David Matthews

A Somewhat Gentle Man
dir. by Hans Petter Moland
(Norway, 108 mins.)
Portland International Film Festival (PIFF) 2011

The film festival program describes A Somewhat Gentle Man as an “off-kilter tragi-comedy [whose sensibility] has been compared to that of the Coen Brothers and Aki Kaurismaki — dark in tone but light in spirit.” Kaurismaki is the closer kinship. Charles Bukowski also comes to mind.

The opening scene opens a little window into the character of the protagonist. On a bleak winter day, Ulrik (Stellan Skarsgård) stands in the prison yard, at the gate, waiting to be released after serving twelve years for murder. He is a big man, tall, heavyset, of middle age, with thinning hair tied back in a ponytail. A prison guard approaches and hands Ulrik a bottle of beer as a token of the guards’ good wishes as he gets on with the rest of his life. Ulrik looks straight ahead, motionless, after a bit saying, “Okay. Thanks.” The guard is not an eloquent man. He gropes for the right words and finds few as he advises Ulrik to leave the past behind him when he walks through the gate.

The dialogue is laconic and the circumstances darkly humorous. Ulrik is the somewhat gentle man the title suggests, a decent man who is not drawn to violence but is capable of it. He generally looks at life with a kind of stoicism, bemused and almost detached, accepting what life dishes out even when it brings him pain.

Once out on the street Ulrik connects with Jensen, a minor league hoodlum boss who supported his ex-wife while he was imprisoned and now expects payback on the debt. Jensen arranges for his sex-starved sister to rent Ulrik a dank room with not much more appeal than the prison cell he just left. Since Ulrik is a mechanic by trade, Jensen fixes a job for him in a garage owned by an odd little man who turns out be Jensen’s former brother-in-law, thus the sister’s sex-starved state.

Wacky characters parade through the film to embellish scene after scene in brief appearances, among them a tough-guy dwarf gun dealer and Ulrik’s ex-wife, who says she respects him for doing what a man must do, but he ruined her life and she wants nothing to do with him, then offers a quickie for old time’s sake, one for the road, you might say, because as she puts it, they used to be so fucking romantic.

I do not recall a film where there was so much laughter throughout the audience during the sex scenes. Ulrik is not the stereotypical ex-con eager for some action after twelve years inside. The action comes to him unsought, and he takes it up with more resignation than eagerness, as if having found himself in a situation from which there is no way out but to do the deed.

Then he becomes involved with Merete, who manages the office at the garage and on their first meeting matter of factly warns him not to even think about getting into her pants, telegraphing that there will something between them before the final credits run.  Her attitude changes after Ulrik has a forceful little chat with her abusive ex-husband, which ends with Ulrik advising the creep to flag down a taxi to take him to emergency room, have that broken arm taken of, tell them he fell down the stairs. Things seem to be looking up a bit for a change until Ulrik feels obliged to tell his landlady that he is seeing somehow else. As we might expect, the landlady takes it badly, snarling at Ulrik, “Even sluts have feelings.”

The twelve years in prison left Ulrik estranged from his son, Geir, now twenty-five, studying to be an electrical engineer and with a nice fiancé who appears ready to give birth at any moment. After an awkward beginning father and son seem to be on the path to reconciliation until Geir reveals his father’s past to the fiancé, who comes from a proper family that just does not do things like kill people. Ulrik is told he cannot come around anymore.

Banished from his son’s life, given the boot by Merete and fired from the garage job as a consequence of the landlady’s vengeful machinations, Ulrik seems poised to go against his nature and inclinations and return to the gangster life.

Moland the director says, “A Somewhat Gentle Man is a film about our painful shortcomings, a tribute to less-than-perfect sex, and a worldwide campaign against the people of petty exactness who rule the world.” (quoted in 34th Portland International Film Festival program).

Moland made a nice little film whose characters touch us with their ordinary humanity, shortcomings, rough edges, bizarreness and all, and who are able to feel for others even through the difficulties, the needs and yearnings, the daily grind, and the pain that make up so much of their own lives. With decency come dignity and grace.

David :: Feb.26.2011 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

How I Ended This Summer
dir. by Alexei Popogrebsky
(Russia, 124 minutes)
Portland International Film Festival (PIFF) 2011

T-Bone and Mrs. T-Bone joined me for an early afternoon showing of How I Ended This Summer. Before the film we rendezvoused at Park Avenue Café, where I absolutely insisted that the coffee was on me. The conversation and company were excellent, and T-Bone said it was the sweetest coffee he ever drank.

