Scandinavian Cinema is having a great decade, Weekly Reel #26
A short aside to compliment Scandinavian cinema, early Michael Caine classic, Kubrick’s last film, bpd Winona Ryder, Keitel double-feature, and a hard French pass
News of the Week: I didn’t see anything new at the theaters this week (but did see a great Harvey Keitel double at the New Bev), so this will be a classics-heavy viewing recommendations week. Theatrical releases will start to pick up for the rest of the year as we enter awards season, so look forward to that.
Watch Now (Pick of the Week)
The Worst Person in the World is a Norwegian film by Joachim Trier that debuted last year at Cannes and got two Oscar noms. It’s about Julie (Renate Reinsve, who won Best Actress at Cannes), a young woman unsure of her future, who starts a relationship with and then moves in with a comic book artist fifteen years older. Besides from having no tangible goals beyond her bookstore job and photography, Julie’s father neglects her and she meets a boy at a party that questions how strongly she feels about monogamy. She then experiences an exquisite time-stop sequence where everyone in the world stops, except for herself and that boy. What happens after is where the title of the film is implied. The story is about committing oneself to life’s biggest choices and how one shouldn’t lose time choosing what they think is best for them versus what they feel is best. In other words, time flies when you’re young. And in even shorter words, carpe diem. But director and writer Joachim Trier doesn’t let us easily depart or pick a side, which is how less confident filmmakers would have handled it. The title is both false, one wouldn’t need to look hard for worse people than a slightly aimless thirty-year-old, and true, according to Julie’s perception of herself. It’s giving you a false out.
Scandinavian cinema has been solid from the origins of cinema with Carl Theodor Dreyer to the sixties GOAT, Ingmar Bergman, who has been most filmmakers favorite and biggest influence ever since. And even more recently, the output from these countries have been perennial favorites at film festivals: in Denmark with Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, in Sweden with Ruben Östlund (winner of the Palme d'Or for his last two films) and the Alfredson brothers, and in Norway with Joachim Trier and others. What their cinema offers is a unique psychological approach to melodramas, which German cinema was mastering until you-know-who, that grounds its characters in their environments like clinical rats in a maze looking for sustenance or an exit. They take the simple formula of crisis-resolution in drama and turn it into art. We ought to learn from them as our greatest filmmakers learned from Bergman in the past, which included Coppola, Kubrick, Allen, Fincher, Scorsese, Lynch, Baumbach, Schrader, Haynes, Soderbergh, and these are just some of the Americans. The Worst Person in the World is available on Hulu.
Save for Later
Alfie is a “cockney Don Juan,” played by Michael Caine, who talks to the camera to tell us about his carefree escapades with women and rules about managing long-term hookups. (“She or it. They’re all birds.”) The troubles begin when his most manageable side-piece gets pregnant. After the birth, Alfie becomes more attached than he’d like to both son and mother, the latter looking to settle with her most ardent suitor to raise the child in a stable household. Alfie then makes a retreat to the countryside after having a cancer scare from an x-ray. These moments would turn the typical philanderer straight, but not for Alfie. Only after seeing the darker sides of these decisions later, which he must confront, do his actions create unrecoverable consequences. The strength of the film is in Caine’s casual Brit-wit carelessness. He’s the guide to the modern city man: young, searching for meaning, using humor and rules of engagement as shields. Lewis Gilbert, the director, would direct three Bond films after Alfie, the kind of character who Alfie would aspire to be, but, as Alfie shows, can’t be in reality. Michael Caine pulls off the character well enough to hide the film’s flaws, which is obviously based on a play. Alfie is streaming, for free, on Kanopy and with ads on Pluto TV.
Eyes Wide Shut is a great re-watch. (I’m assuming most of you have seen it, if not, please skip this spoilery review.) Which is great for that purpose because it takes on a universal sexual personae, the male psyche, which is relevant for varied reasons at different points in one’s life. The story is quite simple; Bill (Tom Cruise) loses control of his impulses after hearing about a year-old fantasy his wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman), had. Claiming initially to be unjealous, Bill fantasizes with having an extramarital affair—to get even? —but recoils in horror at reaching under that subconscious layer of energy and staring it in the horns. Kubrick made an honest attempt at evaluating the masculine psyche confronting the limits of marriage and human nature—super ego and id. The film is also very funny, Bill punishes himself to an absurd degree after only hearing the story of an old, brief fantasy. Kubrick is telling us, “Ever had a fantasy of an extra-marital affair, well, watch what happens if you try.” Bill explores a little too much and finds himself at a Venetian masquerade orgy. Most of us find much less. The aesthetics of the film are simple by Kubrick’s standards. Red lights are everywhere in the foreground, while blue lights unnaturally pervade the scene from the outside. Nude bodies are so frequently revealed that they become costumes rather than sexual objects of arousal. And whereas most filmmakers in 1999 released mind-fuck films (The Matrix, Being John Malkovich, and Fight Club) ushering in the new millennium of mankind’s present anxieties, Kubrick went back to the most primitive conflict of mankind—man and woman—to remind us of the anxieties that will always live with us. Eyes Wide Shut is available on Netflix.
