Films You've Seen Recently and Don't Know WTF to think

IdleRich

IdleRich
There was a film called Vivariam on telly the other day, I'd actually read about it in a film group and so instead of flicking past it I decided to give it a go. English actor Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg make a not especially convincing couple who are looking for a house to buy together, after a few heavy-handedly prophetic scenes involving cuckoos the two of them head off to visit an estate agent and we're straight into the action.

The estate agent is an unbelievably weird and sinister guy, I mean so much so that, even though they can't possibly have any inkling of what is going to happen to them, it still beggars belief that they would go with him to look at a house.

The agent drives them to this huge and featureless estate, an interminable and bland suburban nightmare of identical houses with identical gardens on identical streets and without a single shop, cafe or indeed anything to break it up even slightly - it reminded us both quite a lot of the thing they've built at the bottom of my parents' garden after bulldozing acres of beautiful green space in fact - and when they go inside for a cursory look around the fucker only goes and disappears!

So our heroes decide to leave except they can't! Every road they take eventually leads them back to the show house at number 9 until they run out of petrol and, defeated, climb into the bed. Next day they try and escape on foot, but that doesn't work either, so they're trapped in the house. Vivarium is one of those glass cages they put insects or snakes in in a zoo so I guess that the idea is that they are trapped there and someone is watching them, but you never these watchers, what you do get is a delivery every day which contains enough tasteless vacuum packed food to keep them alive - and then one day it also contains a baby with a note saying "bring him up and be released" so they do. And that's really the set up, they are trapped alone in the house with the sinister cuckoo baby, each day as empty and boring as the last - at that point I wondered how they would keep it interesting with two (arguably three) characters, a single house as a set and nothing happening - well, the answer is, they don't. The film meanders for three or four hours to its predictable end, an ultimately frustrating comment on the suburban dream gone wrong - I guess. With some stuff about cuckoos chucked in. For me it's frustrating cos there seems to be no real reason for them to be punished like this. They didn't really do anything wrong, they didn't aspire this 50s style bored-alcoholic-wife-stays-at-home-while-husband-works-himself-into-an-early-grave paradigm, it just seems to lack any meaning or justification - while at the same time thinking it's really clever. I guess that the real problem though is that, after a start that is weird enough to get you interested, it's really just rather boring, plus I don't really buy the way the actors just kinda settle into it - of course it's hard to think of what else they could even try to do but if it were me I think I would be somewhat more upset. Or that's pretty much what I thought anyhow, anyone else able to explain it to me in a way that makes it more interesting?
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
Years ago there used to be these things called video libraries from which you could actually rent films to watch on tapes and later dvds. One time from such a place on Broadway Market I borrowed a film called Songs From the Second Floor by Swedish director Roy Andersson; it was a bizarre collection of surreal and perhaps loosely connected vignettes seemingly set in the same unsettling and depressing place, a world of washed out colours and nightmarish occurrences. I had never seen anything like it and while I wouldn't claim to have understood it I liked what i saw and was fascinated.

A few years later Andersson's next film You The Living hit the cinema and I was there to see it. The film consisted of loosely connected nightmarish vignettes set in a strange world of washed out colours over which a miasma of melancholy had seemingly settled - although at times there were moments of sly humour that provided some relief from all of that. I had only ever seen one thing like it.
Moving forward fifteen years, technology has changed and I can watch lots of stuff on my laptop, I decide to check out Andersson's latest offering, About Endlessness - a film consisting of somewhat connected vignettes which occur in a peculiar world of washed out colours that hint at a nightmare of tired conformity and melancholy. Although the surrealism has been reduced somewhat it reminds me of two other films.
It occurs to me that somehow I missed Andersson's third film, A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence which I understand to be an action-packed space opera, I must check it out sometime.

