Change Your Image
alex-187
Reviews
Idioterne (1998)
A real masterpiece
This must be a real masterpiece for I like it a lot and, speaking about Von Trier, this is the first time I do. Having also seen recently Vinterberg's Festen the differences between the two Dogma directors are evident. While Vinterberg is rather explicit, Von Trier's greater gift is to lead the attention astray more than once distracting the viewer from where the director finally means to aim. Von Trier manages a few times to have you think that he's missing the point, forcing you to concentrate more attention on the screen. And the final lesson is: too strong are our bindings with our culture, with our education, with our family and neighbourhood traditions, too strong for us to be able to betray them (and us) behaving differently from how we're expected. Only few can reach the goal of effective freedom from bourgeois chains, for only few can see their vacuity and even less are those brave enough to break them definitively. An apology of revolution? Or anarchy? Or, to put it more easily, a story about the distance usually running between intention and action? However, a good film from the idea to the final result.
La vida es silbar (1998)
A wonderful love letter from a Cuban director to his own country
A love letter, sincere though not lacking criticisms, from the director to his country. I love the style of this Cuban director whose work I see for the first time though this is not his first one. In it three stories evolve, while a narrator decides the sakes of the characters, with the whistling acting as a trait d'union working as the image of a much wished freedom of expression. Original is the idea of depicting as orphans all the characters, maybe with the intention of suggesting to the world that Cuba starts suffering for lack of affection, because of the isolation she is forced to, by the manouevres of those who believe the capital is more important than the people. And while this image might seem too tender with Cuba, not so is the story of Julia, a woman who faints any time she hears the word "sexo", and of Dr. Fernando who shall show her, causing a comic carnage of passers-by, that a lot are the words which aren't willfully heard on the island. Then there's the story of choices to be done: she is a dancer who has to choose between him, dancing, God, orienting herself amongst a myriad of overridings and troubles. Eventually there's Elpidio, who dreams of a mother by the name of Cuba, has a true declaration of love tattooed on his back, then feels betrayed and has the tattoo burnt. ("Nobody is perfect", he reassures an ugly beggar at the end of the film, attempting to find a consolation statement for both) refusing a possible escape to another place and another love, no matter what. The final meeting of the characters in an unusually deserted Plaza de la Revoluciòn is, like most of the film, a mix of melancholy and hope for a future with more freedom and opportunity.
Force majeure (1989)
Thrilling and thought-provoking
This is what it takes to spend the night with a rodent devouring your ugly, dirty occidental conscience. Would you leave family, study, anything to save a friend's life in a faraway land? A strong look at youth, at the clash between the wish of experiencing everything and that of avoiding any responsibility. The film is great in depicting the inner struggle of both the boys involved, never giving the audience any assurance about who's going to leave and save a life and who's going to give up. Thrilling and thought-provoking.
Hello Hemingway (1990)
A great film starring an Oscar-deserving teenage actress
It's a pity that third world films don't get a distribution the way anything coming from Western Europe and Northern America gets. Anytime I leave a cinema after having seen a masterpiece such as this, I got the feeling that the distribution guys to be able to let us see any picture shot in the dominant world are depriving us of a lot of wonderful films they are too absentminded to sit and watch (and if they did, could they understand them anyway?). Laura de la Uz, the teenage protagonist in this film, is deserving of an Oscar (if the Oscar ever meant anything to anybody) and I'm sure that whoever got a prize that year in the best female main character category robbed her. While I'm writing, it's 1999, the film is dated 1990 and my heart aches at the thought that she could have starred in more films or, even worse, she could have made no fortune with her acting and could now be a forgotten school teacher or bartender. Pérez himself, who has shot only four films so far and whose "La vida es silbar" is almost as good as this, is a great director, as deserving as that other great Latin-American Solanas.
Epidemic (1987)
The clash between the happy beginning and the cruent ending does not appeal to me. Thumb down
So what? Maybe we should come to the conclusion that he/she who teases evil is destined to be hit by it. But I don't like this film. I didn't like its joking evolution and disapprove the final, never-ending, gore scene where the young hypnotized girl's sufferance, a prologue to everybody else's, is depicted in a hard-hitting monologue. It reminded me of a similar scene seen in the contorted, convolved "Baby of Macon" (the film that signed the end of my love for Greenaway) and I hated it, notwithstanding the evident difference, that being a scene of external violence while this is more a self-inflicted violence scene. The only appreciable side of the film is the grainy black and white used: too few, ain't it? And as far as I found "Breaking the waves" terribly boring either, the score is 2 thumbs-down out of 2 for Von Trier.
