Silent Light (2007)

A remarkable film. As remarkable now as when I first saw it 10 years ago.

I’m not going to read any online reviews. I’ll just go with my immediate response.

How did the director Carlos Reygadas get such close access to this Mennonite community in Mexico? How did he get the members of the community to act? And how did he get them to act so sensitively, so intimately, so convincingly?

This film feels like a fly on the wall drama documentary. It feels like an entirely faithful and utterly authentic depiction of the Mennonite way of life. Not that I’d want to live the Mennonite way of life. But I feel like I’ve been given a thorough immersion into how their world is, given a profound insight into how their life is lived.

The father doesnt want to tell his son (Johan) what to do. God will guide him.

And Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr) needs Gods guidance. The adultery he is committing is profoundly conflicting his soul, his very being.. He’s in love with Marianne (Maria Pankratz)

Johan and Marianne’s extra-marital affair is impossible to keep hidden given the close-knit community they both live in. Johanns wife Esther (Miriam Toews) knows about it. Johan feels guilt. Marianne feels guilt. But it seems there is nothing they can do to stop themselves from loving one another. They have been chosen. Their love is some kind of fateful communion they can do nothing to ignore.

Esther is torn to shreds. She is in the car with Johan driving through the rain. ‘Just being next to you was the pure feeling of being alive. I was part of the world. Now I am separated from it’ she says. ‘I feel the same’ her husband says.

And now comes one of the most heart-wrenching scenes of despair I’ve ever seen in a film. She runs out in the rain to this tree.

The utter total despair of the suffering that is breaking her heart overwhelms her, kills her.

Johan has to go and find her, this wife of his that he has killed via the love he has transferred to another woman.

Marianne and Johan must face up to the Mortal Sin they have committed.

And yet what happens is this.

Laid out in her coffin, the sinned against wife Esther, transcendentally awakens, and as if from the higher more ennobled realm of the Spiritual World, forgives Marianne, and even thanks her.

This is a very long, very slow, film. There is no expressed acting going on, emotions are muted, damped down, inhibited. The central drama is withheld well within. You have to tune in very carefully, very sensitively, to all the subtle shifts of internal torment and suffering.

You will have to go into an internal state of suffering yourself (at the sheer boredom and lack of external stimulating interest) to get the most illumination from this film.

Not a film to be entered into superficially, or watched with a noisy distracted lazy attention.

Silent light requires absorption through a silent mind.

Dir: Carlos Reygadas, Mexico

8/10

Ten (2002)

The whole of this film takes place within a car being driven around Tehran by Mania Akbari. The Ten of the title refers to the 10 conversations she has with whoever is sitting next to her in the passenger seat.

The first conversation is with her real life son (more or less playing himself I suppose)

Actually ‘conversation’ doesn’t describe what transpires between them. One long  – overly long in my opinion – bout of bickering is what it is. He’s trying to (mis) understand why she’s left his dad. She gets into heated exchanges with him as if he were an adult rather than what he actually is – a confused and angry 10 year old boy. The dashcam is fixed on the boys face, wanting to focus one-sidely on his POV, and run you through the gamut of his over-reactive shouty distress. To begin with I was beguiled by how naturalistically and emotively expressive he was; but after 17 minutes of argumentative shouting and helpless handwaving I wanted both him, and his facelessly agitated mother, to shut up and be quiet.

This boy – her querulous son – takes up 4 of the 10 interactions and after the third one I’d had more than enough of their circular fractious bickering.

The other passengers – 4 women – splurge forth confessionals about their troubles and travails re men with Akbari as a sisterly agony aunt.

This film is supposedly giving some kind of intimate insight into the plight and predicament of Iranian woman. Maybe it is, but I couldn’t see how the concerns being expressed could be generalised to women living outside this exclusively Islamic, oppressively male-centric, culture.

One of the passengers picked up is a street prostitute. Akbari fakes being ‘interested’ in the prostitutes way of life. The prostitute laughs and sniggers her off. The prostitute isn’t given a face. We only see Akbari’s face smiling sinlessly (and slightly embarrassedly)

Mania Akbari is a beautiful woman. And she makes this film just about watchable.