That was the high point. As T-Bone remarked afterward, this one was right in his wheelhouse and he still found it interminable. Thirty or forty minutes could easily have been excised with nothing lost from this thriller set at a remote meteorological research station in the Russian Arctic. Even at that, there are arresting scenes and moments of great intensity as young Pasha’s summer job turns from a grand adventure in the wild to to a nightmare of psychological trauma and terror rooted in his own weakness and foul-ups. Menaced by a polar bear, radioactivity, unforgiving nature, and his intimidating comrade Sergei, Pasha is driven to the brink of madness and murder.

An ordinary film, even a bad film, may have moments that touch on the sublime or the marvelous. How I Ended This Summer is neither ordinary nor bad. The two actors (Grigory Dobrygin as Pasha, Sergei Puskepalis as Sergei) are quite good, and the cinematography is sometimes spectacular. For all that, I was not much taken with it, and perhaps more telling, neither was T-Bone.

My Joy
dir. by Sergei Loznitsa
(Ukraine, 127 minutes)

A pastiche of random violence and surpassing strangeness in Ukraine. “There are hints of Tarkovsky in the poetic exploration of place and memory…the sense of a Dantean journey and a vision of utter hell are powerfully conveyed.”— Time Out, London (quoted in the program for the 34th Portland International Film Festival). Beyond that, I don’t have a clue about this one.

David :: Feb.21.2011 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

The Double Hour
dir. by Guiseppe Capotondi
(Italy, 95 minutes)
Portland International Film Festival (PIFF) 2011

The Double Hour is a finely wrought psychological suspense with a denouement I found heartrending. Kseniya Rappoport is a wonder as Sonia, at once femme fatale and something of a tragic figure. There are a number of ways the convoluted plot could have played out. This film found the right one.

David :: Feb.20.2011 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

Following is the text of an mail I sent this morning to my senators and congressman. Writing a letter is not much, and I have no illusion as to its effect. It is a small thing I can do by way of taking a stand. The same goes for weighing into the fray via the small forum this space offers. Some might say this amounts to no more than a symbolic gesture. Well, I am poet. Symbols matter. Gestures matter.

I urge you to stand firm against Republican budget proposals that would slash or end support for NPR and PBS, weaken environmental and workplace safety protections, curtail financial oversight reforms enacted in the wake of the recession, cripple the administration’s attempts to invest in infrastructure, hamstring health care reform, and generally gut a host of other important discretionary government programs.

We all know the US faces serious fiscal problems. Hard decisions lie ahead. You will likely have to vote to cut programs I believe are important. I accept that. What I do not accept is the Republican article of faith that the budget deficit can be addressed without raising revenue. You know, as I do, that George W. Bush inherited a budget surplus. The present state of affairs was precipitated by the Bush tax cuts, two ongoing wars fought without raising revenue to pay for them, and a needed Medicare prescription drug benefit that was not paid for. These are not the sole causes of our fiscal dilemma, but they contributed mightily to it.

Even Republicans acknowledge that cuts in discretionary spending will have no discernible impact on the deficit. They are using fiscal circumstances as a pretense to hammer programs they oppose on ideological grounds. I am tempted to term this a cynical move but should give the benefit of the doubt. I imagine there are some honorable women and men among them.

The tax cuts for the wealthiest among us should never have been enacted, much less extended. That those who have prospered have special obligation to support the nation is a principle that goes back at least to ancient Greece. No one proposes that they be taxed back into the middle class. The wealthy would still be wealthy without the Bush tax cuts.

Furthermore, President Obama should never have said he would never raise taxes on the middle class. There may be sound reasons not to raise middle-class taxes now with the economy as it is, but we should all be willing to contribute to the common good and general welfare. I can accept higher taxes to support health care for all, public transportation, high speed rail, a clean environment, a real social safety net, and the arts. There you have it. I write not as a Democrat but as a European-style socialist.

David :: Feb.20.2011 :: House Red: Politics & Current Affairs :: No Comments »

Kawasaki’s Rose
dir. by Jan Herbejk
(Czech Republic, 100 minutes)
Portland International Film Festival (PIFF) 2011

The word from the film festival calendar is that Kawasaki’s Rose is inspired in part by the fine German film The Lives of Others. Thus we know going in that this film will deal with life in the 1970s and ’80s, before the Velvet Revolution, and the theme will have something to do with how people comported themselves during that era, whether with honor, integrity, and courage, or out of cowardice and self-interest, maybe acting from genuine belief in socialist ideals even as those ideals were betrayed by the regime, or driven by venality or greed, or just doing what they felt they must to get on with their lives in circumstances not of their choosing, in other words from the kind of mix and muddle that makes up all our lives.

