We’ve discussed Youth of the Beast elsewhere and also over there, and from what I’ve read that’s the film where Seijun Suzuki blasted out of the action genre expected by his studio bosses and into some hyperstylized visual poetry assonant but not consonant with a tough-guy crime thriller. Or, put plainly, it has all the markings of a crime movie but feels like a species entirely alien.

And his films got stranger from there. I just watched the fairly-recent Pistol Opera which seems wholly unconcerned with narrative coherence, instead riffing on gorgeous, gorgeous, silly and stark images. To call this a crime film will steer people wrong; instead, imagine a pop-art reiteration of everything a crime movie might have, including quasi-professional assassin guilds, rivalries between top-ranked killers, and lots of tough-guy and tough-dame patter. It’s glorious to watch, even though I couldn’t pretend to know how one would “make sense” of the film.

‘Brothers’ is a Danish film, directed by Suzanne Bier, that was apparently some kind of hit at Sundance. It is very good, though frequently painful to watch, and it is that pain that makes the movie so powerful. The setup is pretty simple. There is Michael, the good brother, who is a soldier and a good husband and parent, and Jannik, the bad brother, who is a fuck up, released from prison as the movie begins. Michael goes with Danish/NATO forces to Afghanistan, and on his first day there, the helicopter he is in is blown out of the sky, and everyone believes, and his family is told, that he is dead. In fact (and this is no spoiler because the movie is quick to tell us), he survives and is kept captive by some Afghan military group. Meanwhile, Jannik rapidly shapes up as he helps Michael’s wife, Sarah, and kids get over their grief, and he becomes dependable and perhaps a little in love with Sarah. Michael is forced to commit an atrocity, and then is rescued. But when he returns home, his rage, guilt and bitterness overwhelm him and he spirals downhill. Thus, a little too neatly, the good and the bad brother trade places.

Despite the too-pat storyline, this is a beautifully acted and subtle portrait of a family torn apart and trying to put pull itself together. All the leads are excellent, and Connie Nielsen, as Sarah, is astounding. She manages grief at the same time as she knows she has to protect her two young daughters from the pain of losing their father. The camera lingers on her face (which is, after all, incredibly beautiful) and a whole range of different emotions will pass across it in the space of a few seconds. Almost all the scenes are interiors, mostly of pretty cramped houses, and Suzanne Bier gets to use low lighting and shadows to accentuate the way the emotions register on the faces of her characters. Enjoyable would be the wrong word, but this is well worth seeing.

in the very early days of the blog i asked:

more later. by the way, i am intrigued by netflix’s new “friends” feature–even if it unkindly says “you have no friends” when i click the tab now. anyone interested in linking to each other’s rental queues?

mike and i are netflix friends (which he has somewhat pathetically had inscribed on his business card, and listed in his cv). embarassingly for me, we agree on 90% of our film ratings; embarassingly for him, i can see that he has the entire emanuelle and ernest series in his queues. anyone else on netflix who wants to open themselves up in this way? if so, click on this.

This is a film by Laurent Cantet who directed the superb ‘Time Out’ and the not bad ‘Human Resources’, both films about the alienation of work and the struggles and personal demons that follow. ‘Heading South’, by contrast is about sex tourism. Set in the late 1970s in Haiti, the film depicts a group of middle-aged white women who stay at a small hotel in Haiti in order to surround themselves and have sex with young Haitian men. In fact they are little more than boys. There is a mock documentary style as every so often, one of the lead characters speaks straight to the camera and tells his or her back story. And the whole film takes place against the backdrop of grinding poverty and the Duvalier dictatorship.

It is about sex tourism, but the use of power for sex pervades the entire film from the opening scene when a Haitian mother tries to give her 15 year old daughter to an older Haitian man at the airport, to depictions of the Haitian power elite forcing young girls to become their mistresses. The ability of middle class white women (one is a college professor at Wellesley, another works in a warehouse in Montreal) to buy sex with gifts, food and pocket money is just the most direct example of the relatively powerful using their power for sex.
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I cannot for the life of me recall how or why this got onto my Netflix queue. Nor do I remember what made me look through that mountain of movies (most of which seem “good for you” and thus remain ever-hopeful numbers 100-300 out of my ridiculous 462 films lined up) to spot this little gem. But it is a great, small film. (more…)