But now here comes that whiny son of a brat of hers. Best jump out the car before they start their boring bickering at one another again.

Dir: Abbas Kiarostami, Iran

6/10

Things to Come (2016)

That is Madame Chazeaux (Isabelle Huppert) being driven by Monsieur Chazeaux. She is upset for 3 or possibly 4 reasons. Reason 1: She’ll never see her holiday home in Normandy again. Reason 2: Her ageing pest of a mother is depressed and possibly dying in a care home. Reason 3: Her books on academic philosophy are no longer going to be published. And reason 4: The Monsieur Chazeaux driving has left her for a younger woman.

The having of reasons are important as both her and him are teachers of the importance of having reasons to explain (or excuse) the best ways to behave (They’re both Philosophy Professors)

He’s been her husband for 25 years has her Heinz Chazeaux.

But now, apparently, she is to be dispensed with, traded in for this much more desirable younger model (who we never meet)

Her depressed mother (Edith Scob) is also another calamity to be burdened by.

Her depressed mother seems to have given up the will to live.

And therefore dies (rather too conveniently for my liking)

Her mother was a vain and conceited former model cum minor actress.

Her daughter Nathalie has made something significantly seriously committed of her life (something her shallow mother tritely failed to do)

But so quickly little Nathalie, or Madame Cadeaux, erstwhile Professor of Philosophy, owner of a seemingly respectable middle-class bourgeois life – has been dispossessed of all her safe certainties, her professed securities.

She should be unravelling with all this heartbreak material being thrown under her to break her down. But being a Philosophy teacher she’s able to be philosophic:  ‘To think…my kids are gone, my husband left me, my mom died. I’ve found my freedom. Total freedom. I’ve never experienced it. It’s extraordinary’ says Nathalie.

She’s said all of that to her former student Fabien (Roman Kolinka). He’s invited her to the house in the mountains he shares with his coterie of radical activists.

The radical activists read radical texts, write philosophical manifestos, think radical thoughts, do radical actions (like smoking dope).

‘What do you think about questioning authorship?’ asks one young female radical activist (while washing the dishes)
‘Me? Nothing’ replies Madame Cadeaaux
‘Come on – a philosophy teacher!‘ retorts the young radical activist.
‘You know I think I’m too old for radicality. I’ve done that. I’ve been there before’ says Madame Cadeaux rather resignedly.

Her beloved Fabien is even challenging his ex philosophy teacher on how actively and publically engaged her private form of philosophy is.

She feels affronted. Dismayed. Has packed her bags and left the following day.

In a way though, in her own self-sufficiently stoic way, she has made her actions and thoughts compatible. She hasn’t compromised her integrity. She’s been able to carry on. She hasn’t fallen apart. She’s used her inner fortitude, relied on a reserve of rational resolve, to help her get through, to survive to live another day, to still look forward to the things to come – like a grandchild, in the future.

I think that’s the takeaway message you’re meant to come away with after watching this. But I didn’t entirely buy into it. I didn’t find Nathalie as a character particularly convincing or appealing. That might be something to do with the way she was written. Or it might be more about the way she was performed. Isabelle Huppert was OK doing the scuttling around being a mundane wife and mother, but seemed, or looked, too vacuous as a credible teacher of philosophy. There didn’t seem to be that much going on in her head other than being preoccupied by mundane irritating distractions (e.g. her pesky mother, the mothers pesky cat)

Dir: Mia Hansen-Løve, France

6.5/10

PS: And now comes news that Edith Scob, Nathalie’s depressed dying mother in this film, actually died today aged 81. What a fateful irony.

Suntan (2016)

Kostis (Makis Papadimitriou) is a fat, balding, ugly, middle aged doctor marooned on a Greek holiday island in winter. He’s a lonely morose outsider. Then the summer and the ravers  arrive. Now is his chance to be in with the in crowd and have some fun and frolics.

He gets himself embroiled with young blonde raver Anna (Elli Trigkou)

She rolls over his podgy pud of a bod one hot afternoon. He does a quick squirt up and out.

This means Kostis is in love. Well, in Kostis’s lonely old infatuated head it does. But not for Anna. That was just her having a bit of fatuous fun with him, amusing her lazy self.

