Kitchen Stories

2003 Director Bent Hamer

This is Bent Hamer's comedy drama" Salmer Fra Kjøkkenet" and is based on the real-life social experiments conducted in Sweden during the 1950s.

In the years following WWII, a research institute sets out to modernize the home kitchen by observing a handful of rural Norwegian bachelors. In the small town of Landstad, middle-aged Isak is one such research subject who regrets ever agreeing to participate in the study. Nevertheless, he is observed by Folke and the two develop a strange friendship until the observer becomes sick. This causes a problem with Folke's boss and Isak's friend Grant.

This is a wonderful little jewel of observational comedy, big brother without the cameras. It is also a touching tale of lonely people. For those who speak Norwegian and understand Swedish there are many language gags that are not translatable and so the subtitle reader is deprived of many of the subtleties of this film. Something of a unique film.

The Girl who played with Fire

2009 Director Daniel Alfredson

This is the second installment of author Stieg Larsson's best-selling "Millennium" trilogy.

A prominent magazine publisher launches a comprehensive investigation into Swedish sex trafficking. The publisher of "Millennium" magazine, Mikael Blomkvist  has built an empire on his ability to shake up the establishment. Approached by a young journalist with evidence that high-ranking Swedish officials are involved in sex trafficking and crimes against minors, the incensed magazine publisher launches a comprehensive investigation that threatens to implicate some of the most powerful politicians in the country.

Unfortunately this sequel lacks the pace and intensity of its predecessor. The two main character stories remain separate until the very last scene, so none of the chemistry that made the first film so tight is present. The film ambles along and feels more like the hyphen between two films rather than a real second instalment. Noomi Rapace delivers a brilliant performance but Mikael Nyqvist seems to struggle with a character that has suddenly turned two dimensional. Let's hope that the concluding part picks up the pace of the first.

Passion

1982 Director Jean-Luc Godard

This film is a major part in Jean-Luc Godard's ongoing investigation of the relations between painting and cinema and uses innovative forms to explore political and economic questions.

The plot, if it can be called that, is very simplistic. A director is shooting a film whose scenes are all reproductions of paintings by Goya, Valasquez, and other European masters. Production comes to a halt when his producers refuse to increase his budget until he explains the film's story to them. Meanwhile he is ending an affair with the wife of the manager of the hotel where the film's cast and crew are staying. In a sub-plot a factory worker attempts to unionize her fellow employees.

The story of Passion is elliptical and incomplete. It is a means of presenting a collection of scenes and images on related themes. This kind of story would become the hallmark of Godard's later career. This film marks the reunion of Godard with director of photography Raoul Coutard, who shot many of Godard's films of the 1960s. The cinematography is key to understanding this difficult film in which how an image is shot is as important as what it depicts. Godard and Coutard favor shots that begin as open, disorganized framings and become painterly compositions as the people and things in them move.

The American Friend

1977 Director Win Wenders

Wim Wenders' mines Dennis Hopper's real-life experience as a painter and collector in this existential take on the American gangster film based on a Patricia Highsmith novel featuring the notoriously sociopathic Tom Ripley.

Hopper stars as the eponymous American, currently a middleman selling the work of American painter who has feigned his own death to increase the value of his paintings. While auctioning this work in Berlin, he meets art restorer, Jonathan, who he learns is suffering from an incurable blood disease. When a shady friend requires Ripley to find a "clean" non-professional to do a contract hit in order to pay off a debt, even he is reluctant. But he quickly realizes that the physically vulnerable Jonathan would be perfect for the job, and tries to get him to accept by employing various subterfuges to persuade him that his condition is even worse than it is. For his part he guarantees the restorer that his family will be financially secure for life, and a deal is struck. As usual, nothing works out quite as expected.

This is a forgotten little gem. Dennis Hopper is really at his very best here. There is a touching reference to his earlier "Easy Rider" film but his persona is as different as can be. A dark gripping tale where the unpredictable ending does not disappoint. Although filmed in the 70's this film does not have all the tacky style that hallmarks that era. Filmed largely in an area of Hamburg harbour that no longer exists it is quite a trip down memory lane. Hard to find but well worth the hunt.

Pierrot le fou

1965 Director Jean-Luc Godard

This is Godard’s mischievous, free-associative tenth film. It falls more into the Breathless, Band a Part,  Le Petit Soldat genre, in that there is a discerable story to follow, rather than his more experimental efforts, taking the simple and well tried boy meets girl format.

