Ever since Drive, Ryan Gosling has become an object of fantasy. He is the perfect man, both good and bad, fragile and manly. The Place Beyond The Pines plays with this image, and reuses it from the very first scene. The movie opens on a close-up shot of Ryan's tattooed torso. The camera follows him, bare back, walking through a fun fair, in a scene that is a reversed strip-tease. The naked unknown guy puts on the attributes of his sexiness (a Metallica t-shirt and a red leather jacket). Exactly like in Drive, the style creates the character. The men are calling him, the girls are screaming his name. He throws his cigarette on the ground and straddles his bike. Of course he is a stuntman, and of course, even though he is not alone inside the stunt globe, he is Handsome Luke, the only one people want to see. During the first part of the movie, the real subject, and object, of the film is definitely Gosling's body, iconized just like James Dean's. After he discovers that he has a son from a fling, Luke decides to give up his way of life to take care of the child and the girl (Eva Mendes). But Romina already lives with Kofi ( Mahershala Ali) in his own house, and Kofi already takes care of her, whereas Luke doesn't have any money. Robin (Ben Mendelsohn) for whom Luke works as a mechanic, then talks him into robbing banks. Things are going well, until what the Ancient Greeks called hubris makes Luke feel overpowerful, and then things go wrong. The tormented soul is killed by a policeman (Bradley Cooper). The end. The icon dies. The myth is re-created. The movie would just be a pale copy of Drive if it ended here. Fortunately, it doesn't. Even though Gosling's presence haunts the rest of the film, it is the policeman that replaces him as the lead character. The antihero is dead, the hero takes his place. After his act of bravery, everyone in the media and in the police pays tribute to Avery Cross. But Avery has a wife and a son just like Luke did, and that burdens his conscience. The whole movie is based on a parallel between the two men's fates. After a fifteen-year ellipsis during which none of the characters has aged (except poor Eva Mendes), the third part of the film follows Avery's and Luke's sons. Avery has divorced his wife and given up his job to get into politics, and AJ, his son, comes to live with him. In his new highschool, AJ (whom you want to slap the whole time) meets Jason, Luke's son. Neither of them knows the link that unites their fathers. But the truth untold kills slowly, and inevitably comes out. The end of the movie is a reflection on family secrets, on the past that you try to evade but that returns anyway, on destiny that links people and repeats itself, whether you want it or not. It might be a little strained and artificial at times, but in the whole it makes an interesting movie. Besides, Mike Patton did the music. That alone should convince you to go and see the film. The soundtrack is great, and it gives the movie its beauty, both deep and threatening, both violent and sad. Derek Cianfrance's filmmaking also oscillates between mainstream and abstract, particularly in a forest scene shot at full speed where the colors of the trees and the light of the sun blurr into something almost experimental (let's remember that Stan Brakhage was Cianfrance's teacher). The film is in-between. I can't find better words to describe it. And this in-betweeness is more a success than a failure.
Reviews
6 Reviews
Hannah Arendt
(2012)
Intelligent movie and great performance
2 May 2013
Warning: Spoilers
The movie starts like a thriller. A man, walking alone in the night, is suddenly kidnapped by some men in a van. The man screams. The image is dark, except for the lights of the van which hurries toward us. We understand later on that the kidnappers were Mossad agents and that the man was Adolf Eichmann. This is 1960. Hanna Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) has been living in exile in New York with her husband (Axel Milberg) for twenty years. She is a well-known professor, she and her husband are a happy couple, she is surrounded by friends. After hearing the news of Eichmann's arrest, she convinces the New Yorker to send her to Jerusalem to cover the trial. The article that she ends up writing and that the New Yorker decides to publish is of course more than a mere journalist account, but a philosophical reflection on the origins of evil. Arendt's now famous theory is that Eichmann was not a monster nor an anti-Semite, but just a cog in the Nazis' infernal machine, unable to think and to feel empathy. This idea is what she called the banality of evil. In her essay, Arendt also denounces the collaboration of some Jews with the Nazis. Of course those ideas create a scandal among the American intelligentsia and the Jewish community around the world. People attack her without trying to understand her, and of course, as it is often the case, without even reading her. How can a Jew who experienced the concentration camps put herself in a nazi's shoes to try to explain his crimes? How can a Jew dare criticize other Jews? Many of her friends break off their relations with her. One of them, on his deathbed, asks her "don't you love your people?" and she answers that she can't love a people, she only loves her friends. Two visions conflict with each other, communitarianism against freedom of thought. The film is interesting in the way it shows this free thinking at work. Hanna Arendt, wonderfully played by Barbara Sukowa, is shown smoking in her apartment, sitting at her desk or in a sofa, lying on a couch, standing at the window. She is shown writing and thinking, and it's never boring. You can criticize the film for many things, but not for its dullness. You can criticize Margarethe von Trotta's academic filmmaking, especially when she uses flashbacks to evoke Arendt's relationship with Heidegger. You can criticize her partial perspective. She never questions her character, she makes Arendt a heroin, a sort of Robin Hood fighting for truth. Arendt's character is far from bland, but she has no contradictions, no gray areas. Except for the final speech to her students, Arendt's work is not really tackled, but this is not a film about a philosophical work, it is a mainstream film about a woman that von Trotta wants us to like. And we do. The film is a tribute. Von Trotta intelligently treats the historical dimension by inserting archive images of the trial. You see Eichmann in his glass cage, answering the judges' questions. You also see survivors testifying, and some Jews trying to justify themselves. Thus, except for one superfluous scene, the trial is not re-enacted, and this is for the best, because fiction cannot replace already existing images. You can criticize the film for its didactism, or praise it for its informative qualities. You can't criticize the film for its lack of accuracy, because it is a portrait, and, like every biography, it is biased. Here, the biography is almost a hagiography, but a hagiography that is open and clear in its intentions.