She didn’t mean anything by it.

But his puppy-dog infatuation with her turns into lovelorn pathetic obsession.

She’s soon had enough of him hassling and harassing her.

As far as she’s concerned its Game over. He has to understand that. He now has to Get Lost and crawl back to his rightful place in Loserdom.

But he’s misunderstood the rules of this game, not having played it for many a year (or maybe never at all) And he doesn’t want to get lost.

Sadly and pathetically, even tragically, he doesn’t get that the love he feels for her is not the love she had to offer.

He can’t accept that he’s been so causally tossed aside, so heartlessly dispensed with.

And now he has become a saddo loser, an ugly fat figure of pathetic ridicule.

The humiliation and the rejection hurts. He can’t bear the pain any longer. So he does this.

He drugs and drags her back to his surgery. She’s laid out on the table as if like a corpse on a mortuary slab.

Being the good and dutiful doctor he has failed at being, he starts to tend to the wounds he’s inflicted on her.

But it will probably be to no avail.  There is no way back. For him (and maybe for her also – if he’s done her in) The damage has been irreparably done.

This was a sad watch the first time I saw it. Sad, but touching a painful nerve in me somewhere. I felt for him. The rejection and humiliation of the loveless loner guy. I could empathise. But this second watch wasn’t quite so affecting. The whole drugging and dragging her off at the end seemed ludicrously contrived. I still didn’t like how casual and cruel Anna’s indifference to him was. But also I wasn’t so enamoured with Kostis as a character. Although there was plenty of podgy flesh on his frame, there wasn’t enough meat on his bones. And not enough blood in his veins. And not enough spine in his backbone. A flabby adolescent boy acting out, or pretending to be, not only a hapless doctor,  but a hopelessly immature man.

Dir: Argyris Papadimitropoulos, Greece

6/10 Not one to keep, or watch again.

Hannah (2017)

A film you can – and I did – fast forward quite easily through all the slow bits and not lose any sense of what is going on. Basically, because there’s not a lot going on. Or rather, everything that is significant, that is necessary, is going on inside Hannahs (Charlotte Rampling) head, hidden behind her hooded eyes, trapped despairingly within her ashamed and alienated psyche.

There are a lot of slow bits. And very slow bits. And not many talky bits. And next to no likeable bits at all. That fast forward button on VLC is indispensable for turgid films (like this) with their torpidly frigid Hannahs (like Charlotte Rampling)

Hannah (both the film and the character) is mostly made up of boring bits strung together to convey a prevailing mood of internalised isolated desolation.

Hannah doesn’t have a voice. Not one that will willingly articulate her anguished despair. Therefore she doesn’t speak. She merely sits shut up inside her wrap around shroud of heavy dislocated silence.

Here is Hannah looking at her – or Charlotte Ramplings – most miserable depressed best (or worst)

I think every time I read an Anita Brookner novel from now on I’ll be casting Charlotte Rampling in my miserable minds eye as one of Brookners lost and loveless loners; Rampling is the stoic personification of Brooknerian dejection, Brooknerian desolation, Brooknerian everything totally despairing.

The shame and the humiliation and the rejection that Hannah is undergoing comes unbearably to life in this breakdown scene in a public toilet.

Yes, such shame, such humiliation. To feel so cast out. To feel so utterly rejected.

And to look through the iron railings of your despair and know there is absolutely nothing you can do to redeem your reputation, or salve your unsaveable soul.

As far as the world is concerned you’re a goner.

You’re like the beached whale Hannah is here disconsolately a witness towards.

You are a helpless, hopeless wretch. You have been rent asunder.

Seems like most people have not liked this film much. Found it far too dispiriting, depressing. And it is depressing, dispiriting. It is abject misery from baleful beginning to anguished end.

I can’t make my mind up what Hannah decided to do (or didn’t do) at the end there. But if were her I probably would have.

This is a film I won’t be deleting. Even though I didn’t enjoy it. I might need it at some despairingly desperate time in the future. When life feels like it has gone way way beyond mere amusement or trifling enjoyment. When life is falling abjectly, down the hurthole of some unfathomable abyss.

