Springtime.

The time when people rediscover nature, ice-cream and late-night walks.

Me?
Well, I have to re-discover an over-the-top comedy series that has 9 (!) seasons, one more gruesome than the other.

If you have not yet watched Peep Show, don't start now. Or do so at your own responsibility.

Thinking about...

...the two things I like focusing on the most:

1. how to effectively sabotage every attempt at getting any work done.

2. how to over-interpret a film way out of proportions, and thus make it seem as if its intention was really to say something about things I care about, although probably its author cared about a whole different set of issues, really. (Yes, I need to develop some kind of strong accent of authority to make that last line sound convincing; pidgin English just doesn't cut it.)

I have recently seen a film that was really an unlikely contender for any kind of weekly highlight for me, because it a) is sci-fi, sadly a genre I have too little patience for, and b) it was written and directed by no other than Alex Garland, a man who was perhaps once very dear to me, but the problem is that this mysterious 'once' was literally half-of-my-life-ago, when I was an easy-to-woo highschooler and he was the author of a then-acclaimed novel The Beach (time flies!). Now, to be fair, he did in the meantime manage to play my soft spot once again with the script to Never Let Me Go, a film that kind of made everyone feel they were back in highschool again, emotionally at least (or was it just me?), but his following novels were just completely out of tune with my own interests, and so down he went into the trash bin of history. However, he is back with a film he both scripted and directed - which goes under the pretentious title Ex Machina - that I perhaps did not love, but that really doesn't seem to let me get out of its tight grip, which is admittedly something of a success.

Ex Machina is far from a great film: it is predictable for the most part, and framed with an eye of someone who has a lot of style lessons to learn. But it does - and I say this without intending to spoil anything to anyone - tackle the second-favourite topic on my list (right there behind awkward father-son relationships I have previously written about): human emotions. And it does so in a way that, at least to my biased self, seems to be saying: forget intelligence; no matter how intellectually advanced the human race gets, our own worst enemy will always be the thing most inherent to us - our need to feel for others, our capacity to love and be loved. Now, a part of that capacity must in some form be a social construct: we fall head over heels for that 'certain someone' because most of us are trained in the art of monogamy for as long as we know of ourselves, and our notions of 'right' and 'wrong' are also very much dependent on societal moral compasses. But that all does not make the basic point any less true. No matter how physically strong, technologically advanced or intellectually superior, we are all constant victims to our capacity to feel that certain something for others, and we like to fool ourselves into thinking that actions driven by that something are also the ones logic would embrace, if only it had all the pieces of the puzzle.

Of course, that idea is far from new - but what makes it fascinating is that it never seems to get old or worn out. And there was something about the way writer-turned-director Garland tackles it that really made it interesting, even if it is perhaps just the sheer bluntness with which he spells it out. No complications, no metaphors, just straightforward simplicity. Kinda like falling in love, really - it just hits you, no warning, no apology, no regrets.  

How not to think

The best thing to do is always to look for distractions. Sometimes you can find interesting things...other times, you find Ewen Bremner. On a film poster. For "Snowpiercer", which plays as part of the Berlinale.

Why did I not know about this?
Ah well...good things come to those who are clueless, apparently.

PSH

I never really expected to write here again, but there is a first time for everything. In the times when I am not really in the mood to work, I read pretty much everything. In the last few days, everything was pretty much marked by one thing - the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. By now, I have read more articles about Hoffman than I could count, yet it was, surprisingly, a blog entry on a fashion blog that struck me as the one I wanted to reply to. So this post started out as a comment, but ultimately seemed way too long to post, as a rude monologue imposed onto someone without them asking for it. It should have probably gone to the trash - monologues are almost always chokingly heavy, and somehow egoistic. But this space has always been egoistic in a way, so I let it live here...
  

Almost a week since the news came out, and I still cannot quite grasp it. It still feels both unreal and unfair.

I didn't know him, obviously. And we live at the opposite ends of the world, kind of, so I never accidentally came across him either. Yet he made his mark. He was, without any doubt, the best actor I have ever seen. I loved every one of his roles, as he could portray anyone so fearlessly and honestly; only now that I am forced to use these words to describe his works do I see how much we overuse them - sure, acting is a profession that requires courage, but only rarely does one really see a fearless performance. With Hoffman, while he always spoke of fear, you could never feel any of it watching him on the screen. But my favorite role of his is probably still that of Jacob Elinsky in Spike Lee's 25th Hour, where he plays a man at the same time uncomfortably self-absorbed and awkward, yet also gentle, innocent, and somehow broken, almost as if he himself is uncomfortable by his own presence, shy about his gestures, hiding his desires. I admired Hoffman deeply for being able to give so much soul to such complex, non-polished characters, and while it is unfair (to say the least) to make judgements of the actor based on his characters, I always thought it tells something of him as well - that he must have been a very open, sensitive person, to be able to feel all those characters and give them so much life on screen. 

