With Catherine I saw this movie on Sunday night. The German press had praised it unequivocally like few others this year. Beforehand I wasn’t too keen on seeing this film as somehow I had lost interest in Kaurismäki. It’s like if you have seen one Kaurismäki you have seen them all was what I thought. Like a band who does not evolve and always makes variations of their first then original record, for example the Red House Painters.

I was right and I was wrong.

Kaurismäki tells another fairy tale story set in the country of losers and social outcasts. Again it owes a lot to the film noir and is close to the early Jim Jarmush films especially Stranger than Paradise. Even the music used by Kaurismäki is quite similar. Instead of Screamin' Jay Hawkins with I Put a Spell on You it is blues like Blind Lemon Jefferson, rhythm & blues and rock 'n' roll which comes out of the jukebox in M’s (the man without a past who is brilliantly played by Markku Petolta whose facial expression is as vivid as that of an Easter Island statue) container. M even transforms the band of the salvation army into a rock 'n' roll outfit with the lead guitar sounding very much like Mark Knopfler though. This brings me to a nice reflection. M owns virtually nothing but he has music. He found the jukebox on the road. Music is free. M doesn’t even need an internet connection.

This time nevertheless Kaurismäki captures the sense of togetherness of the down and out who have nothing to lose in a succinct laconic way he didn’t before. I don't think the ideologically loaded concepts of solidarity and compassion are fitting here. An electrician branches the container of M to the power supply system. M who has no money asks the electrician what he owes him who responds:

That is probably the most striking trait of Kaurismäki’s characters. Despite a hard life without illusions they don’t lose their sense of humour. They actually create humour out of desperation. Like Zen masters they only live on the minimal and essential, are free like birds and full of practical often paradoxical wisdom.

Another scene illustrates the extreme improbable hard luck M encounters and how he gets out of the situation with an incredibly absurd action. M has found out by accident that before he lost his memory during an extremely violent attack by three young men he had been working as a welder and a company wants to employ him as such. He needs a bank account to get the job so he tries to open one. When talking to the female bank employee the bank is robbed and the two are locked into the strongroom. Unfortunately the alarm has been turned off as the bank is bust and the oxygene concentration in the room is decreasing rapidly. As the first idea to stop breathing simultaneously doesn’t turn out too practical M says that in this case he can as well smoke a cigarette. He rolls it and lights it. The exhaled smoke moves towards the smoke detector but the alarm doesn’t go on. Following the direction of the smoke with her eyes the bank employee sees the detector and switches the sprinkler system on by hand.

Some words on a film we saw on Sunday which is based on the true story of a Frenchman who based his life on pretending being a doctor. For 18 years he mislead his wife and children and when they found out he killed them and tried to kill himself. The guy is now in prison and told his life story to Emmanuel Carrère who transformed it into the book L'Adversaire (the opponent) which has also been filmed by Nicole Garcia featuring Daniel Auteuil as the con man.

Laurent Cantet's movie L'Emploi du Temps (Time Out) (reviews) takes the basic elements of the story and varies it a little. The main character Vincent brilliantly played by Aurélien Recoing is fired from his consultancy firm. Out of shame he decides not to tell his family and tries to continue as if nothing has happened. He spends his days killing time in his car, in hotel lounges and later in an empty farmhouse in Switzerland. In the evening he usually comes back late to give the impression that he has worked hard.

In some way or other most people act and show off in their lives and they know it but Vincent is an extreme. It is a much harder job to lie every day to your family and friends than to follow a normal working life and it takes a lot of energy out of you. You need an amazing memory not to contradict yourself which is only possible if you believe in your own lies. And you also need a lot of fantasy to tell about what you were supposedly doing at work. Vincent has both. His whole life after the sack is built on lies. At the end the only person still believing in his concoction of lies is actually himself. Vincent cannot tell the truth as it would mean admitting that according to his high standards he is a loser. And he would have to give up his identity which has become the identity of an actor. Recoing is most convincing when he smiles. He has the ability to smile in a way that the spectator knows the smile is false.

Summary: A brilliant existentialist film on the dichotomy of what we really are and what we want the others to believe we are which explores all the psychological depths of this theme.