Äkta människor
(2012–2014)
clever
2 May 2013
What do you do when you want to make Science-Fiction like Blade Runner, set in the future, with replicants and all, but you don't have Ridley Scott's money ? You make a science-fiction series set in a future that looks exactly like our present, but that has replicants in it. Except here they're called Hubots. Apart from the name change, they are pretty similar. And the blade runners in Real Humans are called EHURB, less stylish policemen in charge of arresting any hubot that would create trouble. Humans use their hubots as modern slaves, in factories, at home, or in brothels. Need a cook who will also clean your house and take care of your children ? Want an improved inflatable doll ? Or just a companion that is more talkative than your dog ? Try the hubots. They are pleasant to be with, they never get tired, they always smile, they always agree. Some humans even start to like them better than their human partners. The problem is, hubots are machines under the law, not worth more than your car or your bike. So you can't go to a club with them, and human-hubot couples are not well considered. Fortunately, Inger Ergman, who at first was a bit reluctant about having a hubot at home, finally grew quite fond of her Anita. And as she has friends who date hubots, she's going to use all her skills as a lawyer to alter the law. Of course, hubots are not all obliging and slavish. Anita, for instance, used to be an independent robot in love with Leo, who leads a group of autonomous hubots determined to be and remain free. But if some hubots want to be free, if they can fall in love, it means that they can have feelings, and a conscience. So should we still assign them the same values as a that of a car, and throw them away when their bug can't be fixed ? Should we consider them as humans ? Should human-hubot couples still be considered an abomination ? In these tense times of debate about gay marriage, Lars Lundström's questions about what love is and about the power of feelings, are definitely well-timed.
The Grandmaster
(2013)
Best Wong Kar Wai's movie since In The Mood For Love
2 May 2013
Warning: Spoilers
Since In The Mood For Love in 2000, I can't say that I 've really enjoyed Wong Kar-Wai's movies. I was indifferent to the extremely aestheticized romantism of 2046, and I found My Blueberry Nights cute, but disappointing. Wong Kar-Wai got the idea of The Grandmaster about ten years ago, and he started gathering material and information about it while he was shooting In The Mood For Love. There is some of In The Mood For Love in The Grandmaster. There are some shots that could go in either movie, a similar atmosphere and languor. Wong Kar-Wai wanted to pay tribute to Ip-Man, a master of kung-fu and Bruce Lee's mentor. He follows his life from the 1930s to the first part of the 1950s. His story mingles with Chinese history, as he experiences the last dynasty, the Japanese invasion, the civil war and the British occupation of Hong Kong, where he found refuge. We are very ignorant of this Chinese history here in France. In fact, The Grandmaster has nothing in common with a western movie, if we consider the word 'western' means formatted by Hollywood. It is a movie about martial arts, but it is not an action movie. There are good guys and bad guys in it, but no one wins at the end. The movie is not linear. It follows Ip-Man, then Gong Er, master Baosen's daughter. Just before the outcome of a fight or right in the middle of a scene, we move to another place, another character, another time. We move forwards, and then backwards. The movie's structure is so different from what we as western viewers are used to seeing that it's sometimes disconcerting. The dialogues, made of proverbs, metaphors and aphorisms, sound also somehow weird to our western ears. The aesthete, perfectionist, demiurge-eye of Wong Kar-Wai's camera wanders among details and around bodies. It is always moving, and its movements slow down time to better find what is going on here, in front of us, to better understand what is the mystery that is living. The characters are often behind something, a window pane, a sculpted grating, a veil, and at some crucial moment in their story, they are seen from above, stuck between two walls. The landscape is a setting made of details and objects to be broken, of windows smashed by a falling body. The fight makes us see what was not seen, the off-camera that was still here the whole time. At some point in the movie, Gong Er is visiting a whorehouse and she asks her father why he brought her there, and he answers something like "What you don't see still exists". Here is what Wong Kar-Wai's camera tries to show, what is here, in front of us, that we don't see. We're sometimes lost in the blur and the shivering of the image, but we must indulge in this loss, and take pleasure in it.