His incredible work was one of the reasons I started writing about cinema, which I still occasionally do, and I was always hoping one day I'll get the opportunity to meet him at a festival somewhere for an interview, which I now know will never happen. To watch him play in a different setting, on the theatre stage, has been a wish of mine for a long time, and I used to plan imaginary trips to New York from Budapest with the schedule of plays in sight. Crazy, but true.

He was an incredible actor; and while there have been great losses for the art of cinema always, as time inevitably takes its toll, and some from the last few years still can be felt (James Gandolfini and Heath Ledger immediately come to mind), the emptiness that remains after Hoffman is of entirely different kind. He wasn't just great, outstanding, amazing, award-winning - he was also so incomparably different than anyone else, that the gap he leaves behind is too big to even grasp. I cannot imagine anyone else doing any one of his characters, and it saddens me immensely that for years to come, there will be so many roles played by others which would be played to perfection only by him.  How profoundly unfair.

How unfair. 

On being forgetful

I have been taking a break from this blog for a while now, but I never thought I will forget to post on it the one thing I've done - what WE have done, as it was a real team effort, no doubt! - related to film that I am actually proud of.

A magazine.
A film magazine.
A Croatian film magazine, at the moment only the second of that kind - as movie magazines seem to have become extinct here...

More info here and here.

If you happen to come across it, lemme know what you think - it will make me a very happy person :)

Fascinated by...

...the list of names in this year's official Cannes competition.

Seriously: the Dardenne brothers (I know, I know, it doesn't sound very promising, the film - but they will always have extra credits in my book...), Lars von Trier (who is feeling very melancholic, apparently), Aki Kaurismaki (!), Terrence Malick (after...how long has it been again?), Nanni Moretti, Nuri Bilge Ceylan...andsoonandsoon...

But quite frankly, only one movie and one name comes as a complete surprise to me.

Well, who would have thought?
Good luck to you, Nicolas.

:)

Thinking about...

...invisibility*.
in all its forms.


Images:
1) Patrick Tierney as the ignored Peter Foster/Bedros Deryan in Atom Egoyan's wonderful 'Next of Kin' (1984) (M, thank you for reminding me of it...)
2) Cristi Puiu as the lost Viorel in his own 'Aurora' (2010)
3) Andrew Garfield as the fragile Anton and Lilly Cole as his object of gentle desire in Terry Gilliam's 'The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus' (2009)
4) Vincent Cassel as the sad Kirill in David Cronenberg's 'Eastern Promises' (2007)
5) Mads Mikkelsen as the subtle Lenny in Nicolas Winding Refn's wonderful 'Bleeder' (1997)
*and about how I always seem to go to the same films and same directors for comfort.
*and about how I hope the Spiderman role will not ruin the career for the wonderful Andrew Garfield, as it did for Maguire...
*and about...

On being emotional

I am no great analyst - not that I don’t wish I was...Even when I was little, there was always a desire in me to be smarter, more insightful, more creative with the ideas I get from everywhere; yet I never quite managed to internalize these desires into my perspective on things; In time, I hardly became more clever and constructive. No magic came to be, even if I hoped that one day I would wake up a changed person, or at least that all the books I’ve read will change me significantly. It simply never happened.

I did, however, become more emotional in my view on things – or rather, I learned to accept that my perspective is primarily an emotional one, and make it a part of my ‘style’ (if not an advantage), instead of carrying a feeling of shame, almost guilt, because of that single mark of my personality. it has not been an easy thing to do, and it still isn’t – to say that you want to discuss things, but you have very little to offer but your subjective, emotion-driven perspective, often feels like having nothing to say at all, and it still often makes me blush when confronted with perspectives more insightful, academic, marked by more knowledge (and the fact that I somehow managed to surround myself with a lot of people officially belonging to the academia hardly makes it easier for me) than the one I can offer, substantiated by nothing more than my quiet inner voice. Yet sometimes...sometimes I let go and enjoy it. As, on certain rare occasions, I lose the shyness and the feeling that I need to be ‘smart’ in order to enjoy things the right way, and I simply let go.