Dir: Andrea Pallaoro, Italy

6/10

Frontier of the Dawn (2008)

Yet another film of Philippe Garrels with his mutli-rumple haired son Louis as Francois in the lead role. He’s fallen in love with Carole (Laura Smet) falling in love with him.

Well, she is a bit of dish. She only had to capture him with this smile while he was photoing her – and he was automatically snapped into her seductive clutches.

She’s a married celebrity actress whose film director husband is away long term in Hollywood. Feeling neglected, she’s ripe for some romantic lovering.

Its difficult to gauge how serious this love affair is given how adolescent she is about it.

We don’t have much to go on. They keep saying they love one another but we don’t see much evidence to substantiate what will eventually turn out to be – their fatal attraction.

Carole gets into playing the Love Law of Windshield Wipers. She consciously flirts with another man at a party to deliberately test Francoise; see how much she can wound him into jealous possession. She wants to make him hurt, see him suffering.

(The Law of Windshield Wipers indicates that the more one lover wants, the more the other lover has to withhold and pull away; with the proviso that this push-pull dynamic is then reversed)

Eventually, Carole realises she’s gone far enough in tormenting the poor lad, and feels the suffering of what she loves rebounded back within herself.

Carole, it turns out, is more of a hurtee than a hurter; bi-polared up to her be-brittled brink. Insecure as fuck. Desperate as hell. Well, she has to be, because she ends up in a mental asylum strapped into a straight-jacket having electro-convulsive therapy. And all because Francois has left her for another woman.

None of this is really making much sense. It all feels far too fraught and melodramatic. It isn’t at all clear, or properly motivated, why she’s going into mega breakdown mode. What is it about Francois that she’s finding too unbearable to be without?

And why has she now gone and killed herself? Anyway, I don’t care. It all smacks of self-induced, self-indulgent, neurosis if you ask me.

But she hasn’t finished with Francois quite yet. Even though she’s dead. She’s going to haunt him through his subconscious yearnings. She’s going to torment him again. Appear in mirrors, to taunt him to come back to her (in her afterlife)

And he seems powerless to resist. Even though he’s about to get married and be set up in conventional life as a husband and a dad. Carole’s demonic love is about to possess him – and take him away.

He’s just jumped out the window.

They will be re-united at last (and forever more)

This hasn’t worked at all. There is next to no character development. There is nothing about their relationship that is either credible or convincing. All the silly supernaturnal baloney in the third part beggars belief.

What a sloppy, superficial, film this has been.

Dir: Philippe Garrel, France

4/10

A Flame in my Heart (1987)

Mercedes (Myriam Mézières) is an actress with a serious problem: she’s addicted to love. And compelled by the lust in her love to keep having sex with unsuitable men.

Like Johnny. Her North African lover cum stalker cum abuser. Ten times she’s tried to split up with him. And ten times he keeps snaking back, pestering her obsessively for sex, wanting to own her love as his own possession.

I can see why she wants rid of him. He’s a controlling oily oik. But although she keeps saying no, he keeps forcing his way into her face, her flat, her fanny

At this point in the film (about a third of the way through) I was really finding his obsessive controlling abuse of her quite unbearable.

The only way she could shake him off was to move into a hotel. But he still found her, and is knocking on the door, screaming abuse at her, telling her what a ‘salope’ (slut) he thinks she is.

And then, miraculously, he disappears; from her life, from the film. We never hear or see him again (thank god)

But then its Mercedes turn to become obsessive stalker. She starts giving a bloke in a suit the eye on the train. He gets off, and she gets off too, follows him through the subway, her stilettos click clicking in hot pursuit. She lures him back to her hotel room. And is stood up against him in her fur coat, stilettos, stockings. She wants him, the jammy bugger. How come gorgeous slutty women in stockings and stilettos never followed me off public transport lusting to get inside my pants? And he’s not even what you would call a stud. Just a boring journalist she seems to have this inexplicable needy immediate want for.

