icivoripmav Reviews

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

minimalist depiction of modern life in general, not only feminist!

[21 January 2009]

To see during 3 and half hours a middle aged woman silently executing the same household works over and over again is one thing. But to realize that this tired looking single mother is virtually cut out of the rest of society and hardly has an occasion of interacting with her fellow citizen, except routinely visiting teenage son and occasional sexual partners, is completely another thing. Once we notice this obvious fact, every act of repetitive domestic task is suddenly becoming painful to contemplate, strangely too familiar for many of us to dismiss simply as monotonous and insipid. All depends on your sensibility to such an existence. Some might find it to be trivial, pretending every woman is more or less supposed to do so since the Creation. Others might spontaneously feel a deep sympathy for her, a prisoner of one's own occupation unable to cope with a deepening void left by the irreversible passage of time, with a growing sense of non-fulfillment.

Apparently, this cinematographic study of housewife's social condition was first intended to be politically engaging at its release, and rightly so, seeing the socio-cultural contexts of 70s. But categorizing it simply as a pioneer of feminist film making, one would miss more essential values this experimental work may embody. If we feel a lingering melancholy and a vague sorrow toward the secluded existence of the protagonist, her solitary acts of peeling vegetables, boiling water, or mechanically making love with men for living... it is probably not because this is a mere depiction of women's status which one hope to be improved in more egalitarian society. We find here something much more deep seated in the modern men's existence in general, namely the social condition of laborers trapped by a particular mode of occupation, gradually and ineluctably losing any clue of human communication as well as the conviction of one's own destiny, without really knowing why.

Jalsaghar (1958)

best music film ever !

[18 January 2009]

Just to appreciate Roshan Kumari's legendary performance -one of the most mesmerizing dancing sequences ever filmed, this masterpiece deserves a repeated viewing.

There is something savage, auto-destructive but also the purest in form about the landlord's passion for music and childish vanity in front of his peers, which made me ponder over the place of music in our society long after the credits end. In the age of MTV and MP3, we are used to the idea of carrying routinely our favorite songs everywhere from streets to bathroom, and it's pity that we hardly experience anymore the authentic ambiance of intimate music gathering such as miraculously acted and filmed in Jalsaghar. Music in other era and other place must have been high point and extra-ordinary moment of community life, source of the spiritual inspiration for civil life as well as its destruction. The decor and lighting of the music room is sumptuous and otherworldly, in perfect contrast with the wearisome monotony of domestic scenes the declining aristocrat is forced to endure.

The Intruder (2004)

Others in the fragile Self

[18 January 2009]

First of all, I liked very much the central idea of locating the '' intruders'', Others in the fragile Self, on various levels - mainly subconscious but sometimes more allegorical. In fact the intruders are omnipresent throughout the film : in the Swiss-French border where the pretagonist leads secluded life; in the his recurring daydream and nightmare; inside his ailing body after heart transplantation.... In the last half of the film, he becomes intruder himself, returning in ancient french colony in the hope of atoning for the past.

The overall tone is bitter rather than pathetic, full of regrets and guilts, sense of failure being more or less dominant. This is a quite grim picture of an old age, ostensibly self-dependent but hopelessly void and lonely inside. The directer composes the images more to convey passing sensations of anxiety and desire than any explicit meanings. Some of them are mesmerizing, not devoid of humor though, kind of absurdist play only somnambulist can visualize.