information just makes the net of your attention go saggy.

I might watch this again one day (Unless they come up with another life in another day next year)

At the end – 2 minutes before midnight – there’s a girl in a car bemoaning the fact that “I spent the whole day waiting for something great to happen….all day long nothing really happened…i want people to know that i’m here…. i don’t want to cease to exist”

“I don’t want to cease to exist”. As long as you’re seen on YouTube, you can pretend you don’t. If you get my drift.

Dir: Kevin MacDonald, England

7/10

Into Great Silence (2005)

If watching monks in white hooded robes knelt down in deep contemplative prayer is your thing this is your film.

I’ve done the Carmelites (in No Greater Love) Now its the Carthusians. The strictest form of contemplative life in the Christian world. Carthusians are hard-core.

This film follows a similar template to No Greater Love. The daily doings are closely observed. The daily beings are carefully observed. All that being still. Being at prayer. Being at Bible.

It’s more beautifully filmed than No Greater Love. Attempts to be more transcendent. Time is slow motioned, stilled, distilled. As in those motes of dust falling through shards of sun light caught in corners; or the white hand towels being gently fluttered by small wind through open window; or a bead of rain hung suspended from a rim; or the steam rising from an ordinary cup of tea.; or that bowl of fruit framed like a Dutch Masters still-life.

I’m typing this as i watch. There’s time enough to type. You fill this film with your own thoughts. As a way of filling its long tracts of silence in with some kind of active engagement. (I wrote over a 1,000 words while watching!)

The Silence even when small and intimate – gets to seem full, and enriching. Silence as white as the snow falling on this Alpine mountain monastery. With a solitary bell tolling. Can’t get better silence than that. And by holding shots longer and stiller, by keeping the camera static, Gröning sanctifies the sense of time being lived consciously, as an act of consecration.

There’s no interviews with monks. Merely close ups of them stood silently to camera. A good decision not to allow them to speak, keep them nameless, anonymous. No ego can poke through then. No tiny personality to mess up the clear pure stream of silence with thick thought.

This film felt bigger than No Greater Love. I don’t question this going Into Great Silence. Silence feels beneficent, beneficial – irrespective of the religious wrappings its trapped up in. No Greater Love made me feel judgmental about the cloistered solitary life of the nuns; their justifications about why they did it, their small fallible human personalities flapped helplessly out, trying to make (no) sense of God (yer man) This film is better at revealing the sheer beauty of being – when it is simply allowed to silently be.

Into Great Silence feels less like a documentary and more like an immersive experience into the Natural world. The sounds surrounding the monastery as necessary as the silence being cultivated inwardly by the monks. Or put the other way: a natural world in which the monks co-exist as a silently occurring element. They are no more important than the rain falling, and no less necessary than the wind blowing through those white hand towels.

You could easily edit the “religious” silence out (all that monotonous chanting for example). Still leave oodles of secular silence to go around.

Silence isn’t religious. Silence isn’t Carthusian. Silence isn’t Christian. Silence isn’t Godly. Silence just is. Here with everybody. Where ever or whatever you are. That’s where this film was getting me too.

Dir:Philip Gröning, Germany/Switzerland

7.5/10

Near the end, the sound of those whooping monks on snowboards, laughing and having fun – a transmission of pure human brotherly joy!

Alexandra (2007)

Grandma Alexandra (Galina Vishnevskaya) looks fed up in that pic. She’s got the whole of Mother Russia on her back – so is needing to walk much Great Suffering out of her tired legs.

She’s gone to see Dennis (Dennis?!) her army officer grandson, where he’s making war in the Chechen Republic. Whys she there? I mean, how credible is this? Why is she allowed to be there? Why is she allowed to wander around the front line faffing her fingers at the bored border guards? This situation seems like a contrived set-up of Sukurov’s to facilely juxtapose women as nurturers against the bad boys (men) of war.

It’s soon turned into one of those films where questioning plot plausibility becomes irrelevant – cus there is no plot. Nothing very interesting happens. And nothing very interesting is said. She gets shown around the dusty hot base, the dirty combat vehicles. Now she’s examining their shiny equipment. She’s brusque, dismissive. Seen it all, done it all. “All” meaning all the suffering already. All the suffering these bored boys are too insensitive – or desensitized – to suffer, with all this impersonalised shooting off of these weapons of destruction they do.

So she’s wandering about the camp mumbling and muttering to herself like some grumpy old Mother Archetype. Its “Alexandra Nikolaevna” this and “Alexandra Nikolaevna” that (thought that only happened to characters in Tolstoy novels). Keeps needing to sit down cus tired. More than likely made tired; by the moral torpor shes witnessing – as accentuated by the drained out greeny gray the film is being filtered through.

“What do you actually want? I don’t understand you” says Unit Commander. I don’t understand her either.  And its hard not to feel disengaged by all this gruff antipathy she’s wearily trudging around the camp with. They can’t help it – the poor lambs; they’re just being soldiers. Making war and killing people is what soldiers do. Even if they are only little lads. If you don’t like being there – go away!

And she’s gone. Leaves as disgruntled/ crotchety/ lonely/ dismayed (take your pick) as she came. Mind you, there’s been a big granny love-in at the train departure; reinforcing how instantly, easily, connective womenfolk can be together. Because they – the grannies, (whether Russian or Chechen) represent humankinds best, possibly – only – hope against war (I doubt Sukurov meant anything as trite as that – but its as much thought as i want to give this film for now)

Dir: Alexandr Sukurov

4.5/10

O’ Horten (2007)

Watched this in the summer and was bored by it. Lets try again.

Odd Horten. A 67 year old pipe smoking train driver about to retire. Lights up pipe. Taciturn. Sucks on pipe. Reticent. Puffs on pipe. Expressionless.

Has he got a daft sense of humour? No. A wacky hobby? No. A pervy sex life? No. Has he got any inner life at all? Er, no.

The lighting and puffing of this pipe. Is about as interesting as Odd is going to get.

The acting is deliberately doggedly dull. The actor is doggedly dull too. Too dull. Distinct lack of oddness.

I need some quirk. Eventually some quirk comes. A dry kind of daftness.

“All my friends jumped but not me. And now its too late” laments Odd. “It seems most things come too late in life”.

Well, its never too late. To make that (ski) jump.

He jumped (of course)

Maybe I’ve only watched this cus its a Norwegian film. And it’s December. And i needed to see some lonely snowy winter.

What was this film? A tribute to the Everyman – or in this case a Norwegian Nobody.

It fell as flat as Bent Hamers other film, that misfiring dud Kitchen Stories.

A lot of pipe smoking in that too.

Dir: Bent Hamer, Norway

4.5/10