This week, I tried letting go a lot – and it led to me realizing that all the films I’ve seen recently seem to deal with one topic: the need to belong. What is even lovelier, the belonging always seems to be of the most private, intimate kind possible: the belonging to one individual, one human being, one partner. Sometimes it is the dominating topic of the film – but mostly not. To belong, it seems, is often presented as a need less ‘visible’, but constantly present. And it is often a symbol, a sign marking the finding of another kind of ‘normality’: in ‘Boy A’, which I saw the other night, belonging to one soul meant being able to live at all (sadly, it also depicted how fragile the illusion of belonging is); also – and just as in ‘Never let me go’, which left me crying in a public space, making my sadness as much an experiment as a humane reaction – it is a mark of having a soul: to be loved, to belong, is a visual, practical (oh how clumsy and inadequate all these words sound) confirmation that to ‘me’ there is something deeper than what I appear to be; I can be important enough to someone enough for that person to take me as I am, so there must be that ‘something’ to me that cannot be seen by the naked eye, but that IS indeed there (I know, in any other situation this sort of theory is just completely false – as one can love the most terrible of monsters, for love has a strange way of choosing its objects; tho in these movies, it seems to fit perfectly somehow). I CAN love, even if everything that is surrounding me may indicate otherwise (and it does, which is why both these movies are so unbearably difficult and sad, but also tremendously beautiful – and worthy of far more thoughts and words than they sadly get from me). And sometimes...it is the idea of belonging to someone that is a sign that everything still can be all right, even if the elements of ‘everything’ bear so little attachment to the potential bond between two people, no hugs and closeness can ever really make all of it right, and it is all simply a matter of destiny/fighting/universe, or whatever other explanation you choose to believe in...

...just like in ‘Onda vidim Tanju’/’Then I see Tanja’, the movie I saw last night. Done by a young Croatian director Juraj Lerotić, ‘Tanja’ is a movie both unusual – made together not from filmed material, but from a wonderful set of photographs – and very ‘usual’ – telling a story of a budding teenage romance in a surrounding filled with personal tragedies. Yet even if the story – overloaded with sadness – can seem a bit over the top, the beauty of the movie comes from the writer/director’s openness towards accepting emotions, instead of hiding away from them in any way. ‘Tanja’ is an example of truly courageous filmmaking in the way it treats the souls of its protagonists: it allows them to be delicate, fragile, gentle, even when it might seem that, in the ‘real world’, that sort of gentleness could be misunderstood, frowned upon, avoided as something that goes over the top, beyond what is acceptable in everyday relations (and boundaries there are indeed: me shedding tears to ‘Never let me go’ was completely ignored by my co-travellers – two ladies, one younger, one old – who, not knowing why I am crying, and obviously not wanting to intervene, continued talking to me or ignoring me just as they did before it happened, pretending not to notice it at all; showing too much emotion made them not more sensible towards me, but simply uncomfortable to the point of trying to ignore it). Lerotić allows his characters to feel and to love, and he allows himself to observe them with love through the eye of the camera – which makes his film incredibly endearing and gentle, even at its most humorous moments (and there indeed are many, some of them painted dark, some lighter). The end result is a movie that is both ‘emotional’ in itself, and tremendously emotionally engaging; one that reminds us of how sometimes, no matter how old (or young) you are, life is just so much easier when you are not going through it alone; and even if the world is confusing, and people can be confusing too, to be emotionally courageous can be rewarding (tho there are no guarantees, any cynic or a passionate Mike Leigh fan would have to conclude), and one person really can bring with him/herself all the hope in the world, and all the strength. In the words of Barry Egan, P.T. Anderson’s gentle loser of whom Lerotić’s teenage hero probably would never even hear of, “I have a love in my life. It makes me stronger than anything you can imagine“. Which is, I guess, all I want to hear on some days...when I too get particularly emotional.

Sometimes...

…life throws an unbearable amount of sadness on you, without any warning.

Sometimes, cinema does too.

Completely unexpectedly, I saw two movies today: ‘Biutiful’, the last work of Alejandro González Iñárritu, and (finally, almost a year after failing to catch it at TIFF!) Florin Serban's award-winning 'Eu cand vreau sa fluier, fluier'. And while I need to keep my thoughts and words on them for elsewhere (I promise, I will share the news here when the time comes, if it does...), I simply cannot help noting that I probably couldn’t have picked two sadder movies playing in cinemas today than I did. Not to make any confusion – they are two very different films. Yet both are about suffering in a way, and what unifies them (among other things) is that a certain source of their suffering – the main one, in case of Serban’s Silviu, and the ‘final’one, death, in case of ‘Biutiful’s Uxbal (wonderfully embodied by the ever-versatile Javier Bardem, who seems to never disappoint, and only gets better with time...) – is simply outside of their hands, outside of their power to meddle with.