Pavel Josek (Martin Huba) is the ostensible protagonist, highly regarded as a social psychologist and for his role as a prominent dissident  under the communist regime. The film opens with Pavel set to receive the prestigious “Memory of the Nation” award. In the days leading up to the presentation of this award, a television crew is putting together a documentary that includes extensive interviews with Pavel and  his wife, Jana (Daniela Kolarova), who is not bashful about presenting her husband in a heroic light as he looks quietly on.

I term Pavel the ostensible protagonist because while he is the central figure around whom the stories of the others come into focus, these stories are interwoven with his into a compelling whole: his wife and her former lover, the sculptor Borek (Antonin Kratochvil) in exile in Sweden; Pavel’s daughter, recently recovered from a form of “cow cancer” exceedingly rare in humans, her philandering husband, and his lover; and as slightly lesser figures Pavel’s granddaughter and Borek’s friend Kawasaki, a Japanese painter who stopped painting after suffering his own tragedy.

The documentary turns up evidence that as a young man Pavel collaborated with the secret police. The evidence is pounced on by Ludek (Milan Mikulcík) the son-in-law, who despises Pavel. From here a bare-bones summary of the plot reads like soap opera, with Lucie (Lenka Vlasáková) outraged that her father should have lived a lie all these years, Jana fierce in her defense of Pavel as she relives painful events whose memory was long ago put aside, the film crew off to Sweden to interview the bohemian sculptor, a victim of the communists now living quite happily and successfully in exile, dark family secrets uncovered, the creepy Ludek given the boot by Lucie after he and Radka (Petra Hrebickova) suggest a ménage á trois arrangement based on new agey, quasi-Buddhist principles. Those who know me will not be surprised to find that I think now of The Brothers Karamazov, another tale with a soap opera plot that serves as the scaffolding for what we call art.

Kawasaki’s Rose masterfully melds the personal with the political. Was Pavel’s collaboration an act of weakness that led to a dark night of the soul from which he made himself a better man, his dissidence an honorable attempt at redemption? Or was the political activism done to cover up that collaboration? Is he no more than a slick operator who looks after his own interests while swaying with the prevailing winds?

Jana will always believe in him. Perhaps she must, for her own sake as much as his.  At the end Borek sets the past aside. Lucie’s forgiveness seems to be more grudging. I say it seems to be because much here is spelled out, and that is part of the beauty of this wonderful film. Only Pavel knows if he acts in good faith. And perhaps not even Pavel knows.

two I missed

My film festival was disrupted the past few days when I was a little under the weather. I missed two that I intended to see. The Robber (dir. by Benjamin Hiesenberg), is an Austrian film about a man in the grip of twin obsessions: running marathons and robbing banks. A friend suggested this one could have planted seeds of some bad ideas, so better that I missed it. Another friend described Young Goethe! (dir. by Philipp Stözl) as “so non-American! A film about poetry and truth…” Sounds right up my alley.

David :: Feb.19.2011 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

Behind Blue Skies
dir. by Hannes Holm
(Sweden, 111 minutes)
Portland International Film Festival (PIFF) 2011

Behind Blue Skies is a coming of age film set in 1970s Sweden. The plot takes off from a fairly conventional set-up. Martin (Bill Skarsgård) is a young boy with a troubled family life, his father an alcoholic who is sometimes violent toward him and his mother. The family does not live in poverty, but they are far from comfortably middle class.  All Martin knows of his father’s job is that he works in an office. His mother provides home day care to make ends meet. Martin tries to rein in his father and protect his mother, but he is not yet able to stand up to him as one man to another. The family problems remain a family secret.

The story opens at the end of the school year. The family of Martin’s schoolmate and best friend Micke is readying to spend the summer at an island resort. Micke’s father invites Martin to join them so he and Micke can spend the summer together. Well, sort of. He arranges a job for Martin at the resort hotel. Martin will live in the hotel staff quarters, not with Micke’s family, thus setting the stage for a little social commentary of the sort our Republican friends would term class warfare.

Martin is an almost unnaturally beautiful young man. Think of Tadzio in Visconti’s Death in Venice. At times his innocence is almost beyond belief as he goes along with things in a thoughtless fashion at which we can only wonder. Yet later there is the sense that he catches on to more than he lets on.

Gösta (Peter Dalle) the hotel manager is a petty autocrat and slimeball. After firing Martin when the boy takes the fall for some stolen beer, Gösta takes him under his wing as a kind of personal gofer he employs in his endeavors in the drug and prostitution trades.

At first Martin goes along without knowing what he is getting into. After the nature of Gösta’s activities becomes clear, Martin continues with him because, really, what other option is there but to return home and help his mother with the day care. The scenario plays out with a beautifully conveyed sense of foreboding, because we have come to care about Martin and it is clear there is no way this can end well.