He a rakish, unemployed adman choking on consumerist jargon and bourgeois conformity, she a happy-clappy coquette with unspecified links to an underground military faction. Each is an impulsive, alienated, despairing soul who finds solace in the other’s desire for chaos and withdrawal. They flee Paris for the south of France in a hail of gunfire and Gauloises. They converse in disjointed, inhumanly droll patter, break  into song, duff up gas station attendants and eagerly concoct a new civilisation on a deserted beach. Then, as their relationship begins to fray, it all goes horribly wrong.

Basing his film ever so loosely on Lionel White’s pulp crime novel ‘Obsession’, Godard inventively drapes genre pastiche, literary references, flash inserts and cheeky agitprop over a robust ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ like framework to deliver a film which, in spirit, feels like both the sum total of his past work and an exhilarating sign of things to come. It’s a wild-eyed, everything-in-the-pot cross-processing of artistic, cinematic, political and personal concerns, where the story stutters, splinters and infuriates its way to an explosive finale.

Lebanon

2009 Director Samuel Maoz

This is a very different type of film by Israeli writer and director Samuel Maoz. A handful of soldiers take a claustrophobic journey into the heart of war. It tackles the collision between youthful idealism and the reality of conflict in a mesmerising and compelling format.

It's June 1982, and Israel is launching an invasion of Lebanon. Four men assigned to take part in the first strike are put on the same tank detail. After being given their orders the men set out toward the Lebanese border, recognizing little of what goes on outside beyond what can be seen through the gun sights. They roll relentlessly onward, occasionally arguing amongst themselves, until they arrive at their destination, a town already bombed into rubble by the Israeli Air Force. Few of their allies remain in the city, putting the soldiers in a perilous situation when a band of Syrian resistance fighters attack the tank.

With the exception of the opening and closing credits the entire film is based inside the claustrophobic, grimy world of the tank. One can almost smell the oil and diesel fumes. The only glimpses of the outside world are shown through the remote gun sights. This is a brilliantly constructed and acted film evoking a great deal of empathy with those placed in this precarious position. It also very subtly introduces the theme that not all allies have the same agenda. Well worth looking out for.

Metropolis

1927 Director Fritz Lang

This is the biggest budgeted movie ever produced at Germany's UFA. Fritz Lang's gargantuan Metropolis consumed resources that would have yielded upwards of 20 conventional features, more than half the studio's entire annual production budget. And if it didn't make a profit at the time, indeed, it nearly bankrupted the studio, the film added an indelible array of images and ideas to cinema, and has endured across the many decades since its release.

In the somewhat distant future the city of Metropolis, with its huge towers and vast wealth, is a playground to a ruling class living in luxury and decadence. They, and the city, are sustained by a much larger population of workers who labor as virtual slaves in the machine halls, moving from their miserable, tenement-like homes to their grim, back-breaking ten-hour shifts and back again. The hero is oblivious to the plight of the workers, or any aspect of their lives, until one day when a a beautiful subterranean dweller named Maria visits the Eternal Gardens, where he spends his time cavorting with various ladies, with a small group of children from the workers' city far below. They are sad, hungry, and wretched looking, and he is haunted by their needy eyes, something he has never seen or known among the elite of the city, and by this strange and beautiful woman who tells all who hear her, workers' children and ruler's offspring, that they are all brothers. And so she sets him onto a collision course with the rulers and controllers of this dark empire.

When it was premiered in Germany in January 1927, Metropolis ran 153 minutes. That complete version was heavily cut for release in America, removing a quarter of the movie. Only very recently has the entire uncut version been found and restored. Both Hitler and Goebbles were so impressed by the film that they invited Lang to join their publicity campaign. Lang packed his bags and left for America that day.

Cobra Verde

1987 Director Werner Herzog

In their final collaboration, Werner Herzog directs Klaus Kinski in the remarkable tale of Francisco Manoel da Silva, the flamboyant 19th century Brazilian bandit known as "Cobra Verde." Filmed on location with a cast of hundreds, Cobra Verde is a tale of adventure, greed and betrayal. It's the story of two worlds in collision, and of the man who was trapped between them.

When the owner of a sugar plantation unknowingly hires the barefoot, gun-toting thief to keep his slaves in check, he gets more than he bargained for as Cobra Verde, in short order, impregnates all of his boss's daughters. In revenge, he is sent on an impossible and deadly mission to sail to the west coast of Africa and re-open the slave trade. Not only does Cobra Verde succeed at this, he goes on to lead an unstoppable army of women in a savage war against the local king.

In this film Herzog has finally managed to reign in the mania that he unleashed in Kinski in the previous films. He shows a committed but compassionate man driven more by events than controlling them. This is a complex film, beautifully shot against the African backdrop with very unique and memorable locations.

