Closer

This film is beautiful, terrible, and real. Sadly, in a world where we're used to hearing stories in the simplest and most easy to swallow terms, I doubt that the average lover of romantic comedies and action flicks will like it. This is a story about the perpetual struggles found in human relationships and if you're used to seeing on-screen romance played out with operatic tragedy, (The English Patient) fable-like tenderness (Like Water for Chocolate), or perfect endings (Officer and a Gentleman), you might be out of luck with this movie. If, however, you think you'd like to see something a little more up-close, complex and real, this might be a movie that will change the way you think about love.

This is a film that focuses less on individuals, and more on the relationships between those individuals. If the four characters in Closer were represented by four points on a map, this movie would be a study of the lines that cross between those points, rather than the points themselves. In this way, we can easily see ourselves and each other in what happens on screen: you don't have to be a photographer to relate to Julia Roberts' self-loathing adulterer, because the film doesn't strive to tell the story of where she came from or why she takes pictures. For her character, it strives to tell the story of someone completely overcome both with lust and with the guilt that accompanies it. These two compulsions feed off of each other so feverishly that she cannot find happiness either in acting on her lust or in abstaining. Telling this side and only this side of her story helps it become more universal, as do the stories of her surrounding characters.

Patrick Marber made only a few changes in adapting his play to the screen, resulting in distinctly theatre-esquire dialog. This intense stylization helps the unconventional narrative seep into your unconscious: with the characters speaking a slightly altered language, it becomes easier to accept their slightly altered depiction of romantic entanglements. Make no mistake, Closer pulls no punches when it comes to the ugly side of romance, of commitment, of love and of the need to be loved.

Marber seems to be preoccupied with the way a slighted lover will beg or even demand to know every excruciating detail about their lover's infidelity. This inexplicable and seemingly masochistic phenomenon pervades Closer on both a literal and thematic level, because Marber has a very simple and universal idea to present. This need to hear these painful truths is the thesis of Closer. What we're soon able to see through the weaving of the characters' relationships is that this desire is a manifestation of any lover's need to possess his or her beloved. The victim of an infidelity grapples not just with the pain of betrayal but also with the inescapable knowledge of a most intimate element of their lover that will never, ever be theirs. In the same way that a man might find himself unable to live with the knowledge of his girlfriend's past sexual encounters (a la Chasing Amy), the cheated-on man or woman has to confront their pain, however irrational, for being unable to think of every element of their partner as their own.

Closer revolves around this theme. On the one hand, it does this through the literal story of a man wanting to know the details of how and where and with whom his wife cheated on him, vainly trying to take back those intimate moments and claim them as his own. On the other hand, however, Closer uses this theme in a much more general way. A man may grasp at the lustful experiences of his wife, trying to reverse his exclusion from them, but the way that grasping is employed in Closer shows us that even if it weren't for the infidelity, he would be grasping anyway. We all would. Our need to feel we have complete possession of our lover is what drives us to desperately dig deeper and deeper, trying to gain some secret knowledge of who and what they are at their most pure and uncompromised level. The scene where Larry (played by On-Screen Demi-god Clive Owen at his raving, ravishing, ravaging best) verbally taunts Anna about her lustful experience with Dan makes it my all time favorite scenes in all the movies that I have seen. I felt the sensation you get when you watch a bullet travel from inside the cylinder of a .44 carbine revolver through the insides of a brain, cranium et al and out through the back of a throat, inslow motion. That's almost as accurate as I can put it.

In the end, however, this level doesn't exist. The digging, the struggling and the grasping is futile as no person can be reduced to a singular truth. We are an entirely different thing, practically a different animal, from moment to moment. As Natalie Portman's character so perfectly illustrates by the end, even the most mundane details about who we are can turn out to be transitory or meaningless. That's not a pretty area of human life to shine a light on but Mike Nichols does it and with an unflinching ability. If it's a perspective you're prepared to spend some time considering, Closer might just be the movie to get the ball rolling.