While both films have their ‘issues’, they are nevertheless worthy of your time. Serban’s film, while not one to be labelled predictable, suffers from some incoherence, both in terms of characters and plot ‘odds’, and it owes a slight lack of charm to its over-insistence on being ‘Romanian’: in a while I haven’t seen such usage of certain long takes just for the sake of it. Yet it was Iñárritu’s film that eventually left me colder, less drawn by its story. Iñárritu is a director who cares for his characters; yet he cares much more for the grand-ness of his topics and the ‘importance’ of what he narrates. This leads to his films often feeling a bit overly cold, distanced, calculated – and thus hard to relate to, even if the stories he tells are often so overloaded with human suffering it seems almost impossible not to sympathize with the characters. And ‘Biutiful’ is no exception: a movie so filled with sadness it is difficult to watch, yet so loaded with stories coming together in predictable ways that it left me even a tiny bit bored at moments. And in the end, it was 'Eu cand vreau sa fluier, fluier' that felt more devastating in its depiction of suffering: not because Serban directs it with more grace or makes it more convincing (actually, it might be the other way around), but because of the ‘type’ of suffering he imposes on his main character.

In ‘Biutiful’, the suffering imposed by one human being upon another (or in this case, others) is more strongly related to side characters, while the main suffering comes from, to frame it somewhat rudely but in the end accurately, ‘natural causes’. Uxbal suffers ‘for’ the others (his kids), due to his life circumstances and terminal illness, and less ‘due to’ others (tho in the case of his wife, there is a combination of the two, as he is obviously torn by own stance on her, yet can’t help it as she poses a threat to what he loves the most). And if Iñárritu hints to us the humane characteristics of his side character, so that we would feel strongly for them as we normally would for the lead(s), he makes sure to still leave them one-dimensional enough for us not to get too carried away (this refers primarily to Lilly, who is given decent space, but is reduced to a dimension the Western world likes to sympathise with the most when it comes to immigrants: a single, suffering, struggling mother, as if being an illegal immigrant is not in itself enough). Serban, on the other hand, ties all his main character’s suffering to people: he is a victim of his mother’s carelessness, and once he is old enough to understand this, and ‘wise’ enough to try to prevent it from happening again to one person he really loves (his little brother), his good intentions find so little understanding in the deaf impersonations of the system that the only thing it can do proudly in response to his mission is to stomp on him with a heavy special police forces boot. And while in any other case such framing of Silviu’s position might seem as avoiding responsibility for own actions, he is amnestied by his young age, and a lack of responsibility of others for him (as a child/young teenager).

To make things even sadder, while Iñárritu recognizes the inherent weakness to human beings, and compensates for it slightly to its miserable hero by assigning him a friend to listen to his heartfelt stories and provide for some physical gentleness that requires nothing in return, thus saving him from walking through at least some parts of his personal hell completely alone, Serban brutally deprives Silviu of all real accomplices. He gets sympathetic glances and eventually cheers from his fellow inmates, but is left alone by most – even the sympathetic prison director quickly loses interest when the ‘normal functioning’ of the system he is running seems to be brought to question. This is not to say that Silviu’s method is good in the end – but when observed as a consequence of his previous complete inability to find any allies, it becomes, if nothing else, less of an instant reason for his condemnation. What is impressive is that Serban never decides to change his course when this is concerned; where in a Hollywood movie a passionate kiss would close the cafe scene between Silviu and the girl, in Serban’s interpretation the kiss is only one-sided, as even sympathy is still masked by fear on the other side. Emotionally, he simply has no real support in anyone, which underlines his suffering even more. He is tormented AND abandoned by people (and people as parts of systems - but let us leave that for some other time, no matter how crucially important it is), not 'the world', 'nature', 'destiny' or any other concept vague enough not to be pointed out so easily - which is probably the saddest of available combinations. And had Serban been brave enough to explore the fragility of his character, the inner breakage which is depicted much too quickly and too vaguely, Silviu could have been a character truly amazing. This way, he seems like a semi-finished drawing of an interesting idea. But on that – in some other places, hopefully. For now, this post has seen enough, if not too much sadness framed in words already.

The late night 'I love you' - to Hoffman, and to the one who is my measure of fragility...