Or, let me write that another way. Andersson's films are surreal and peculiar and in that sense I truly don't know WTF to think... but I also really like all of them, so in the sense in which the thread titles were intended, I should have probably put this review of About Endlessness in the thread about films you fully recommend - cos I do fully recommend it much more than many other films which I have placed in there. However, when I look at Andersson's career (and in case there is anybody who did not spot my sarcasm, his third feature, the one about a pigeon which I have not seen, is not in fact a space opera; I haven't seen the reviews or adverts for it at all, but I would bet any amount that it is a film consisting of loosely connected melancholy vignettes set in a washed out world of the kind which you might come across in a bad dream although the overall feeling of sadness is no doubt leavened by the odd moment of unexpected wry humour) what I see is a guy making almost the same film again and again but just a little bit worse.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
I should enlarge on that maybe. If you compare SFTSF which was his first full length film I believe, to his latest effort which I watched yesterday, then they both have the same structure (as far as I remember), each scene involves a camera which is positioned motionless, or, if memory serves, occasionally it will move a tiny bit, perhaps slide along to the slide by a couple of feet, but compared to what we are used to in the vast majority of modern films then to me it is completely reasonable to describe the camera as fixed. It is basically exactly the same technique as Paradjanov uses in, say, Suram Fortress or whatever.

eg if you watch this from about 15 seconds in



Compared with this up to 2.58 or so



Ilyenko also used this technique for much of this film if I remember correctly. He was Paradjaov's cinematographer.



Both directors spend ages literally building a particular scene before the shot - if it's Paradjanov it will normally be a bit of the Armenian steppe or a courtyard in a castle and it will be sumptuously decorated with rugs and beautiful people in fine furs, quite possibly there will be a table with an ornate mirror and golden goblets strewn around, maybe some food which is half-eaten but beautiful nevertheless, could be even a camel or a couple of peacocks in the background as a living ornament.

If it is Andersson it's the same idea but the scene will probably be in a hospital or maybe some people will be staring sadly at a grave or a hangman's noose. All of the colours will be washed out, he uses a filter on his camera which is called "really depressing". The people he chooses to put in his vignettes - well, can you guess? - yes, that's right, they are fat and ugly, or maybe that's not even the right word, it's more that they are beaten down by life, every bit of their saggy craggy faces will be pulled down by sadness, the deep lines and heavy jowls tell a tale of a life both startlingly mundane yet at the same time abnormally depressing. Occasionally there will be people having sex, they will look as sad as everyone else, perhaps it will be a wizened old stick man underneath a fat and wobbly young woman who seems likely to kill him with every movement despite her complete lack of enthusiasm. OK, it's only fair to say that there is a lot of humour in his films - it's sly, sarcastic, cruel and sardonic but it's definitely there. I don't really know what to say about it, but I feel I need to mention it. Certainly in You, The Living there was one particular scene where I really truly laughed out loud and I think everyone else in the cinema did too. How often do you really properly laugh at a film?

I mentioned on facebook that I had seen About Endlessness and it turned out that one of my friends* had worked on it, this is what he said

I worked on About Endlessness for the few days that they shot in Oslo. The set designer was really cool, she showed me a lot of crazy sets they'd been building. She said that they would spend a whole month building a set in this basement studio, then shoot the scene for an entire day, then the next day they would scrap the set and start building the next set for another month and so on.
Also two of my friends who were in my new film played extras in it.

I didn't ask him if they were abnormally ugly but I did ask what he thought of the finished article and he said he hadn't watched it.

So OK, we have a technique that is used to a greater or lesser extent by Paradjanov in pretty much all of his films and by Andersson in all of his as far as I know. I don't think that that is a problem in itself, there are millions of films that are shot in the same style, just cos this is an idiosyncratic style we notice the similarity more, nobody said "Oh not another action film shot in the exact same way" when Mission Impossible 17 came out even though it uses the same techniques as a million films, so I don't think it's right to slate About Endlessness for using the same technique as ten other films. However, Paradjanov's films are different from each other within this style - one is about a castle that keeps being knocked down, another about a poet and so on. But Andersson's films are basically the same as far as I can tell - every one seems to be about depressed people, often losing their faith, certainly there is always some Christian imagery, normally reduced to mundanity, Nazis often pop up. The films are not linear as such but characters do recur from scene to scene, also sometimes you hear sounds from another scene in the background - in one you see some people at the base of a cliff and someone falls to their death crashing down into the corner of the scene, later you see presumably the same person approaching the cliff from the top.