No coming of age story could be complete without youthful romance. This one is sweetly told. Martin and his coworker at the hotel, Jenny (Josefin Ljungman), are drawn to each other as the initial surreptitious glances lead to brief snippets of conversation and encounters where as much is communicated by shared silences as by the words that bracket those silences. Jenny has her own secret family darkness and her determination to save money and go to Spain to make a better life, while Martin is silent when he should say something, only to say the wrong things, or at least not quite the right ones, when he does speak. We all know how that goes.

For much of Behind Blue Skies I thought the film was okay, but I was not taken in by it. Toward the end came turns that redeem everything and bring the Behind Blue Skies near to the sublime. This is one where I find myself liking it more and more as I think about it afterward, and I am reminded that a film is not just what we see in the theater. It is what we carry with us when we walk away.

David :: Feb.14.2011 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

Silent Souls
dir. by Aleksei Fedorchenko
(Russia, 75 minutes)
Portland International Film Festival (PIFF) 2011

“We wanted tenderness to be transformed into nostalgia; tenderness and nostalgia were to become synonymous with love. This feeling, this representation of the Merjan, was something we felt the whole time we were staying in that region.” — Fedorchenko

The Merjan are a Finnish tribe that “dissolved into the Slavs about four hundred years ago.” Aist, the film’s narrator, is the son of a strange, self-educated Merjan poet in the Russian town of Neya. Concerned about the loss of Merjan culture and traditions, Aist has taken up writing stories, songs, and poems to preserve it.

Miron, director of  the paper mill where Aist works as a photographer, tells Aist that his wife, Tanya, is dead and asks Aist to help bury her in the traditional way.

The ritual begins at Miron’s home where Tanya lies on her deathbed. The two men remove her dress. Miron brushes her hair and tenderly bathes her with a washcloth. Then they tie colored hair ribbons into her pubic hair, which the narrator explains is what a bride’s friends do on the day before her wedding. On the wedding night the husband removes the ribbons and ties them together and hangs them from a tree.

The corpse is placed in the back of Miron’s car, and the two men embark on a journey to the place where Miron and Tanya spent their honeymoon. As they drive through the bleak, evocative landscape, Miron engages in the tradition the Merjan call “smoking,” telling stories that reveal intimate details of his life with Tanya, things he would never have told anyone while she was alive.

One reviewer described these as dirty stories. The description could hardly be more wrongheaded. In another context perhaps we would call them dirty stories. Here they are stories of a passionate love. They evoke memories of the beloved that make the teller’s face brighten and bring feelings of tenderness.

The journey calls up in Aist memories of his mother, who died in childbirth when he was seven, and his father, the strange poet who the townspeople sometimes applauded and sometimes beat up. Aist’s father was devastated by the loss of his wife. After her death he no longer behaved so strangely, and Aist believes he died of grief. Memories of his mother’s burial are interspersed with recollection of the symbolic burial of his father’s typewriter.

The Merjan tradition is to bury the dead not in the earth but in water. They think of drowning as suffocation in joy, tenderness, and yearning. At the river of the honeymoon, Aist and Miron build a pyre and cremate the body and deliver the ashes into the water.

The Merjan have no gods, only their love for each other. On the journey home Miron and Aist stop in a city along the river. Standing on a bridge, the lights of the city spread out before them, they are approached by two women. One asks, “Do you want to come with us?” Miron says, “Of course we want to come with you.” For as narrator explains, the Merjan believe a live woman’s body is also a river that carries grief away.

At the beautiful and enigmatic close of Silent Souls, my face brightened and my spirit filled with tenderness and yearning. How much of what is presented as Merjan tradition and culture is rooted in what we ordinarily think of as reality and how much in the filmmaker’s imagination and vision is an open question. The answer does not matter.

postscript

A friend’s observation:

The 2nd screening of “Silent Souls” ended as we were in line for “Aftershock”.  Some white haired old lady came out and declared it was “……loooooooooong and quiet and weird.”  A cluster of Russians came out and were excitedly talking in a circle before scattering into the night.  I couldn’t understand them, but I trusted their review more than granny’s.

David :: Feb.13.2011 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

As I write, it is not yet known which moment of 1989 the situation in Egypt will emulate, Tienanmen in June, or Prague in November. Whatever the outcome now, we know the world has turned again, and the lessons of Cairo will be applied, on all sides, in civil struggles that will dominate the coming era. — Ric Vrana, Preliminary Lessons from Egypt

Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
— William Wordsworth, “French Revolution as it appeared to enthusiasts at its commencement.”