Sweet Sixteen

"Sweet Sixteen" was a very pleasant surprise. For someone like me who have yet been exposed to his previous works before this, I shall now eagerly go out and seek out his other movies.
The gradual dramatic shift and character build-up in Sweet Sixteen is a testament to Ken Loach's artistry and masterful craft as a director. His empathy for his characters is very evident here. Coupled with his intuitive understanding of how this story should be told, the film packed an emotional wallop (especially approaching the end) much unexpected before watching it.
Particularly striking is the unexpected range of Martin Compston's portrayal of Liam, the male protagonist of this powerful film. Throughout the film, we glimpsed into the psyche of this young boy/ man - his intelligence (uncanny street smarts), his honour (towards friendship & kinship), his courage and conviction and most heartbreakingly, his idealistic naiveté. This boy is brimming with charismatic magnetism. A bright future awaits him (can already picture him as a future Clive Owen or Tim Roth).
The scene that sold me was the (mild spoilers ahead) unexpectedly moving confrontation between Liam and his friend Pinball(approaching the end of the film). In those short few minutes, the power and depths of their ties were presented with heartbreaking clarity. I was floored completely. Being the sensitive bloke that I am, I welled up on witnessing the heartfelt sincerity of that scene. Unbelievable.
Beneath Sweet Sixteen's colourful language(with swearing aplenty) and thick indecipherable accents, this understated film turned out to be a very moving, top rated piece of drama. That the Oscars as usual ignored this film completely, has further cemented my disdain for the Academy's suspect taste (or lack thereof).
IMHO, Sweet Sixteen is too good a film to be ignored. It deserves a far wider audience. Will thus hope this film do secure a future commercial release in Singapore so more people can be touched by its magic. But the hopes are dim, which is very sad indeed.

Äideistä parhain (Mother of Mine)

I sat down to watch this film not knowing a thing about this movie. It wasn't until one of the reviews told me, what it was about that I realized what kind of movie I was about to see and - most important - that this is a story that had not yet been told on the big screen and that this was a story that needed to be told. I couldn't agree more, it's just a shame that this was the particular story that they chose to tell.
Parts of this movie is absolutely brilliant - the scenery, the cinematography and the actors. Oh, the actors! Michael Nyqvist, Maria Lundqvist and the young Topi Majaniemi are superb, utterly superb, it's in the script this movie fails and mainly on one pivotal point. In order for this movie to work you have to feel the anguish of young Eero, you have to feel his heart breaking when his mother sends him away to Sweden. And you do. But you also have to feel his heart breaking when he is sent back to Finland. This you don't do and that's because you don't get to feel the connection between Eero and his foster-mother Signe. When Eero and Signe first meet she doesn't want anything to do with him. She alienates herself from him, pushes him away. Towards the end she shows genuine love towards him, the thing is...I'm not aware of when this shift occurs. There aren't enough scenes in which we see them bonding. Suddenly they just...do. And this is where the movie fails.
Now, please remember what I said earlier. There are many things about this movie that are superb. The main thing being how the part of Eero is written and portrayed. A lot of films have a tendency to make children more mature than they really are, this movie doesn't make that mistake. Eero is a child and acts like one too. Not knowing why he feels the way he does he simply acts out his frustration in ways that a child would - not by sitting his foster-mother down and offering up wisdom befitting a 70-year old (which is all too common in movies such as these).
So, worth watching, just don't expect to get a wholly encompassing movie about what all Finnish war-children went through.

Los Amantes del Circulo Polar (Lovers of the Arctic Circle)

Julio Medem's brilliant films thrive on enigma, obfuscation, tease and irresolution. Lovers of the Arctic Circle is his most playful yet, because it seems his most lucid. There is the usual pattern of proliferating doubles, connection of motifs, bending of time; yet, rather than confuse or complicate like before, each separate entity seems thrusting towards the linear, Unified Whole of the conclusion, which is satisfying in an old-fashioned romantic way, until it too is irreversibly, indeterminately split.

The plot is Medem's simplest yet: two young children, Otto and Ana, are brought together by the affair between their parents which eventually grows into marriage. Otto continues to live with his mother, but increasing love for Ana causes him to move in with his dad so they can enjoy furtive lovemaking. Otto's mother, presumably ins reaction to a double abandonment, commits suicide; depressed, Otto tries to do likewise, fails, and leaves Ana and his family to become an air-messenger pilot. After a failed relationship with an old teacher, Ana goes to Lapland to live in a cabin owned by the father of her mother's new lover. A series of extraordinary coincidences seem to bring Ana back to Otto.