Oblivion
(I) (2013)
Visually beautiful but that's it
2 May 2013
Warning: Spoilers
We are in 2077. Tom Cruise's voice explains us that the Earth has been devastated by aliens, the Scavs, and that they also have destroyed the Moon. Men won the war, but they had to leave the Earth to go live on Titan, one of Jupiter's (or Saturne's, I'm not sure which) satellites. Before they can join them, Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), are some kind of maintenance workers in charge of the drones, these little round flying and aggressive machines. The Tet, which is like a big pyramid in the sky, also hires Jack and Victoria to take care of the pumps that suck sea water. For maintenance workers, they have a pretty cool high-tech house that looks like it's hanging in the air, and that has an awesome transparent swimming-pool in which Jack and Victoria play doctor. But every night, Jack dreams of this brunette who smiles at him in the streets and who smiles at him again on top of the Empire State. He knows he knows her, but doesn't know who she is. And the cool home, and the cool pool, he doesn't care about them. Like Walden in Thoreau's book, he likes to go to a little wooden house by the lake to take a nap. And he likes the Earth too, he doesn't want to leave it, even if it's a dangerous place. So anyway. One day the girl from his dream literally falls from the sky, and with her he realizes that all he thought he knew is a big lie. A little bit of 2001, A Space Odyssey, a little bit of transcendantalism, some baseball, some romance, and a lot of special effects. Joseph Kosinski loves special effects, 3D and gadgets, and he's pretty good at that. Of course if you're looking for substance for your brain, I suggest you to go see something else.
The Double Life of Véronique
(1991)
Wonderful
2 May 2013
Warning: Spoilers
"All my life I've felt like I was here and somewhere else at the same time"
Weronika lives in Poland. She lost her mother as a kid. She has a gift for music, and especially singing. She likes to apply a golden ring around her eye. She runs a lot. She is always breathless because of a heart defect that she is unaware of. She is searching for love. Veronique lives in France. She lost her mother as a kid. She has a gift for music, and she teaches it to young children. She likes to apply a golden ring around her eye. She runs a lot. She is always breathless because of a heart defect that has just been found out. She is searching for love. Weronika sees Véronique in Krakow, the city she lives in. She stops in the middle of a place crowded with people demonstrating and riot squads. Her alter ego is getting on a bus which will take her back to France. Before the bus leaves, Véronique has time to take pictures of the place and of Weronika, but she does not see her. During the first half-hour of the film, the subjective shots which represent Weronika's vision are unsteady, the fisheye angle twists the perspectives, until Weronika herself collapses, on the stage, among the music instruments and in front of the audience, in the middle of a song. After Weronika's death, we follow Véronique. She is making love with a man, and, right after it, she feels an immense sadness. She says to her lover « It's as if I were grieving » but she is unable to explain why. She decides to give up on the concert she was preparing, the same concert, we can imagine, during which Weronika died. Véronique follows her intuition, and Weronika's death prevents her from dying herself. In the school where Véronique teaches, a man manipulates puppets for the children. He makes the puppet die and become a sort of angel. Later on, Vétonique receives an anonymous phone call, then she gets a lace in the mail, and then an audio tape thanks to which she finds the place from where the anonymous man sends his objects to her. She finds him in a bar in the Gare Saint Lazare in Paris. She recognizes the puppeteer. In a hotel, after they have made love, and confessed their love, she empties her purse on the bed because he wants to know her better. He looks at the photos she took during her trip in Eastern Europe. He says that she is pretty on the pictures. She notices Weronika for the first time. She starts to cry. Weeks, maybe months later, she wakes up in the middle of the night and finds her lover making a second puppet of herself. She asks why he made two puppets of her, and he says that it is because they get damaged. She manipulates one puppet, while the other is lying motionless. The puppeteer reads to her the first version of a tale he is writing about two women on two different continents who are in fact two versions of the same person. This focus on the puppets reminded me of an essay written by Furio Jesi on Rilke's poetry. Jesi writes: the doll, in its form, tragically announces to men that it is her, not them, who will survive in the Infinite. ». To me, the puppets are a reminder of the fate that awaits Véronique as well, that is death. The two women will disappear in death but the two puppets will remain. There is a very important dreamlike dimension in the film which features a dwarf who is also a lawyer, an old exhibitionnist, conversations of secondary characters with no beginning and no end, a subjective shot of the dead Weronika being buried. The film is also very poetic. I think of two shots in particular: the two versions of the old lady crossing the screen, and the image of the old church reflected backwards in a plastic ball. To appreciate this film, you need to get rid of the need to understand and analyze everything, and accept the absurd side of reality. My sister saw the film with me, and at one point she said: « there is something in this film that is us. » That « something » can be defined as the atmosphere, the setting, the green and red colors. the light. Kieslowski's movie addresses that part of our brain that is the center of our emotions, of our sensations, and of the memories of those sensations. It remains with us like an old dream that we had forgotten.