Viskningar och rop (1972)
Full of good sides, but Bergman's pictures always are
A film portraying four different attitudes towards death. Entirely happening inside a house which could be identified like the body keeping the different souls of the actors within, the film depicts: the dying "realistic" one, the beautiful "cheating" one, the frigid "paranoiac" one; and the "motherly" maid.
Nice are the dissolving close-ups accompanying the portraits of the four actresses which end up in blood red full screens like fresh-cut wounds. Full of significance is the scene where the dead sister comes back to life. Full of realism is the ending. Full of good things, but Bergman's films always are.
La vita è bella (1997)
Cinema has never been Benigni's best activity: this film stands as a confirmation
Worrying enough, Benigni shows once more he's one of the greatest theatre comedians around, but hasn't a great feeling with the big screen. He hasn't shot a lot, actually, nevertheless I can remember but one really good film by great Roberto ("Tu mi turbi", that is), while "La vita è bella", though widely hyped, is no better than "Il piccolo diavolo". The film is a comedy, though tragic. Or a tragedy, though comic. God, my head aches! It is an appreciable, though missed, attempt to mix the tragedy of the German WWII lagers, with the comic efforts of a father trying to save his child's ingenuity from the worldly ugliness. Two intentions too noble to fit in a bare one-hundred minutes film which is heavy where it should be light and vice versa. Get back to theatre, Roberto, and don't worry: nobody's perfect.
Vor (1997)
After years of Russian films, I expected something deeper
After years and years of Russian films, I am used to expect stories deeper and richer than this. The wonderful interpretation shown by the child actor can't erase the poverty of the film as a whole. The film is the story of a six-year-old child, who's never seen his dead-in-war father, so that the only paternal images he has got are fleeting glimpses, courtesy of his childish fantasy. Looks like the child is the representation of the Russian people, wishing for a change to come and having to face the reality that the realization of your wishes not always results in the concrete the way you expected. The thief enters the child's life abruptly, treating him rudely, teaching him how to live by the muscle and showing interest only in the private parts (how right...) of the mother and in the valuables of the homes giving them hospitality in between their non-stop escaping from town to town, from train to train, from one burglary to the next one. The child is a masterwork of tenderness and shows a great acting capability, expressive in a way that Di Caprio shall never be able to equal in 40 more years of movie appearances. Along the way, though fascinated he shall never find a way neither to trust nor to comprehend that strange chap, so intrusive in his so far perfect mother-child relationship (mother herself is a psychiatric case for her loving a man, who's rather rough both to her and her child and who's not actually an example the kid should be shown), but shall surprise his own self (or maybe it was the underlying wish to see his mother smiling again) by calling him 'dad', while chasing the jeep carrying the thief ('twas time) and his peers to jail. Because of this betrayal, visions of his "real" father shall abruptly come to an end, mother shall die in a few days and his life shall continue in an orphanotrophy. The meeting with the thief years later shall take the now grown-up boy to the extreme consequences, using the gun that the thief had left him against the outlaw himself, who had shown a very short memory of the teen's mother and teased him about it.
Ta'm e guilass (1997)
One of the best films in the history of the big screen. Full stop
One of the best films in the history of the big screen. Full stop. A man, preparing to kill himself for reasons we shall never be told, is looking for help. He won't find any by the army, for no manifestation of strength shall be able to solve any problem permanently. Nor will he find help under the wings of religion, based as it is on faith, a principle too abstract to heal concrete suffering. Help will come, instead, from nature, its colors and smells. An old man, who shared the same unhappiness as a youngster, shall show the aspirant has-been that nothing deserves such an extreme decision: even the sight of a happy couple crossing the road can change your attitude towards life. Shot on the bare but wonderfully colored hills of Iran, which often recur in Kiarostami's environments, I felt dizzy looking at the scene where the protagonist tries to foresee his underlife by projecting his shadow under a fall of sand and stones unloaded from a camion: this scene alone is worth the Oscar!