Disappearance Sous le Sable (Below the sand) is a film by the young French director François Ozon. I love the French author cinema of Truffaut, Rohmer and Chabrol. Especially the first two have made films where conversation is essential. Ozon's film is different. Conversation is quite peripheral here. The film shows the slow psychical break-down of a woman who has lost her husband. She simply does not accept the reality and almost succeeds. I would call this an impressionist film which gives a very exact picture of what goes on in that woman. The more the story goes on the more reality takes over.

Spoiler alert! (though the plot is not so important really) Jean and Marie are a middle-aged couple who go on holiday to the Landes south of Bordeaux where Jean owns a holiday cottage. They do not talk much but they seem to get on ok. The first time they go to the beach Jean asks Marie if she wants to go swimming with him. She says no and never sees her husband alive again. There are no huge waves. It is a normal sunny seaside day. The film is about how Marie copes with the loss of Jean. Even though it becomes more and more evident that he has committed suicide she won't accept that he is dead. She lives on as if Jean had only left for a short trip. When the police phones back a couple of months later that they have found a body who fits her description of Jean she does not call back. She does not want to know. She has an affair with an acquaintance who is interested in her only after having talked about it to Jean in her imagination before. When Jean's old mother who apparently never liked her tells her that Jean was bored in the marriage and probably just left her to start a new life with another woman she changes her mind. Now she wants to see his dead corpse. When she sees the deformed body in the morgue she denies reality again. She tells the police that it was not him though the belongings the police found were obviously his. At the end she is back at the beach and sees a man in the distance who resembles Jean a bit. She runs towards him and the film finishes.

What happened to men? Recently I saw two movies about the absence of a man. In the first the man is mentally absent, in the second he just disappears physically. Both were highlights of this year's cinematographic output.

The Man Who Wasn't There is the latest work of the most European of all American film directors, the Coen Brothers. It is a film noir darker than any of the films in the 30s/40s which gave the name to this genre. Ed the chain-smoking barber does not talk much. When he speaks it is mainly about the miracle of growing hair and his fear that the hair could stop growing which would make him jobless. He lives an average American life in a small town. He is married and when he finds out that his wife betrays him everything takes its unstoppable course. I won't say much more about the story only that it does not finish as Hollywood films would end. Everything happens to Ed. He only reacts. The question of culpability is irrelevant. Ed could be a character out of Kafka's short stories. Especially Der Prozess (The trial) comes to mind. Or Camus L'Etranger (The stranger). Everything is fate. Ed is an anti-person. A loser whose care for the career of a young piano-playing girl is interpreted by her only as interest in sex (I actually thought the same). Who is so naive to invest money in an obviously fishy plot. Tragically it won't be only the cash that he loses there. The Coen brothers are in American film what Beck (esp. with Odelay) is in American rock music. Geniuses of eclecticism. They have absorbed all the history of Western arts and culture to create something refreshingly new. They transform Heisenberg's uncertainty principle which states that you cannot measure speed and location of an electron at the same time into the phrase "The closer you look the less you see" which the lawyer says in before the trial. There is also some very black humour at one point where I had to laugh till I cried when suddenly the laughter stuck in my throat. It is the scene when the brother of Ed's wife asks if there are no alarm clocks in prison as she does not turn up in time for her trial. There I really felt cheated by the Coens. I forgive them the slapstick scenes but in the trial scene they really manipulated the spectator. Anyways a great movie and one of their best together with Fargo. It is a quarter to twelve and the other film review will have to wait until tomorrow...

Last Waltz
The video I got from Amazon is a kind of watershed of pop music. A music movie by Martin Scorsese about the last concert of The Band at the Winterland, San Francisco on Thanksgiving 1976. It is something like a best of before punk broke out. The Band itself is a pretty boring rock outfit. In the movie they play with the most important artists of the 70s. Ronnie Hawkins (they used to be his support band), Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Muddy Waters, Neil Diamond etc. Even though The Band is only an average band (sic!) that movie captures the spirit of the early rock age amazingly well. One of the best rock music films around. Much better than Stop Making Sense anyway. And I love the early Talking Heads!
The film is worth buying just for Joni's beautiful rendition of Coyote, one of my favourite songs of hers. I am just "a prisoner of the white lines on the freeway...". Nevertheless she seemed a little bit out of place with The Band. Apparently she also performed Shadows and Light and Furry Sings the Blues at the concert. Both are not featured on my copy of the video.

