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pwolfcarius
Reviews
Shultes (2008)
trying hard to be meaningful...
This picture is OK, but not great, detached, unsentimental, unpsychological and even impersonal, as often these days, mysterious without reason ; Shultes, the main character, is not only solitary and impenetrable, but suffers from amnesia (an easy symbol of the way Russia today forgets itself, I suppose, but making little difference to the picture itself...) ; he lives with his old and sick mother, but they just watch TV together in the evening, not exchanging one single word ; he does a bit of running, a bit of stealing, and he's quite good at picking pockets (maybe the picture tries to be "Bressonian"... but here stealing is not prideful self-assertion, nor anything else... it's just a meaningless way of survival...
The only really great part is when we see actress Cecile Piege, in a little film she shot of herself on her portable camera, making a passionate declaration to an unseen (and to everybody else unknown) man, then singing (or miming ?) a punkish song for him ; and I'd like very much to know what the title of this song is, and who sings it in reality...
Tan de repente (2002)
A marvelous, minimalist movie
A marvelous, minimalist movie, laconic, elliptic, constantly ambiguous, all along unforeseeable ; it starts as a thriller, at full speed in every respect : sentimentally (love at first sight of a skinny, heartless, full of bravado punk-girl nicknamed Mao, for Marcia, a plump heartbroken shy sales-girl : a study in contrasts !) and literally (kidnapping of Marcia by Mao, clearly a LEADER, and her mate Lenin, more the following kind, in a hijacked taxi) ; as soon as the trio leaves Buenos Aires, thriller turns into road-movie ; the asphalt jungle hardly behind them, they're in full flight : but little by little everything slows down, finally settling for GOOD in the straggling town of Rosario (what could be quieter than a place called rosary ?), where Lenin calls on an old aunt who agrees to HARBOUR them, on top of the two tenants she already has : a woman painter, a male biology student ; the road-movie now turns, slowly but surely, delicately, imperceptibly, into an intimate Chekovian comedy : so far, there had been mainly OUTER events, now there will be mainly INNER events ; a trio of people incapable of giving comes into contact with a trio of people who can give : the aunt first, who gives naturally : just by being herself ; then the painter, who gives actually, generously, to Marcia : a dress, then one of her paintings ; the biology student at last, who gives ambiguously : by helping Mao in one of her shoplifting sprees. This mixture naturally brings about some changes in the «receiving» threesome ; in fact, in this rather charming household, more bohemian than anything our two punkettes could ever have dreamed of, everything is going to TONE, always as literally as sentimentally, to shift, to skid, to complexify : relationships alter, the line between sex, love, friendship and even family becomes not only thinner but blurrier. All considered, this is more a Bildung-movie, whose main three characters discover themselves as they discover real life : wrenched from her daily routine and stagnation, Marcia matures, finds herself a prey to violent emotions, even to a certain rebelliousness (she reproaches Mao who neglects her, now having designs on the student, and getting sweeter, more feminine) ; with no outlet for their rebelliousness, Mao loses some of her aggressiveness, Lenin owns up to a certain tenderness for her wonderful aunt, acknowledges her nostalgia for a family (she even consents to being called by her real name : Veronica) ; every process has been reversed. This very subtle movie, in black and white and yet all in half-tones, curiously has a moral, clear and classical : welcome the unexpected, live intensely while there's time ; but what is no doubt shown is that there are many very different ways to live, and all sorts of intensities...
This movie unreels like human life : starting with a bang, quickly off the mark, all instinct and energy, then gradually slowing down, like a spring that imperceptibly relaxes, until SUDDENLY, you become conscious : you realize it HAS slowed down ; youth is over ; for better or worse, you have found some marks...
If things change imperceptibly, there are nonetheless two symmetrical exceptions : one at the start (wrenching Marcia brutally from the slow metaphorical death that was in STORE for her), the other at the end (the sudden real death of aunt Blanca) ; the latter sequence is a gem : the whole bunch goes for a tour on a rowing-boat (her last «voyage» ?) ; she sits at the rear, in the sun, under a big straw hat, smiling blissfully (we see her pale face close-up, over-exposed, nearly white) ; imperceptibly the camera comes closer, her smile sets, her face becomes strange, A WHITER SHADE OF PALE, the frame becomes blurred, the sound dies ; next frame : the sky (her soul has gone to heaven ?) ; only afterward do we understand that she died then, thanks to the dismayed comments of those who had been close to her ; a masterpiece of INDIRECT directing (that points to, instead of showing, that makes its point without stating it) another fine example being the last frame : in the bus that takes them back to Buenos Aires, Marcia falls asleep on Lenin's shoulder ; if Mao's nowhere to be seen, it's probably that she stayed in Rosario with the student... ; a good open ending...
One thing is not ambiguous : the charm of this picture, which is real, cannot lie in the three main characters, because they have none ; so it must lie exclusively in the way it was filmed ; a deep, subtle movie, amazingly mature, both humanly and formally.
Nói albinói (2003)
An Icelandic Tarkovski ?
Easily the most interesting and beautiful debut film of these last few years, with "Tan de repente" and "Verboden te zuchten" ; explicitly placed under the care of Kierkegaard ("if you hang yourself, you'll regret it, if you don't hang yourself, you'll regret it too"), Nói is as full of humour as it is desperate (with the exception of "love and getting away", Nói doesn't take anything seriously ; he's constantly playing : to avoid being sucked in by that seemingly absurd adult world which takes itself so seriously ; he dreams of escaping to Hawaii, looking at slides with a cheap viewing-box his mother just gave him for his birthday ; in this minimum world, everything is cheap...)
Frightful feelings of isolation and desolation, of being trapped on one hand ; but on the other hand, as absurdly funny (the parish-priest and Nói haggling over the depth of the tomb he has to dig in the cemetery ! and in Danish, Kierkegaard is the word for cemetery...) as it is anguishingly claustrophobic (Nói trapped, this time literally, in his secret cellar after the avalanche -- probably an allegory of his ever-increasing isolation)
Filmed with Tarkovskian beauty (a permanent blue cast, at once gloomy, serene and unsettling ; blue maybe because it is the exaggeration, the saturation of white, the white of frost, the white of snow), it could be seen as the fateful tale (told more in images than in words) of a village "idiot" (in the Dostoievskian sense), or a "Stalker", as hemmed-in by (rather nice) people as the village is hemmed-in by (desperately beautiful) nature, doomed for absolute aloneness, into which, starting from mere difference and marginality (the "albino" bit), he will gradually "descend" (taking refuge regularly in that cellar being just another allegory of this) ; a journey to the end of the cold
tragic, but perhaps liberating
even if we can't, whatever we do, escape "fate" (the local fortune teller had rightly seen only "death and desolation" in store for Nói)
Starting rather realistically, the film gets more allegorical as it unravels (the avalanche turns out to have killed a mere 10 people : all those Nói had some contact with, and only those) ; in the last but one image, facing us, looking into his viewing-box, Nói looks like a robot, or a spaceman with his helmet on ; as for the very last image (the "real" view of one of the Hawaiian slides he used to look at : a beach of white sand, palm trees, and the gentle waves of a turquoise sea), it will probably be given as many interpretations as there will be viewers ; it proves once more that images, like words, don't have meaning(s) in themselves, but only relatively to the context into which they come inserted : here, the corniest touristic cliché becomes a thing of many meanings, an unfathomable mystery
Like Aki Kaurismaki's "Match factory girl", in many ways a fairy tale in reverse...