Diary Of A Chambermaid

1964 Director Luis Buñuel

This is a remake of the 1946 Jean Renoir film based on the novel by Octave Mirbeau and is now considered to be a classic piece of Luis Bunuel film making.

Celestine, a beautiful Parisian domestic who, upon arrival at her new job at an estate in provincial 1930s France, entrenches herself in sexual hypocrisy and scandal with her philandering employer.  She quickly learns that he is a harmless boot fetishist, his daughter a frigid woman more concerned with the family furnishings than in returning the affections of her husband, who, in turn, can't keep his hands off the servants. The gamekeeper, is a fascist who keeps his masters informed of all the doings downstairs, and the next door neighbor is a veteran who can't stand the owner and is sharing a bed with his housekeeper. Celestine picks her way through this minefield carefully, spurning the advances of all of the men until it's convenient for her.

Filmed in luxurious black-and-white Franscope, Diary Of A Chambermaid is a raw-edged tangle of fetishism and murder and a scathing look at the burgeoning French fascism of the era.

Made in U.S.A.

1966 Director Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard directed this brightly colored, pop-art homage to American crime cinema, which somehow finds room for commentary on leftist politics and the corrupt nature of advertising.

Paula Nelson is a mystery woman who used to be involved with  an outspoken Communist and has been linked to the murder of a foreign agent. Paula wants to silence him before he starts making trouble for her, but she can't find much hard evidence that's he's still alive outside of a recently discovered tape recorder that plays his recorded rants on current political issues. While speaking with a small time hood who knows about Paula's relationship, shots ring out and suddenly the hood is dead. As Paula tries to find a way to get rid of the body, she tries to discover who killed him and why, as a pair of lackadaisical hoods follow her around Paris.

Filled with references to American genre cinema this was the last film Godard would make with his one-time wife Anna Karina. The flimsy plot was loosely adapted from the novel The Jugger by Donald E. Westlake , who wasn't paid for the rights and prevented this film from being released in the United States until after his death in 2008.

L'Antidote

2005 Director Vincent De Brus

This film is a beautiful mixture of laugh-out-load humour and irony. Sadly not available with sub-titles, unless you speak french pretty fluently you will miss much of the subtler sides of the film.

Jam, played by Christian Clavier, is a highly successful entrepreneur on the brink of a major takeover when he starts suffering from anxiety attacks. His doctor thinks that this is to do with childhood experiences and suggests he searches back in his mind to something that could be the trigger and will prove to be the antidote. Enter André Morin, played by the late, great Jacques Villeret, reprising his role of the amiable "con" (idiot) who proves wiser than everyone. Morin is a small time accountant who has become a champion of the little man – the small shareholders who are taken for granted by today's business leaders more interested in power and wealth. It is a real clash of cultures and provides plenty of laughs.

Without giving anything away the story obviously owes something to Citizen Kane. There is an interesting opening title sequence, which suggests more thriller than comedy and some good special effects for the Rosebud moment. If you loved Le Diner des Cons you will enjoy this film.

---

Dogtooth

2009 Director Giorgos Lanthimos

This is a brave and bizarre film by writer and director Lanthimos dealing with the perils of social isolation. It is a very clever allegory of the overbearing "Nanny State" that favours fear and violence as a means to control its populace.

A father and mother live in a large house on the outskirts of town with their three children, whose ages range from mid-teens to early twenties. The children have never been allowed to leave the house, which is surrounded by a tall fence, and their knowledge of the outside world has been strictly controlled by their parents, who have chosen to teach them only what they believe is important and have deliberately confused or misled them in many other areas. The parents quite literally treat their children like animals, and the only contact the youngsters have with people outside their family is a woman who works with the father's business and comes by periodically to have sex with the eldest son. She makes the mistake of bringing a present for the two younger daughters, and explains the custom is that they should give her something in return. This simple act sets off a chain reaction of events that has terrible consequences for everyone involved.

This film is both disturbing and intriguing in equal measures. The mother's complicity in the father's paranoid delusions seems ambiguous at times and the cinematography lacks fluidity in places. There is an amount of explicit sexual content which some may find uncomfortable. A particularly unique scene to watch out for is the one where the parents converse silently by mouthing the words so as to prevent their offspring from overhearing. I think this will become a cult classic for all its little failings.

Le Ballon Rouge

1956 Director Albert Lamorisse

Most of Albert Lamorisse's films celebrate the miracle of flight, but few were as landmark as his 1956 short subject The Red Balloon. This is a truly delightful gem.

The story, told with a minimum of dialogue, concerns a little boy, played by the director's son Pascal, who comes across a helium-filled balloon. As he plays with his new acquisition, the boy discovers that the balloon seemingly has a mind of its own. The little red orb follows its new "master" all through the streets of Paris, then dogs the boy's trail into the schoolroom, which drives the teacher to comic distraction. Towards the end, it seems as though boy and balloon will be parted forever, but director Lamorisse has a delightful surprise in store for us.