Paradiso
My girl friend, a friend of mine and me went to see Paradiso. Sieben Tage mit sieben Frauen. (Paradiso. Seven days with seven women.) [review DE] by Rudolf Thome (bio). And it was like paradise. Not the fact that the main character celebrated his 60th birthday with the seven most important women of his life for seven days in his house on the country side. It was the atmosphere, the landscape, the beautiful images and the sometimes funny and always subtle dialogues. The film evolves very slowly, it takes its time. When the guests arrive one after the other it is like a small brook which rises to a wide river and becomes a small stream again when everyone leaves at the end.

Adam is a composer of modern music. The model for him must have been Hans Werner Henze who has just turned 75. Adam was and is a casanova, has been married three times and had even more lovers. What is a little strange is that Adam as a character stays relatively vague. All his women who are all quite distinct one from the other seem to be much more special than him. Or let's say as characters they are more precisely depicted. After the week when the birthday community dissolves Adam is alone with the trees again. One of the women (I guess it was Lulu whose present were 60 poplars to protect the house from the wind and the bad spirits) had said before that she could not live together with him anymore as he spoke with the trees. She would have coped with a rival but not with trees. I just realize that Adam's current wife is called Eva and a snake also plays a role in this film. When thinking about his son whom he did not know before Adam characterises him as very masculine and boyish playful at the same time. And says that these are the qualities women love in men. Probably not too far from the truth.
What I like about films like this one is that they are full of small details you only realise later on when you rethink about them or even better discuss about them with someone else.

Together with Truffaut, Rohmer and Kieslowski, Thome is my favourite director of the "dialogue" (or author) cinema which focuses on the relations between men and women. Kieslowski minimises conversation so that each word in his dialogues is of utter importance.

What is love?
The day before yesterday we watched Le beau mariage by Eric Rohmer as a home video. The movie dates from 1981 and is very low-budget. As all Rohmers it is mainly conversation. Rohmer is like the small brother (actually he is older and his films are wiser as well) of Truffaut. Quite simple but still intellectual films.
The plot is really simple. A beautiful brunette in her early twenties (Béatrice Romand looks younger than she is) splits with her married painter boyfriend. She is sick of being only second choice. So she decides to marry. Very strange. She does not even know whom. But soon her friend introduces her to her cousin, a lawyer. From the beginning her friend makes clear that she is exactly her cousin's type. Dark hair, slim figure. Now she knows whom she will marry. She gives up her job and runs after him. It is like the Diary of a Seducer by Kierkegaard, but there it works and here not. Maybe men are better seducers. :)
She is so sure of herself but the guy does not respond. So finally she goes to see him in the office and he tells her that actually she is exactly his type of woman, but this is exactly the problem. The reason he puts forward that he has no time for a relationship and that he has to work on his career is of course bullshit. In fact he says no as she is trying too hard.
The quintessence for me is that it does not work as no love is involved. She is absolutely not in love with the guy. She is only acting rationally so she cannot expect that he will love her back. It is all too perfect. You cannot force love. Love is always a present, with something irrational or unpredictable. There is a very human aspect in love. We do not want to be overrun. We want to be respected, free to choose or at least we want to think that we have a free will.

Went to see Intimacy by Patrice Chéreau last night. A huge disappointment. The worst were the so-called sex scenes. Ridculous. How can you have sex without an erection? Watching other people having sex is embarrassing enough, watching them faking sex is even more stupid. Anyways the soundtrack was brilliant. The music somehow did not fit to the movie but who cares. Starting with the Tindersticks "A Night in" it went on with The Clash, David Bowie, the Clinic (I did not know them), Iggy Pop, Nick Cave, Eyeless in Gaza etc. A good sample of the darker and punkier part of the mainly London indie scene of about ten years ago. Between the bad sex and the good music there was nevertheless one line by the main actor to remember: Is next Wednesday again Wednesday? (Wednesday was their meeting day.)