Recently Watched Films 2022

[Dan Warburton]

Hirokazu Koreeda, After Life, 1988

Wiki: "A small, mid-20th century social-service-style structure is a way station between life and death. Every Monday, a group of recently deceased people check-in: the social workers in the lodge ask them to go back over their life and choose one single memory to take into the afterlife. They are given just a couple of days to identify their happiest memory, after which the workers design, stage and film them. In this way, the souls will be able to re-experience this moment for eternity, forgetting the rest of their life. They will spend eternity within their happiest memory."
A disarmingly simple idea, as seemingly bland as the old school building (or is it a hospital?) the film is shot in, but its realisation here is subtle and inexplicably moving, and we develop real affection for these characters and the counselors who look after them. The documentary "real" feel of the cinematography is partly responsible, but so is the setting, with its rickety old desks and chairs, flaking paintwork, rust and crumbling masonry. Had this been shot in some godawful squeaky-clean office setting (like the Corneau I mentioned above), it would have been awful.
To quote the director: "Our memories are not fixed or static. They are dynamic, reflecting selves that are constantly changing. So the act of remembering, of looking back at the past, is by no means redundant or negative. Rather, it challenges us to evolve and mature."

[henriq]

Tom Kinninmont/Peter O’Toole - Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell (1999)

Ok, not the most filmically daring in concept or execution - a filmed performance of Keith Waterhouse’s play, from the Old Vic in London. But what a play, and what a performance… As the man said, if Jeffrey Bernard didn’t exist it would have been necessary for Peter O’Toole to invent him. A character so thoroughly consonant with his own, and an absolutely consummate performance as a drunken bohemian wastrel, locked in a pub for the night. Is that real vodka in the bottle? Doesn’t matter either way - if it is, he exhibits an impressive command of the text through increasing stages of drunkenness, if it isn’t, he owns every inch of that experience, gives full body and voice to it. Pause, hesitation, explosive swathes of vocalisation, laughter, stumble, silence, regret, despair - the whole gamut and spectra of experience and memory, yes, he is IT. And not alone on the stage: mention must go to the supporting players, Annabel Leventon, Sarah Berger, Royce Mills and Timothy Ackroyd are all great. Leventon and Mills are especially wonderful. And there is a lovely, redemptive tone at work. The opening, with Leventon reading a love letter from Bernard’s muse to him - yes, pubs and betting shops IS where she loved to be with him - to the reading of the poems in his honour at the end of act one. You almost want to stand up and clap at points - wait til you see the party trick with the egg… It reminds me, in a way, of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective. The same movement through pain and regret, to joy and forgiveness, redemption. I find I need stuff like this, it must be the season. And I’ve watched this twice in maybe three weeks. A heartfelt recommendation!

[henriq]

Oh, and an RIP:



Time for a major Antonioni retread, I think.

[Alastair]

Hirokazu Koreeda, After Life, 1988

I saw this at the NFT at some point in the late 90s and absolutely loved it. Spent ages trying to track down a DVD copy, eventually managing to get a region 1 version in the days when this was quite a thing. Must rewatch soon.

I'm currently working my way though the Dietrich/Sternberg at Paramount box. FIlms are great, introductions by Nicholas von Sternberg terrible.

There's a Belgian documentay from 1969 as a bonus on the "Dishonoured" disc where a 74-year-old JvS reduces Dorothée Blanck to tears as he recreates his approach to lighting Dietrich. Disturbing.

[Dan Warburton]

Too late to wish you a Happy New Year, Alastair (I believe you're supposed to do that in January?) though I will anyway.

Time for a major Antonioni retread, I think.

Michelangelo Antonioni,L'Avventura, 1960

Yes, Henrik. We watched again as an RIP tribute to the late Monica (who, poor dear, had been suffering from Alzheimers for so long she'd probably forgotten she'd made this by the time she died). Haven't been back to trawl through the IHF archives to find out who didn't enjoy this very much (apart from Ingmar Bergman, not that he ever posted here, alas), but we did. Long overdue return visit. Was she a great actress? I don't think so, but she didn't have to be: like Karina for Godard, she was perfect for what the director wanted.