Girl, Interrupted was a near pass for me. The acting performances of Angelina Jolie (who won an Oscar for it), Elisabeth Moss, Brittany Snow, and Winona Ryder as patients in a 1967 mental hospital saves the mishandling of the story. Directed by James Mangold, the story is adapted from Susanna Kaysen's (portrayed by Ryder) memoir of the same name about her experiences at a mental hospital. Upon its release, filmmakers became interested in adapting it for the screen, which they could have pitched as the female version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, winner of all the top Oscars. Mangold, who would go on to make Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma, a couple Wolverine movies, and Ford v. Ferrari, treated Girl, Interrupted as oscarbait by exaggerating the performances and turning the melodrama dial to ten. The author of the memoir focused on her own experience with borderline personality disorder, which is a little explored topic among films about teen-age girls that Kaysen was trying to turn into a public discussion. (Sofia Coppola’s released The Virgin Suicides the same year. Although it doesn’t specify the psychological problems of the four teen girls, it provides a more nuanced and artistic study of a similar issue.) And this problem is only getting worse in the social media age. It’s obvious, with data, that girls are the most harmfully impacted today psychologically, which makes the viewing of Girl, Interrupted more important than it deserves. The film is streaming on both Netflix and HBO Max.
Harvey Keitel double feature: Mean Streets (1973) and Bad Lieutenant (1992). It’s easy to see why the New Beverly Cinema played these two Keitel classics in 35mm; they both feature a gritty New York with sketchy lifestyles to match. While Keitel plays a more ensemble position in Scorsese’s first real feature, he’s front and center as a drug- and gambling-addict NYC officer in Abel Ferrara’s classic. As is usual for a Scorsese film, the protagonists are impulsive and do harmful things with enough charm to get away with it, but with Ferrara, a protagonist can be a thorough piece of shit without a redeeming act to save them—which was especially hard to do with Keitel’s charisma. A good counter-example would be Reservoir Dogs, released the same year as Bad Lieutenant, also starring Keitel, which is more in line with the Scorsese thesis of sympathetic anti-heroes. It’s nice to watch the fun moments of a criminal’s life, but the darker moments (which in Bad Lieutenant include a dp nun rape, Keitel masturbating on a young woman after pulling her over for a broken tail-light, a multi-day drug bender with cocaine, crack, and heroin, running up a gambling tab to one-hundred and twenty thousand dollars) can quickly make one snap back to reality.
Both films feature Keitel as a practicing catholic with scenes at the altar (you can probably already guess which of the them shows more desecration in those scenes). In Mean Streets, the Catholicism is revealed in the Italian-American neighborhood of NYC through community, brotherhood, and guilt. In Bad Lieutenant, it’s just pure guilt that haunts Keitel through all his transgressions making things worse. The only moment that Keitel makes a redemptive flex is by looking for the two kids that raped the nun, and even that manhunt is questionable and unfocused. It’s impressive to show a film the same viewing as a Scorsese classic (albeit not one of his best) and triumph in certain areas, especially with the dark NYC landscape, so Ferrara, and the New Bev programmers, did an excellent job. Mean Streets is streaming for subscribers of realeyz and FilmBox+ and Bad Lieutenant is available for free, with ads, on Tubi and Freevee—I recommend the latter because of Tubi’s awful ad placements, unless you don’t want to support Amazon.
Pass
News from Home was another Criterion challenge pick, which is a 1977 experimental documentary by Chantal Akerman, a Belgian avant-garde filmmaker. Akerman edits the entire film with static shots of early seventies, Taxi Driver-era New York City with voice-overs by Akerman reading her mother’s letters sent to her while living there. Her mother was clearly concerned for her well-being, always asking if she had enough money, to be safe out in the big city, the occasional hometown gossip. I can normally sit through strange, old French-language films, but the eighty-eight minute runtime of News from Home was unbearable. The point of the film was to make the viewer anticipating the next letter from maman, because of the empty spaces left between voice-overs, but instead made me wish that Akerman would’ve packed up and went back home early. Akerman’s masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is three hours and twenty-one minutes, showing the chores of a single mother over three days. If I’m going to see this film, someone would need to strap me down in a cinema with an un-pausable projector. If you want, you can stream News from Home on HBO Max.
Thank you once again for checking out my Substack. Hit the like button and use the share button to share this across social media. And don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already done so.