Jack: Don't worry. I'm a good swimmer.
Connie: I know...
Jack: Yeah.
Connie: I knew you'd be a good swimmer. When we talked about summer, l knew you'd be good at it.
Jack: Yeah...I am for you.
Connie: I knew you'd be good.
Jack: I am for you.

(Connie and Jack, Jack Goes Boating, Philip Seymour Hoffman 2010)

If there was ever an actor who was the embodiment of courage, it must be Philip Seymour Hoffman. There are people who can act. There are those who are nice and loveable. There are those who cross their boundaries for every single task that comes up ahead of them, be it for adrenaline or for any other reason in the world. But Hoffman...Hoffman is all of this, and so much more. For every single role he does, he doesn't (just) change physically (ironically, his biggest 'official' recognition he won for one extreme of pure physical disappearance – stealing up that Oscar for the role of Truman Capote in Bennett Miller’s film, which will probably remain memorized in my thoughts as a living oil on canvass, an amazing painting, a lifeless masterpiece...and he was at the same time most laughed at for the other – the role of the transvestite Rusty in ‘Flawless’; yet he is mostly always the same, with the same hair and the same look and the same recognizable invisibility); he strips naked, completely, down to the bone. To the heart. To the soul. He fights battles with every single one of known emotions, conditions and states of mind, and he wins every time, whether it is cruelty (‘Mission:Impossible III’, ‘The Red Dragon’), subtle evilness (‘Cold Mountain’), confusion (‘State and Main’), despair and humiliation (‘The 25th Hour’), coolness (‘Almost Famous’), sadness (‘Love, Liza’), addiction (‘Owning Mahowny’)...just literally anything. There is simply nothing he cannot do, and his ability to let go is always the most captivating detail in all of his movies, no matter who he was directed by, or what his role is.

But it is not (only) his versatility that makes Hoffman so unique – it is his fearlessness in showing fragility that I love so much. In a fiction world of cinema where men are courageous avengers, fearless defenders, flaming lovers and calculating gamblers (or otherwise exist mainly in comedies, as losers and ‘weaklings’ who are to be laughed at, or miraculously transformed into ‘real men’ by the end of the movie), often stripped bare of all fear, fragility and gentleness (or, if they do exist, they are only catalyst for courageous deeds – with the fear of loss transforming an average father or husband into a fearless fighter; not to mention one who looks like Christian Bale or Tom Cruise, just waiting to show off his muscles under the ‘ready for office’ everyday outfit), Hoffman embodies a gorgeously humane precedent, without ever crossing over the boundary of being laughable or tacky. Even when Todd Solondz turns him into the ‘creepy guy next door’, or when P.T. Anderson strips him down and humiliates him as the quiet, gentle and shy Scotty (whose existence we barely notice, and who is reduced to one ‘marking of time’, one historical symbol), there is still so much authentic warmth to him, it is sometimes difficult to watch, but always touching on so many levels. And even if it sometimes seems that he is the embodiment of loser(s), it is almost never so: for as much as I am not fond of Jacob (Elinsky) as he whines about his privileged life to Monty to hide the fact that he doesn’t have a clue about life’s difficulties, and all the literature he teaches has taught him nothing about the real-world dialogue, the look in his eyes after an unexpected (and forbidden!) kiss shows him off not as the predator, but as a scared man in search of some freedom, which he can’t find because he’s trapped in his own world of ‘culture’; and even if his Wilson – after the loss of Liza – may seem at first as someone who’s given up on himself, understanding his reasons will only make him more humane in any attentive observer’s eye: for what can be more humane, more sad and more worthy of my understanding, than the grief caused by the loss of one’s life embodied in love? These characters are ‘shameful’ only if sorrow is shameful; only if being weak is in some way unnatural, and learning to deal with our emotions is something easy, irrelevant and so futile, that we shouldn’t ever dare to bring it out to the open, in front of others. And maybe this is indeed so in Hollywood dreamland – but in real life, fragility is not something to hide, but a proof that our hearts are indeed more than a part of the perfect body machinery, a gentle beauty in itself. And Hoffman radiates that beauty with every move, and every word.