[Dan Warburton]

Harald Sicheritz, Mother's Day, 1993

"The movie focuses on a family from a lower social level, the Neugebauers, in the center of a strange and wicked community, living in a notorious apartment estate in Vienna. Their part of town is satirically portrayed like one of the antechambers of hell - for Austrian standards - a socialistic community of concrete and locked doors, where everybody tries to seclude himself and his dark secrets from everyone else. No Walzer, no Mozart, no Viennese courtesy, no post-monarchistic postcard nostalgia and no hope. And just like at Christmas, at Mother's Day private tensions erupt, inducing riot-like scenes in the community, in the supermarket, at church, at the gas station and in school – leading to a unique tour-de-force."
The blurb above makes it all seem somewhat more serious than it actually is, a sort of proto-Hundstage (given the cult status Sicheritz's black comedy enjoys in Austria, one imagines Ulrich Seidl was familiar with it), whereas, despite a couple of deaths (three if you want to count pets) and a few scuffles, Muttertag sets out more to entertain than disturb. Character and behaviour are stereotyped and hyped up - more Benny Hill than Mike Leigh - and part of the fun for Austrian viewers is seeing well-known actors - Alfred Dorfer, Andreas Nowak, Roland Düringer, Eva Billisich and Andrea Händler - play up to 24 different roles. Fun, but probably more fun if you're Austrian.

[Dan Warburton]

Wong Kar-Wai, 2046, 2004

Put it this way: if you like In The Mood for Love, you'll probably like this. But whereas that film obliquely referenced Hiroshima Mon Amour, or at least that's what I remember thinking at the time, it seems WKW here has got his sights set on Blade Runner (prefer the Resnais, myself). But with the same oh-no-not-that-same-fuckin'-tune-again soundtrack, the same multiple costume changes and the same obsessive colour scheme. It helps if you remember what went on in the earlier film, but I found this sufficiently overlong and self-consciously film school that I don't feel like returning to either.

[Alastair]

Too late to wish you a Happy New Year, Alastair (I believe you're supposed to do that in January?) though I will anyway.

Happy New Year to you too Dan. Keep up the good work.

[Dan Warburton]

Happy to oblige! Here's one from the other side of the planet to where you are, cap'n:



Rúnar Rúnarsson, Bergmal ("Echo"), 2019

As an assemblage of brief sketches depicting folks from all ages and all walks of life (in Iceland at Christmastime), Roy Andersson comes to mind, and behind him, Kaurismäki. That said, Rúnarsson's vignettes are refreshingly brief - though you could easily imagine extending several of them into fully fledged features, the situations are so intriguing (love the guys banished to the garage because the wife can't stand the smell of the fermented fish.. and the other three blitzed out of their skulls trying to play Monopoly) - and, unlike Andersson, who seems to be getting darker and more miserable with each film, there's a welcome lightness of touch. Enjoyed this very much - but then again as you know, I'm a fan of all things Icelandic. Except the fermented shark.

[Dan Warburton]

Salomé Lamas, Eldorado XXI, 2016

Thinking of a holiday in Peru? Machu Picchu's cool, if you can avoid the umpteen zillion others with the same idea, and the Nazca lines are supposed to be great when seen from the air (provided your plane doesn't go down - one did recently), but if there's one place you definitely want to steer clear of, it's La Rinconada, a bleak mining town situated at 4750m altitude whose inhabitants have to eke out a living grubbing for several grams of gold in a mountainside of black gravel in a perpetual snowstorm, an intolerable existence only made just about bearable by chewing coca leaves nonstop and drinking yourself to oblivion when you're not working (and, oh yes, make sure nobody ambushes you on the way home from the bar and rips your heart out as an offering to the malevolent Inca gods..). You think I'm making this up? After watching this jawdropping documentary of almost Straubian austerity - one of the shots lasts over 45 minutes - I'll never make fun of Rochdale or Luton Airport again. Yikes.

[Dan Warburton]

Mike Hodges, Croupier, 1998

Yes (Ben, Henrik..), much better than the last Clive Owen / Mike Hodges thing I reviewed here a while back. Owen is absolutely perfect here (can't resist saying yet again he's the best Bond that never was) delivering a sharp script in a really well-made and compelling piece of filmmaking. OK, the twist(s) ending left me a little disappointed, though I guess it was inevitable he'd overcome his writer's block, but the characters without exception are expertly drawn (can't say the same for that gangster thing with Malcolm McDowell) and the montage is top-notch. Good stuff!