Anyone who has seen a Medem film (Lucia y el Sexo) will know what to expect: surface realistic observation is rejected in favour of an excessive formalism, artifice and patterning that allows access to greater emotional truths. The doubling is astonishing - male/female, mother/father, son/daughter, sister/brother, earth/air, North/South, death/rebirth, lost/found, concealment/revelation etc. Two halves should make one whole, but it never does in a Medem film, leading only to further fragmentation. The two main leads are played by three different actors each, leading to a triple splitting of self which is further underscored both by the permanency of the actors playing their parents, and by the different actors playing them slipping into the wrong time frame, e.g. the young Otto appearing in the adolescent Otto's plot.

Further dislocation occurs in the formal patterning of repetition and coincidence. The same scenes are repeated in different historical moments with different characters. The same events feature different protagonists, depending on the subjectivity of the teller. The main formal device is to have each lead tell in turn the story, but instead of clarifying, this only further confuses, because each sees differently from the other. Medem then undermines this obvious truth by showing a kind of innate bond between Otto and Ana: the palandromic fact of their names, the way each uses the other as a representation of a beloved dead parent etc. And yet again, THIS is denied in the film's most excruciating scene, where, years apart from each other, the two finally occupy the same space at a few feet's distance, on a cafe piazza, and fail to realise.

There is no such thing as a key to Medem, as his labyrinths are Theseus-proof, but the opening credits bear close scrutiny, revealing images of fragmentation - the crashed plane - and rupture, and an intimation of subjectivity that drives the film. Lovers of the Arctic Circle's ending suggests that it is Ana's striving for wholeness, after the ultimate dislocation - death. This reading, though, is questioned throughout - how, for instance, do we account for Otto's voiceover. We are forced to question how much of what we see is, if not literally plausible, than related. Most importantly, it makes us question the past, a history, and how it's told.

Medem's films, especially VACAS, are concerned with the difference between literal history, as told by the winners, and the messy, interior, emotional history of people as they live. VACAS featured a character named Peru, the name of Medem's son to whom TIERRA was dedicated, and who stars here as the young Otto. Lovers of the Arctic Circle is dedicated to Medem's father. The film is obsessed, like VACAS and, to a lesser extent, TIERRA, with family relationships, with tradition and continuity, with a saga that seem linear (generation follows generation) but is actually circular, as the past is continually replayed and distorted in the present.

A crucial subplot here is the meeting of Otto's grandfather with a Nazi bomber during the Guernica atrocity, an act that reverberates throughout the film, and touches, for good or ill, every character. The duality of the film is linked to the duality that split Spain apart throughout and after the Civil War. Another historical layer is linked to Medem's own work, as I outlined above, issues of continuity, which include style, cast, doubling, scenes (especially that of a photographer capturing his family), animals with supernatural powers, unresolved, or a proliferation of, endings; as well as discontinuities (e.g. for the first time, no Emma Suarez).

This is my lesser favourite Medem film, when compared to Lucia y el Sexo. It spends a little too much time in the air - its matrix of meaning is not as grounded in the blood and earth of his previous work. This is probably linked to the acting. In the earlier films the almost naturalistic truth of the actors clashed fertilely with the formal artifice. Here, the callow acting of the leads fails to achieve this, leaving one a little unsatisfied. The older stars are magnificent, though, especially Medem regular Nancho Novo, the loveliest man on film; his OWN abandonment is heartwrenching. There is also a great deal less comedy than previously, again, I fear, due to the acting. These are serious quibbles, but ultimately irrelevant - this is easily the best film around at the moment.

Pride and Prejudice

With an lovable cast, Pride and Prejudice is intelligent in its handle of the material and its fluency in cinematic crafting. Goodbye to dusty, "precious" interpretations of Jane Austen. This cheeky, poetic, even dark new film makes the story youthful with down-to-earth vibrancy and worship of emotion. Here are young people making the mistakes and dreaming the dreams of the young (when it was written it wasn't antiquity, it was life). Lizzie is not a smirking omniscient but a quick witted independent; hotheaded and fiercely loyal to her sister. She is wary of an unfair world and uses her wits to survive. Darcy is not an impenetrable stoic but a shy sensitive soul with high unwieldy social pretensions fending off the outside world. And they are both lonely and have big yearning hearts, so the filmmakers made one great decision -- they let them fall in love the first moment they lock eyes. In a shot we see hearts behind fortified personalities and an instant chemistry that takes a movie's worth of battling with each other and themselves to right itself. It's an earthy move that sets the tone for a film about the people and world behind the antiquated manners, a world not so different from ours.