Whose heart cannot beat a bit faster at the sight of hundreds of thousands of citizens peacefully assembled to demand that the dictator must go? Who could be unmoved by the young fellow, his left eye hidden behind a swath of white bandage, informing a reporter that his mother has ordered him to remain in the streets until Mubarak goes? He says, “I am a hero now,” and his comrades beside him take up the chant.

There is some consensus that Mubarak’s time is past, however he clings to power for the moment. We can hope that the insurrection in Cairo and other cities will end in democracy but should not be surprised to see a new strongman replace the old one or a military coup justified by the threat of descent into chaos and anarchy. The emergence of an actual or de facto theocracy, as in Iran or Israel, seems less likely, though the Islamist bogeyman, in the guise of the Muslim Brotherhood, is predictably trotted out by the regime and those in the West who would preserve the status quo, allowing perhaps for cosmetic change but no more than that.

People yearn for freedom. They need bread to feed their families. Wael Nawara, a cofounder of the opposition Tomorrow Party, addressed the challenge posed by this dynamic Friday in an interview with Margaret Warner on the PBS Newshour :

Well, actually, I really think that we need to think also of, you know, new ways of how to sustain this. Maybe we go only once a week, or maybe twice a week, to the square.

So, we need to start thinking also of ways to sustain this with minimum damage, collateral damage, to our people who Mubarak is holding hostage. He’s holding our people, our folks, our families hostage with no money, running people out of cash, running people out of groceries.

And we have to be smart also and start realizing, we don’t want to lose the popular support. We want to continue our movement, but also take into consideration the interests of little people who — who depend — the taxi driver who has to pay the installments of his taxi, so that he needs to work to be able to pay.

We need to think of ways, creative ways, to sustain the movement while at the same time also allow our folks to — to — you know, to breathe some air.

The U.S. role in all this is problematic. Yes, America has influence, but it is not a puppetmaster. The Obama administration is playing all sides in the hope of retaining that influence whatever the outcome of the power struggle playing itself out.

U.S. support of the pro-democracy forces is tricky because the U.S. is rightly viewed with considerable suspicion in that part of the world. It could be counterproductive for Obama to come more strongly on the side of the opposition at this time. No opposition group wants to be tarred as a tool of U.S., and by extension Israeli, interests. There are reports that the Obama administration has sent clear messages to the military that they will held responsible if there is violence against the demonstrators. This is where the U.S. has leverage and can nudge things in a direction we hope they will take.

I tend to see Obama more supportive of the demonstrators than some of my friends think him. This support is tempered by his instinct for stability. He has no faith, nor do I, that democracy and freedom are bound to rise Phoenix-like from chaos and anarchy, and he does not want the U.S. left on the outside looking in if pro-democracy forces do not prevail. Hence the embrace of Omar Suleiman as a transition figure. Those less kindly disposed to Obama than I am may assert that Suleiman is not intended to be a transition figure at all but simply the new strongman designee to further U.S. and Israeli policy. Doubt is cast on this interpretation by the willingness of the Muslim Brotherhood to join talks with the government, as reported by the BBC (Egypt protests: Government holds talks with opposition). The real $64 question centers around Suleiman’s willingness to be a transition figure and what influence the U.S. can bring to bear, and how far Obama is willing to go, if he tries to hold onto power.

How events play out only the days, weeks, and months ahead will tell. We take heart in the example of people rising up against tyranny and hope their struggle will usher in a new dawn of freedom and human dignity, but we should not delude ourselves. The triumph of the people is not ordained by fate. So while we cherish our hope, we should steel our spirits against the possibility of an outcome we do not wish, lest we allow ourselves to be cast into cynicism and despair, an absence of all hope that makes even the darkest outcome darker still.

references and resources

There is an understandable tendency to personify the government, to blame Mubarak himself for all that’s gone wrong. But Mubarak does not operate alone; hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Egyptians are directly implicated in his regime. From the security chiefs, the cabinet and the members of parliament to civil service bureaucrats, businessmen, local government heads, police officers and informers, a large chunk of the population stands to lose everything if Mubarak is comprehensively overthrown. With him would go the source of all their power, be it great or petty. (Simon Allison, Let them eat bread, Asia Times Online, 2 February 2011)

PBS Newshour  analysis: Judy Woodruff w/ Hisham Melham, Al-Arabiya Television; MARC LYNCH, George Washington University; MICHELE DUNNE, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Al Jazeera

Asia Times

Informed Comment

Talking Points Memo

David :: Feb.06.2011 :: House Red: Politics & Current Affairs :: No Comments »