[Dan Warburton]

Roberto Rossellini, Europa '51, 1951

In this, which forms part of a "solitude" trilogy with Stromboli and Viaggio en Italia (but has as much in common with Francesco, guillare di Dio), Ingrid Bergman plays the socialite wife of a thoroughly detestable executive who fails to spot the telltale signs of her son's impending suicide attempt and subsequently out of guilt becomes a strange kind of St Francis of Assisi figure hellbent on helping out the less fortunate in society (one of whom is played by the impossibly cheerful Giulietta Masina)[flash=] before being eventually committed to a psychiatric hospital[/flash]. Sounds like a barrelful of laughs, eh? There's an oddly disconcerting naïveté to Rossellini's films of this period, especially when compared to what immediately followed them - Antonioni, Fellini, and later Pasolini - which makes them hard to love, if easy to admire.

[Dan Warburton]

Kon Ichikawa, The Inugami Family, 1976

IMDb: "When a tycoon passes away, he unexpectedly leaves the family fortune to outsider Tamayo on the condition that she marries one of the grandsons, pitting blood against blood." Koji Ishizaka plays the delightfully dishevelled detective Kosuke Kindaichi - a kind of Japanese Columbo - in an engrossing if a little on the long side (necessary nonetheless to fish up all the Agatha Christie-like red herrings) tale of feuding inlaws. A little dated, perhaps - put that down to the chirpy and very Seventies soundtrack? - but entertaining enough.
https://www.fareastfilms.com/?review_po ... ami-family

[Dan Warburton]

Matthew Chapman, Heart of Midnight, 1988

Once more, big thank you to my pal in Sweden for pointing me in the direction of this one - though I dare say, big fan as I am of Jennifer Jason Leigh, I might have come across it myself in the fullness of time. Anyway, if you like Kubrick and Lynch (and we know Chapman likes the former: see Stranger's Kiss - and I suspect he knows the latter too) you'll enjoy it. Actually, with all those slow menacing tracking shots down garishly lit corridors into dark recesses in which danger lurks, I wonder if Lynch didn't swipe some of Lost Highway from this one. Be that as it may, it's a scary little tale of the already fragile Leigh who inherits her late uncle's, erm, nightclub (sex club, restaurant, bar.. seems the place has seen various incarnations over the years) and everything that goes with it. We soon learn the uncle wasn't the nicest of chaps (to put it mildly..), and left several nasty surprises for his niece. Peter Coyote once more delivers the shivers, and watch out for Sylvester Stallone's younger brother Frank as the deliciously cynical rock'n'roll cop. Splendid! Though you might not feel like eating an apple for a while afterwards.

[Dan Warburton]

Ingmar Bergman - From the Life of the Marionettes ("Aus dem leben der marionetten") - 1980