This film serves as a color record of the Belleville area of Paris which had fallen into decay by the 1960s and was eventually demolished as a slum-clearance effort. Part of the site was built up with housing projects; the remainder was left as wasteland for 20 years. Ninety-five percent of what is seen in the film exists no more: the bakeries, the famous Y-shaped staircase situated just beyond the equally famous café "Au Repos de la Montagne", the long-gone steep steps of the rue Vilin where Pascal finds the balloon initially and the waste ground where all the battles took place. Only the church of Notre-Dame de la Croix, between the Place Maurice Chevalier and the Place de Ménilmontant remains.

It won numerous awards, including an Oscar for Lamorisse for writing the best original screenplay in 1956 and the Palme d'Or for short films at Cannes. The film also became popular with children and educators.

Le Petit Soldat

1963 Director Jean-Luc Godard

This controversial spy-romance tale by Jean-Luc Godard was banned from release in France for three years because it refers to the use of torture on both the French and Algerian sides during the Algerian struggle for independence.

The story focuses on Bruno Forestier, played by Michel Subor, a young, disillusioned man who becomes involved in politics, yet in spite of the fact that he stands up to torture and commits murder because of this involvement, he does not have deep political beliefs. Also featured is his lover played by Anna Karina, the then-wife of director Jean-Luc and appearing in her first film, as a motivating factor in Bruno's behavior.

This early film, looked at in the context of Godard's later, more militant work, is at once naive and fascinating. Seen in sequence this film marks a definite step in his progression.

Asoka

2001 Director Santosh Sivan

Cinematographer turned director Santosh Sivan follows up on his acclaimed 1999 opus Malli with this sweeping historical epic.

Asoka traces the life of Emperor Asoka, the grandson of Chandragupta Maurya who ascended the throne of Magadha in the 3rd century BC. To extend the borders of his empire, Asoka waged one of the bloodiest wars in history with the neighboring kingdom of Kalinga, leaving it ravaged and devastated. Confronted by the aftermath of his conquest in which hundreds of thousands lost their lives, Asoka is overcome with remorse and renounces the path of war to dedicate his life to spreading the teachings of Buddhism across the world.

This is a story based on legends.  This film does not claim to be a complete historical account of Asoka's life but an attempt to follow his journey. It is visually stunning and a brave effort to compact such a history into a mere two and half hours. Sivan has a very different and unique style of film making.

Detective

1985 Director Jean-Luc Godard

After several years of making films to please only himself, Jean-Luc Godard produced The Detective. Not to be confused with Gordon Douglas' vastly superior 1968 film of the same name. Not that there's anything so blase as a linear plot or appealing characters, but at least some of Godard's isolated vignettes are accessible this time around.

Set in the Hotel Concorde at St. Lazare, the film is set in motion when miserably married Nathalie Baye and Claude Brasseur attempt to collect a debt from mob-plagued boxing manager Johnny Hallyday. Meanwhile, hotel detective Jean-Pierre Leaud tries to solve an old murder case. These two gossamer plot strands are used to tie together Godard's scattershot views on modern life, with emphasis on the voyeuristic potential of the recent video-camera boom.

The director dashed off The Detective to raise money for a film he truly cared about, the controversial Hail Mary and it shows. This film lacks the flair and panache that Godard is capable of and repeats the ploy of a reversible number leading to a mistaken killing that he used in Le Petit Soldat in 1963.

The Seventh Seal

1957 Director Ingmar Bergman

This film launched the international career of its director, Ingmar Bergman, and made a star of its 27 year old leading actor, Max Von Sydow. Endlessly imitated and parodied, this landmark film retains its ability to hold an audience spellbound.

A 14th century knight is wearily heading home after ten years' worth of combat. Disillusioned by unending war, plague, and misery he has concluded that God does not exist. As he trudges across the wilderness, he is visited by Death, garbed in the traditional black robe. Unwilling to give up the ghost, he challenges Death to a game of chess. If he wins, he lives, if not, he'll allow Death to claim him. As they play, the knight and the Grim Reaper get into a spirited discussion over whether or not God exists. To recount all that happens next would diminish the impact of the film itself. The Seventh Seal ends with one of the most indelible of all of Bergman's cinematic images: the near-silhouette "Dance of Death", which ironically was filmed on a whim due to the chance lighting conditions of the moment.

Sixty years later, Bergman's stunning allegory of man's apocalyptic search for meaning remains a textbook on the art of film making and an essential building block in any collection.