Weronika lives in Poland. She lost her mother as a kid. She has a gift for music, and especially singing. She likes to apply a golden ring around her eye. She runs a lot. She is always breathless because of a heart defect that she is unaware of. She is searching for love. Veronique lives in France. She lost her mother as a kid. She has a gift for music, and she teaches it to young children. She likes to apply a golden ring around her eye. She runs a lot. She is always breathless because of a heart defect that has just been found out. She is searching for love. Weronika sees Véronique in Krakow, the city she lives in. She stops in the middle of a place crowded with people demonstrating and riot squads. Her alter ego is getting on a bus which will take her back to France. Before the bus leaves, Véronique has time to take pictures of the place and of Weronika, but she does not see her. During the first half-hour of the film, the subjective shots which represent Weronika's vision are unsteady, the fisheye angle twists the perspectives, until Weronika herself collapses, on the stage, among the music instruments and in front of the audience, in the middle of a song. After Weronika's death, we follow Véronique. She is making love with a man, and, right after it, she feels an immense sadness. She says to her lover « It's as if I were grieving » but she is unable to explain why. She decides to give up on the concert she was preparing, the same concert, we can imagine, during which Weronika died. Véronique follows her intuition, and Weronika's death prevents her from dying herself. In the school where Véronique teaches, a man manipulates puppets for the children. He makes the puppet die and become a sort of angel. Later on, Vétonique receives an anonymous phone call, then she gets a lace in the mail, and then an audio tape thanks to which she finds the place from where the anonymous man sends his objects to her. She finds him in a bar in the Gare Saint Lazare in Paris. She recognizes the puppeteer. In a hotel, after they have made love, and confessed their love, she empties her purse on the bed because he wants to know her better. He looks at the photos she took during her trip in Eastern Europe. He says that she is pretty on the pictures. She notices Weronika for the first time. She starts to cry. Weeks, maybe months later, she wakes up in the middle of the night and finds her lover making a second puppet of herself. She asks why he made two puppets of her, and he says that it is because they get damaged. She manipulates one puppet, while the other is lying motionless. The puppeteer reads to her the first version of a tale he is writing about two women on two different continents who are in fact two versions of the same person. This focus on the puppets reminded me of an essay written by Furio Jesi on Rilke's poetry. Jesi writes: the doll, in its form, tragically announces to men that it is her, not them, who will survive in the Infinite. ». To me, the puppets are a reminder of the fate that awaits Véronique as well, that is death. The two women will disappear in death but the two puppets will remain. There is a very important dreamlike dimension in the film which features a dwarf who is also a lawyer, an old exhibitionnist, conversations of secondary characters with no beginning and no end, a subjective shot of the dead Weronika being buried. The film is also very poetic. I think of two shots in particular: the two versions of the old lady crossing the screen, and the image of the old church reflected backwards in a plastic ball. To appreciate this film, you need to get rid of the need to understand and analyze everything, and accept the absurd side of reality. My sister saw the film with me, and at one point she said: « there is something in this film that is us. » That « something » can be defined as the atmosphere, the setting, the green and red colors. the light. Kieslowski's movie addresses that part of our brain that is the center of our emotions, of our sensations, and of the memories of those sensations. It remains with us like an old dream that we had forgotten.
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