This is intriguing, and I have a lot to say about why. Let’s situate the film, and Bergman, let’s draw the picture. In the forties and fifties when the man rose to prominence, he had to toe the line, work within established genres, such as comedy (Smiles of a Summer Night, for instance). But with growing clout and stature, the sixties rolled around and with them the mature filmmaker. Let’s say that Through a Glass Darkly is an interesting pivot: the cosy family setting of a cluttered country house veering into emptiness, madness and pain. Emptiness, yes, and the point I wish to make about my fellow Swede. For a man so obsessed with the theatre, with the room, there is remarkably little attention paid to interiors in his films. The point, of course: as soon as he could leave studio and genre dictates behind, he did, shedding all that unwanted poundage. With the mature Bergman, the face becomes his interior. (Deleuze makes some excellent points here). And herein lies the rub: working with a fixed troupe of actors as he did, this aesthetic becomes tedious. Not a spot on the actors, of course, they’re great, but manners and cliché intrude when the same set of questions and answers are worked through in film after film. (Interesting how Fassbinder could work at triple the pace, with a more or less fixed troupe, and consistency of theme and exposition, and yet arrive at something so infinitely more rewarding and rich.) Bergman is, in his way, as proscribed and imperious as Kubrick. Anyway, the tension in his films expressed in this way would equal a cluttered space with something fond and cosy, familial and familiar, but whenever pain or truth is approached, the scene and image empties out. Fanny and Alexander as a summation of a life’s work certainly carries this out: the magnificent Ekdahl family residence with the Christmas party at the opening, the family run theatre, the summer house; then the white of the father’s deathbed and lit de parade, and the naked terror and oppressive sternness of the bishop’s mansion. This is some length to go towards talking about the present film, but I wanted to set the scene. A lot of things happened around Marionetten, as we know: a highly public and publicised arrest for tax evasion, hospitalised as suicidal, tearing out the tubes to leave Sweden for the Residenztheater in Munich, and finding the energy and actors for this film. And something certainly did happen in this period, because this is the one film where the interior is worked through like an integral part of the aesthetic vision. If you want to, you can see all of Haneke in this movie. There is a queasy oppressiveness to the spaces Bergman sculpts. Tim’s apartment: settees, chairs, cushions and screens throughout, but lined up weirdly, centred but still off, uncomfortable. Or just something as basic as the kitchen table at the Egermann residence, the way it’s arranged and framed by Sven Nykvist: it really insists upon its presence, a piece of domestic technology rendered dense and visible. And, of course, the peep show where the prostitute Ka meets her end: nothing short of sublime, the way they flip into colour, just like the way that entire space is captured and rendered not only dull and unerotic, but tense and oppressive. A brilliant piece of cinema. And there are a few scenes and concepts in here that are just breathtaking. A paranoid Peter Egermann goes to visit his psychiatrist and friend; appointment over, he sets about to leave, but in a fit of jealous suspicion opens and closes the door, and remains in the apartment. Privy and spy to the wife’s visit and the unfolding infidelity with the friend, as is the camera. Or Tim extemporising to himself in the mirror! Or the dictating of the corporate letter in Peter Egermann’s office. Call me contrarian, but this, Riten, Vargtimmen and En passion are my favourite Bergmans, precisely in their haunted, against type strangeness.

I have little to add to your compendious post, Henrik. Finally got round to watching this yesterday (after much hounding from you ) and was duly impressed, in the way one is by Bergman - and, as you astutely point out, Haneke. I was trying to decide yesterday what my favourite Bergman film was, and couldn't come to a conclusion. If I ever do, I'll let you know. But that would entail watching the half dozen I've yet to see, and rewatching those I've already seen. Which could take some time... When we sit down after dinner and say "So what are we going to watch tonight?" (happens every day), Bergman very rarely comes up!

[Dan Warburton]

Denis Amar - Asphalte (1981)

On first view this sounds a bit conventional, not for its time perhaps, but a few years on: a bunch of people involved in violent pileups on different points of congested French holiday traffic. All framed by a team of surgeons in a local hospital doggedly stitching people together again, and again. But thankfully, it becomes so much more. I know nothing about the director, but from a quick IMDb glance, his time in the arthouse seems to have been very short. This and a few other things, and then off into action and television. A pity, things might have happened, maybe this tanked violently on release? Seeing as we are in France, there is the tradition of Jean-Luc Godard’s Week-end (Jean Yanne does a late, and excellent, turn in this one), Tati’s Trafic, Alain Cavalier’s Le plein de super (that film’s Etienne Chicot has a small role in this). A grand roster, but Amar steers clear of Godard’s dialectics or Tati’s japes and social commentary. And in fact, it deframes a bit, drifts into other territories, and this is where it becomes engrossing. I was brought to mind of George Sluizer’s Spoorloos; of the Italians, with Dino Risi’s Il sorpasso; the congealing ecstasies of the motorway in Fellini’s Roma; of Antonioni with Il grido and Deserto rosso. More concretely, there is a literary brilliance to script and dialogue here. Things are said that sound off, unfocused, weirdly astringent and confrontational. Tonalities overlap and intrude, become metallic and unpleasant: Carole Laure at a rest stop is continuously accosted by motorway dragueurs, another crazed guy insistently in her face. There is a very peculiar, and gorgeous, admixture of tensile lyricism and explosive unpredictability that you can recognise from Jacques Rozier and also, very distantly, from Stévenin’s Double messieurs. I am listing a lot of great stuff here, but that is how much I like it. One more, literature this time: Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop’s Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (Los autonautas de la cosmopista: o Un viaje atemporal Paris-Marsella), where the authors set about to travel by car between Paris and Marseille, stopping for the day, and night, at every rest stop they happened on. The trip is dubbed out into infinity, mechanical monotony and boredom giving way to dreamy abstraction and lyricism. An amazing book, really (I’ve read it at least two times): read that, watch the films, and watch this. Beautiful.