Mercedes: Are you going to love me?
Pierre: I don’t know. Maybe. We’ll see. Yes, I think so. And you?
Mercedes: Oh, yes.
Pierre: How do you know?
Mercedes: Because you kissed me between my legs

This is Mercedes problem, maybe even her pathology: the need she has to live her life between her legs. The absolute and total and all consuming desire to be eaten up inside her cunt. It seems she has to have the hot flame in her heart permanently lit by the fuck fuse in her fanny.

Otherwise she goes to pieces, to pot, goes potty, starts munching cornflakes. With the fuck in her fanny unused, and unfulfilled, the flame in her heart it seems, automatically atrophies, extinguishes.

She can’t cope, can’t exist. Her love (her lover, her Pierre) is not there. What will she do? What can she do? Except eat more cornflakes.

Oh, and sit on the sofa all day staring at the TV. Until that gets too mind numbingly boring and she has to restimulate herself in the places she knows, and loves, herself best.

Wanking herself into exquisite oblivion (possibly remembering, and fantasizing, about this dopey dork of a lover Pierre) But after the evanescent ecstasy of that has passed on, passed away, what next? Emptiness and loneliness again. Back to dry cornflakes again.

Anyway, Pierre has eventually returned. And she’s jumping all over him in her fur coat with nothing on underneath, totally starkers.

Yes, she is sick mate. Sick for you. Sick for love. Sickened by love and its (your) absence thereof.

Maybe this could be recalibrated as: sex is her sickness and love is her malady, her madness. Sex is her passion, but also her poison.

She’s lost her job as a theatre actress. Couldn’t remember her lines any more. So she’s off to a dirty dive to do a different kind of performing: strip tease in front of glassy-eyed goggling Arabs and Africans.

They silently stare at her doing this with a stuffed monkey.

He’s not a real monkey. And that’s not real tongues going on. Well, I don’t think the monkey is getting any pleasure out of it. But she seems to be enjoying fucking it up its arse, riding ontop of its floppy dong, having its rubberised plastic mouth rubbed up hard between her legs. Pierre happens to be spectating this fucky monkey malarkey at the back; but eventually, too embarrassed, he slips away. She was enjoying it far too much for his (and our) liking.

But she’s not embarrassed, far from it. Simulating hard-core sex with a toy monkey in front of a gaggle of gormless immigrants is nothing to be ashamed of.

She desires for her life to be in a state of acute aliveness. Not for her the loveless boredom of a chronic cornflake existence. She needs to have the love in her heart pumped up to hard on full out passion.

And the lover she loves should be equally as totally committed, absolutely obsessed (with, and about, her)

She’s got it bad alright. This madness she calls love. Although I can’t for the life of me see why she’s projecting all this mad passion on Pierre: he’s a sapless suit of a dried out mechanical middle man. I wouldn’t have thought he’s got any spunky spontaneous joy going on between his legs to give her. His centre of attention is all crammed up inside his dead headed cranium.

At this point, I was even vaguely wishing that oiksome arab Johnny would oil his sneaky snaky way back between her legs again. At least he was able to throw her flame about wildly and make her burn vividly back in to necessary life.

And, I think she’s realises, walking around the exotically and erotically charged Egyptian streets, that she’s barking her love up the wrong deadwood tree with this Pierre. Or maybe she’s simply become barking. As in quietly devastated, serenely desolated, by how the flame in her heart will soon be snuffed out through lack of vital, or genuine, reciprocation.

I don’t know how morally and mindly disintegrated she has become, and will continue to be, come the end. Maybe she will recover her (sexual) senses. Maybe her erotic passion has still more flames to burn. Maybe her cunt will find the right cock to heart with.

This film hasn’t had particularly favourable online reviews. Its been called a ‘ludicrous tale’, and Mézières’ overheated performance an embarrassment. I suppose that’s referring to the sofa wank and the monkey rumpy pumpy.

I can sort of see its not a particularly good film. There’s plenty that is cringily embarrassing about it. And yet I liked it. Probably because I like Myriam Mézières. There’s a kind of ugly vulnerability about her. Her mouth is a bit too full of her teeth, her smiles flop out lopsided, her voice makes what she says sound ungainly, look awkward. But she’s sexy as fuck. She exudes erotic appeal with every lurchful lust of her body. The simulated sex with the monkey was transgressively filthy. There’s something dirty about the desire she exhibits, and yet it also seems so natural in its playfulness, in its purity.