Nerolio (1996)
It's hard to show anything shocking about Pasolini: Grimaldi didn't make it
A no-compromise film on the latest days of the most no-compromise Italian poet and filmmaker of the century. Maybe the first well-known artist to reveal his homosexuality in words and acts, the film examines the days of Pasolini's notoriety which gave him the possibility to do such things that anonymity would have denied him. We're introduced to his multiple fellatio in Sicily narrated about in his posthumous book "Petrolio", to his nightly hunts for "fresh flesh", to his irreconcileable relation with the critics, so often unable to see beyond their inhibited and bourgeois education, and with the wishing-to-be-published young writers, prone to lose their virginity to get a favourable recension. The film is heavily claustrophobic (most of it happening within the artist's home-studio, in his automobile and in the aspirant writer's small flat), just like the life of the artist, locked in the role of conscious victim living within a dumb culture, whose major wish is to normalize every personal and artistic expression. Contradictory enough, the same normalizing aim reigns in his relationship with his mother, to whom he reports fake criticisms to have her believe he's still in the favour of the critics and towards whom he has a fastidious guilty attitude for one past soft-core pedophiliac experience he had some time before. So far, so much has been written and told and seen about Pasolini, that hard is the task to whoever wished to shock the audience with images of and about him: I'm afraid Grimaldi didn't make it. And of the bigotry of the Italian culture (in those and these days) we were already aware.
Central do Brasil (1998)
The voyage of a child searching his own roots. A fairly poor film
In the Brasil of today where a color-tv is still something to be dreamed about and where the ability to read and write is available to the very few, a child loses his mother and is accompanied by an acid old lady in the voyage to reach his no-good long-lost alcoholist father. Along the road, both characters shall undergo a change in their attitude: the lady will realize that you can use (and abuse) the ignorant and the poor only for as long as you find yourself by the lucky side of the fence and the child shall learn how to tell the difference between your real goal and the mental picture you have of it. The film also does not forget to remind us of the sad condition of the Brazilian children (the old lady initially sells the child to an organization of organ-sellers) and adolescents as well (a teenager is shot and killed for having robbed a valueless object) and - the director hints - religion and prayer are the only things left to the Brazilian (say the whole Third World) masses today, though there's an abyss between religion (all the people are equal...) and the cruel reality (...but some are more equal than the others). To correctly judge the film, I can not help but compare "Central do Brasil" to Solanas' "El viaje": the latter is a masterpiece, while the former is nothing more than sufficient. If this was Berlin '98's Golden Bear, then the average quality of the films had to be fairly poor there.
La vie rêvée des anges (1998)
A beautiful film about two young girls struggling to find their place in the world
Two girls find themselves living in the same flat and having to struggle for earning their own living. Their two opposite points of view about it shall undermine their friendship roughly. While one of them is busy accepting any kind of occupation, realizing that each and every job is respectable in itself and that one has to do something to get something, the other one closes herself in her own solipsistic shell dreaming of her rich Prince Charming, although her dreams shall only push her down to the deepest of desperations and drive her farther and farther from the real world. I am never kind to the French directors but this time I must admit to be in front of a real masterpiece: this is a surprisingly good French answer to the genre of social films the English are so good at shooting.
Festen (1998)
A masterpiece: something like Bergman in disguise
I wish there were more pictures like this around. It is filmed in an unusual way, that makes it hard to compare it to previous pictures and therefore give an appropriate judgement. The use of the camera is unusual, being always present on the action site, always carried by hand, always digging within the characters souls in a way that ironically evokes a mix of Bergman and MTV's Real Life. Unusual but fit to such a story: a family reunited for the sixtieth birthday of the father, having to face its past of pedophilia and the present psychological consequences on the now-grown-up sons and daughters. Interesting is the right word, even though it did not deserve a full ten (I awarded it a 9) because, in my opinion, it suffers from the same problem John Cage's music has: the idea is stronger than the realization, so that what is on the screen is not as valuable as what the director had in his mind. But, maybe, a few other Vinterberg's films and I'll get used to his style and judge it better: starting from the upcoming Von Trier's "Idiots"
My Name Is Joe (1998)
Gets lost in the myriad of British "social" films
I must unwillingly give a thumbs down to this film. It isn't actually a delusion per se; It actually might be what people expect these days from a British director, but Loach can and must do better (and, in the past, has done), while this could be a nice "opera prima" for a debutante. For those wishing to have access to a real Loach's good film, I would advice to take "Riff-raff" back from the shelf. It might be ten years old but it's still ten times better either.