Another fine write-up of a fine film! A real OVNI this, isn't it? Not really a thriller, not really a tearjerking melodrama, and not really a comedy, but with elements of all three, except that Amar has fun thwarting each of our attempts to pigeonhole it: Carole Laure (fine performance) is neither ditzy heroine nor femme fatale, and we never find out the story of the suitcase; the melo subplots with Marielle (you just know an accident is bound to happen as soon as he picks his car up in the garage), Chicot and the old couple looking for personal effects in his scrapyard, and Wilson the chainsmoking worldweary surgeon are all allowed to.. well, just fizzle out, we never see them again; and though there's much humour in Jean Yanne's deadpanning, the way he ends up kills any comedy outright. In short, a film that keeps you guessing throughout, thoroughly engrossing and highly recommended.

[Dan Warburton]

Joseph Losey, The Go-Between, 1971

So I googled this and the first thing I saw was "The Go-Between is a disappointing period drama which squanders a potentially interesting premise", which links to Rotten Tomatoes where I see the film has a 100% fresh rating. So god knows who wrote the sentence above." I don't particularly agree with it anyway, though on reviewing I'm not of the opinion that this is Losey's best work with Pinter (that's a toss up between Accident and The Servant, I reckon). Maybe it's my own jaundiced (these days) opinion of my country of origin and its dreaded class system, all jolly japes and surnames only between boys (and it's only boys) and public schools and cricket etc., the outdated rotten system that gave us the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and the current (not for long I hope, though I fear for the worst) incumbent of 10 Clowning Street. Whatever, fine performances as to be expected from Messrs Bates and Fox and Ms Christie. The story? I'm reminded of those lines from Peter Porter's wonderfully acerbic John Marston Advises Anger: "She won’t marry the men / She sleeps with, she’ll revert to type – it’s part / Of the side-show: Mummy and Daddy in the wings, / The bongos fading on the road to Haslemere / Where inheritors are inheriting still."

[Dan Warburton]

Jeanne Moreau, L'Adolescente, 1979

One of my fellow Karagargans informs me that Jeanne Moreau's estate, including the rights to the films she directed, is now in the hands of her estate, so I hope that someone in the Moreau family has the good sense to get this splendid (and, it would seem, more than partly autobiographical) coming of age tale properly restored and reissued in glorious HD. Wiki: "Set deep in the French countryside just before the start of , it shows the idyllic life of a remote village in the mountainous where a family from has come to holiday with relatives. The family get-together marks a coming-of-age for daughter Marie, the adolescent of the title." With Edith Clever as the mother and Simone Signoret as the grandmother (not forgetting Laetitia Chauveau as Marie - her only film appearance, alas) and a cast of great actors, how can you go wrong? A mystery why this, along with Jean Eustache's Mes petites amoureuses, isn't better known.

[Dan Warburton]

Daniela Thomas & Walter Salles, Linha de Passe, 2008

This review https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie ... -125020/is on the one comparing it to Rocco and His Brothers, theme-wise, though Salles and Thomas' kinetic photography looks more like the Dardennes than Visconti. Sandra Corveloni won - deservedly - Best Actress at Cannes for her portrayal of the poverty-stricken mother of four in São Paulo. Another holiday destination you might choose to avoid.

[Dan Warburton]

Abel Ferrara, Piazza Vittorio, 2017

I really like Ferrara's documentaries, because the occasionally sloppy camerawork and montage that tends to mar some of his features doesn't matter, and even adds to the authenticity of the endeavour. Showing everyday life in and around the piazza in Rome that gives it its title, it's an entertaining and endearing portrait of the neighbourhood, which is, of course, far more ethnically diverse these days with the influx of migrants from Africa and Latin America. And the USA - "I'm a fuckin' immigrant too," Ferrara growls at one of his interviewees -including Abel's acteur fétiche Willem Dafoe, who's also recently moved nearby. Nice thing is the film doesn't set out to judge or side with anyone in particular. Must get back to Rome before too long.