She’s a naughty girl is Mercedes (or do I mean Myriam Mézières?) A bad girl. A sex addicted slutty sad girl. And Myriam Mézières manages, for me anyway, to enrich Mercedes cunt with an emotional core. She’s the reason why I will no doubt be giving this film several repeat watches in the future.

Dir: Alain Tanner, Switzerland/France

It gets 7/10 purely on Myriam Mézières being Myriam Mézières.

Paterson (2016)

I’d quite liked this when I first saw it a couple of years ago. But this 2nd watch didn’t do it for me. In fact I gradually got more and more irritated by it.

First source of irritation is this ugly mutt

He’s called Marvin and he’s supposed to be an object of morose mirth and deadpan drollery. But he’s just a slobbery dog who is getting paid far too much loving attention.

By his owner, Laura. She thinks the sun shines out of Marvins dirty fat arsehole.

Paterson (Adam Driver) is less enamoured, but he’s going along with walking the shitty thing because, well, its his wifes dog, and he’ll do anything it seems to make his lovely wife content.

His wife, is the second, and perhaps the biggest source of irritation in this whole film. The Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani playing Laura seems mismatched as Patersons’ adoring wife, and miscast as a quirky kooky oddball. Its barely believable that she’s shacked up with this lanky lugubrious bus driver.

And the contrived idiosyncracies of her kookiness fall flat, feel false. seem hardly credible. All the business with the obsessive black and white interior design, the cheddar cheese and sprout supper pie, the compulsive cupcake making.  Its not daftly charming. Or even cutely endearing. Its mostly mildly moronic.

Here is Paterson trying not to vomit out the cheedar cheese and sprout pie (which of course, his nutty fruitcake wife is tucking into with exxagerated gobs of gusto)

All of this batty behaviour would be believable in a dotty old dear, but not in a young woman who looks as lovely, and as cooly super-sexily viable, as Golshifteh Farahani. Maybe she’s suffering from some hidden Persian personality defect like borderline dopey American disorder. Or maybe she’s suffering from chronic lack of self-esteem. Or maybe she’s simply in the wrong film.

Here she is trying to console Paterson. Slobbery mutt Marvin has just eaten her husbands poems dull doggrel.

And here is glum Paterson looking across at the dumb dog (staring at us) lugubriously contemplating whether to kick the mutts butt.

‘I don’t like you’ says Paterson to the dog. That makes two of us (me included) Marvin merely squats there with slobbery tongue hanging out of his mushy fat face.

But Paterson won’t do anything to Marvin. Because Paterson will disengage himself from any active service with anger. Paterson does not getting irritated. Paterson does not do livewire act-out expressive feelings. Paterson is a poet with an uncapital p. Patersons job as a poet is to listen and to observe, and to scribble his listenings and observings into his little poets notebook. Therefore, Paterson will simply accept what has happened with a borderline bored air of blank impassivity.

Which brings me to the third irritation: Adam Driver as Paterson. He’s being directed to play a boring bus driver doing his hum drum day writing his ho hum poems, and all flattened inside a dulled down detachment of lugubrious docility. He is the epitome of an everyday everyman boring bloke. Who for some unfathomable reason, his gorgeous Persian wife dotes over, and wants to wrap up within her dopey half baked notions of domestic bliss. I didn’t believe in any of it. I didn’t see marital harmony. I saw mundane marital mismatch and mild mental health melt-down. I mean, either Paterson is going to have to kill that dog or he’s going to have to suffocate his smother-lovering wife. He definitely shouldn’t give up his day job. No more Paterson poems – please! Just drive the bleedin bus – stop pestering us with all your drivelling doggrel.

Oh yes, the fourth irritation is with Jim Jarmusch the director. I’ve had more than enough of his limp and lame Aki Kaurismaki affectations. Deadpan drollery only really works if your half hearted heart is in the right kind of desolate place. Like the frozen forests of deepest darkest Finland.

Dir: Jim Jarmusch, US

So, from a initially promising 7/10 this drops down disappointingly to 5/10. And also gets kicked, along with Marvin the mutts butt, into the delete bin.