Now set in 1797, when Austen wrote the first draft of the book, the filmmakers committed to main plot points and themes, and astutely represent the Romantic Age and Austen's characters. The love between Jane and Lizzie is supreme and fuels a desire in Lizzie to tear at Darcy when he separates Jane from Mr. Bingley. She's hurt, she reciprocates the pain, and it is bitter. Pride and prejudices are drawn clearly: Lizzie searches hard to find fault with Darcy, and Darcy cannot bring himself to let down his guard. Both have their reasons justified, but they foil their own chances at love constantly until they see how wrong they are and are too heartsick to keep going. Class conflict is suddenly personally injurious and vicious. When Charlotte Lucas marries for security, it's a grave matter and she must bitingly sober up a disdainful Lizzie on the realities of their world. The Bennets are too eccentric and improper for their own good. Lady Catherine (Dame Judi Dench, who is downright fearsome) is not just a cold figure for Lizzie to spar with, but someone capable of deeply hurting others. The filmmakers are savvy in their understanding of history. Setting it back 20 years is a remarkable move, because we accept more diversions and variation with the 18th century than the 19th and it presents Austen as a Romantic, which automatically requires the story to be interpreted from a different, very legitimate, perspective. The ideals of the Romantic Age are ingeniously, subtly played here: human equality, gritty realism married with beauty for the sake of beauty, but a beauty which is never elitist or decadent, always grounded, simple, and universal: nature, the human being, emotion.

The ensemble and mis-en-scene are electric. The camera spryly edges in and out of rooms and conversations instead of sitting arthritically in a corner. The dance scenes are less about ballet, now rollicking and spirited as characters send signals, flirt, deflect and analyze one another. In true Romantic form (worthy of filling Wordsworth with pride) the aesthetic unabashedly revels in beauty, but always the simple joys of our world: sunrises, dewy landscapes in wide shots, colors everywhere. It has a lovely score, period inspired and without any pomp and circumstance. Simple blocking is caffeinated and given substance, something is always going on in the background. Lively, layered interactions between characters make rich scenes, neither wasting space nor time. Consider a scene with Mr. Collins, played by the magnificent Tom Hollander (a standout here, so delightfully weird. When he jaggedly squirms his way up to someone you want to shriek). He wants to speak to Lizzie, alone, and a bolt of fear strikes through her as she pleads in vain not to be abandoned. The sisters are merciless, Mrs. Bennet delighted, Mr. Bennet at a loss, and Collins prepares. It's all silent and it's hysterical.

Suggesting variation to revered characters is a frightful task, but here it's a revelation. The entire cast is brilliant, but the two leads are transcendent in their roles. Keira Knightley is charismatic, random, wonderfully young, intuitive to the bone -- she inhabits Lizzie. Matt MacFadyen is deep, remarkably subtle, but mostly he is soulful. I've long held him as a sympathetic actor, but he shines in this. The two instill an unexpected exuberance of feeling in their performances. Neither ever acknowledge the camera exists and make the most of every second they have on screen to project their characters. When you throw them together you get a love story full of emotional subtext, double meaning, and gloriously heavy moments.

Because so much dialogue was cut, simple lines have impact and much of the exposition is visual. Epic little moments linger and rain, revealing souls. The thoughts and intentions behind the actors' eyes and words are visible at all times. This movie understands the power of a shot or glance. Lizzie comes to understand Darcy in how he embraces his sister or smiles (a momentous occasion, indeed). When she talks about love it's stirring because it's finally spilled into the open after we've seen it near the edge many times with half said sentiments and stifled tears. Usually "I love you" comes with extra explanatory prose, but here sincerity kills cliché: parties are fun, a misty field is breathtaking, the dawning of love a revelation, the heartbreak is throbbing.

It's a brilliant film. There is something breathless and luminous about it, from its youth and the break from propriety, to the beauty and spontaneity of life and romance, pain and joy, which provide the color.