So it's not just the same style, it's the same look within that, it's the same kind of people doing the same things in the same colours. The only difference or evolution from the first to the last is that the scenes are less weird, maybe there is a bit more linearity, I guess he would describe them as tauter but to me they are less expansive. So I watched the film yesterday, in a weird kind of way it was comforting, I found myself lost in it quite easily. I did enjoy it. But at the end I just felt like I'd watched his first film again with the best bits cut out. And the more I think about the more disappointed I feel... it seems like an unusual and promising talent "maturing" by slowing pruning himself back towards normality.

I'm sure Andersson sees himself growing wiser, more mature, more focused and less in need in the flashy tricks of magic and surrealism. But I miss all that stuff. I'd love to know if anyone else has seen Songs From The Second Floor and also About Endlessness (any two of his films really but I think if you see his first and last that should give you a clue to his journey) and what they think.


*It was my friend Iosu (pronounced Josh) who makes films in his own right @suspended has also met him in fact

https://dissensus.com/index.php?threads/16589/
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Love Roy, wouldn’t want to permanently live in the worlds he creates but as a tourist for a couple of hours? Always

There’s a scene in early on in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors where a tree falls on an unfortunate soul. The camera is positioned at the height of the tree tops, then arcs down mimicking the tree falling. Stillness to surrealism in quick gear changes, little flourishes abreast oceans of still mind letting more life in
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
That is one way of putting it. But I think I was trying to say that Paradzhanov has a zone of consistency and Roy really pushes it from that to coming dangerously close to just making the same film again and again... and yet it seems he's doing something right as far as Wash and I are concerned.

So I watched the film yesterday, in a weird kind of way it was comforting, I found myself lost in it quite easily. I did enjoy it
Love Roy, wouldn’t want to permanently live in the worlds he creates but as a tourist for a couple of hours? Always

I wonder if he's got this idea of the perfect film and he's just trying to make it, getting closer and closer each time by making what could almost considered versions of the same film. Perhaps he'll finally get to whatever he was aiming at and then say that it's the definitive version and you can forget all the other ones as they were really failed attempts, prototypes. His last one had less of the surreality, the magic... I wonder if he considers putting impossible stuff in there cheating somehow. He feels that he ought to be able to reveal the sublime truth without any short cuts. Ultimately his perfect film will be made of perfectly mundane vignettes which reveal the face of god. I dunno why I hit on that explanation, maybe it's overly generous but it feels sort of plausible.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I find the look of his stuff viscerally off putting.

I suppose that is fair enough, it's completely possible and reasonable for you to simply not like it, regardless of whether it was the best choice to create the world he wanted and then to use that world to ask certain questions and to show us his own attempts at moving towards an answer. I guess it would be possible to even agree that it was the best choice artistically while hating it like that. But do you think it was the right choice in that way or would you not even agree there?

I understand that the look of the films is horribly depressing in a mundane way, it reminds me of working for Nationwide in just after graduating. If working in a dead-end temporary office-job in Swindon had a colour it would be one of the ones that you see in this film. And yet even so, I was finding it quite comforting to watch the film the other night just before bed, maybe it was the familiarity of the world that I had visited a couple of times before that seemed to ensure me that I would be safe and that I would enjoy the next hour or two.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
It’s not droll for the sake of it, there’s a mastery of surrealism through patient scene building, enhanced by dislocated worlds populated by dislocated humans

Rooms feel like depressed universes to get lost in yet they enchant too, a paradox of tensions
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
It’s not droll for the sake of it, there’s a mastery of surrealism through patient scene building, enhanced by dislocated worlds populated by dislocated humans

Rooms feel like depressed universes to get lost in yet they enchant too, a paradox of tensions
Yeah that sounds about right. And I think that he now feels that he can achieve all that through the build-up and implication, no need for the final moment of actual magical stuff to manifest. Which I'm sure is more mature and skilful and all that but for me it does make the film less fun.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Aye cos you’ve already got a clear read on pacing, style and what to possibly expect

There’s a few scenes where the entire army passes through town directly outside the bar, the past in the present and if if you consider the outcomes of said war (big territorial loss, whole units wiped out) it takes on a deeper air of corrupted agency
 
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