‘Jack Goes Boating’ could be the gentlest, most stripped down work of Hoffman’s so far. For Jack is not only his character to play with, but – with the movie being Hoffman’s directorial debut – the decision of how much of his inner world to show was also left up to Hoffman himself. In the end, Jack is a man so gentle, it is almost unbearable. And while he is often uncomfortable with himself and with others - clearing his throat obsessively when feeling threatened or overexposed in any way – the tiny glimpses of courage he shows (embodied so poetically in the swimming lessons, which were funny and sad at the same time) come off as feats worthy of praise much greater than the acts we award and praise in everyday life. And they are. For no physical challenges, no successes in sports and medals won can ever compare with the courage of saying ‘I love you’; and no Oscar shine for the greatest performance can ever top the amount of soul given in the act of the first kiss. Hoffman, as an Oscar winner, knows this; judging by this role, he knows it well. And he makes Jack so kind to the world, you would think the world will crush him with all its sorrow. But it doesn’t, for he wiped away his tears – in front of us, the observers, reminding us there is no shame in demonstrating weakness, even if it makes both his and our cheeks blush – and has learned how to cook, and how to swim. And even how to row a boat. And how to love...well, that he has known all along...

Thinking about...

...sensuality.

Les Amours Imaginaires (Xavier Dolan, 2010); Fa Yeung nin wa (Kar Wai Wong, 2000); Irreversible (Gaspar Noe, 2002).

On loving innocently

Kim: You're here... They didn't hurt you, did they?
Were you scared? I tried to make Jim go back, but, you can't make Jim do anything. Thank you for not telling them that we...
Edward: You're welcome.
Kim: It must have been awful when they told you whose house it was.
Edward: I knew it was Jim's house.
Kim: You... you did?
Edward: Yes.
Kim: Well, then why'd you do it?
Edward: Because you asked me to.

(Kim and Edward, Edward Scissorhands, Tim Burton, 1990)

The biggest Thank You goes to lady R. for reminding me of this, unintentionally...

On how towards people, we have double standards sometimes - and love's no exception

Christy: Why does your status say 'single' on your Facebook page?
Eduardo: What?
Christy: Why does your relationship status say 'single' on your Facebook page?
Eduardo: I was single when I set up the page.
Christy: And you just never bothered to change it?
Eduardo: I...
Christy: What?
Eduardo: I don’t know how.
Christy: Do I look stupid to you?
Eduardo: No...calm down...
Christy: You’re asking me to believe that the CFO of Facebook doesn’t know how to change his relationship status on Facebook?
Eduardo: It’s a little embarrassing, so you should take it as a sign of trust that I would tell you that.
Christy: Go to hell!
Eduardo: Take it easy!
Christy: No, you didn’t change it so you could screw those Silicon Valley sluts every time you go to Mark!
Eduardo: Not even remotely true, and I can promise you that the Silicon Valley sluts don’t care what anyone’s relationship status is on Facebook. Please, open your present...
(...)
Open your present. It’s a silk scarf.
Christy: Have you ever seen me wear a scarf?
Eduardo: This will be your first.

(Eduardo Saverin and Christy, The Social Network, David Fincher 2010)

Was away for a long time. Maybe I will still be away, dunno...sometimes my ideas just don't want to find their way into becoming letters.

But sometimes...an unexpectedly beautiful thing appears, just asking to be shared.
Like this one...
Saw 'The Social Network' the other day - and was, as always, mesmerized by Fincher. But that feeling of adoration deserves at least a post of its own.
This tiny little sequence, however, had to be shared now - as it made me re-think our expectations of our partners, and the dlusion we so often grow up with, that the person we share our life with should be of the kind that satisfies a form, a shape, a pre-designed model we desire of them.
Eduardo Saverin is certainly the most loveable character of the movie; there is a certain traditionality to him, a very moderate sense of politeness, and a sense of 'human'-ness and gentleness that the other characters lack. He is instinctively almost impossible not to like.
Yet, this is what the viewers - us - see from the outside. Christy sees something else: a confused character, unwilling to share much, and probably unfaithful too; 'cause, what else would he be doing not answering her calls, than spending time with another woman at the time? And the silk scarf? In the viewers' perspective: a clumsy, but thus even more endearing attempt of showing affection which perfectly matches his confusion. In her perspective: an act of a careless man, who probably wasn't even thinking of her when buying it; a generic present from an unfaithful man.

The point?
People come as they are. And they can be the kindest, nicest, most endearing personalities - but they are rarely as we imagine them to be. But our inability to see that, to be open to exploring how they really are, instead of expecting them to be 'just as they should', can sometimes mean missing a tremendous much. Or maybe not. But without trying, we'll never know.

Or maybe I am just sentimental, and not so much hating the idea of silk scarves.
Or maybe, just maybe, it's just Sunday...

On how, in life and love, we have choices

"I fell in love with her, Alice."
"Oh, as if you had no choice? There's a moment, there's always a moment, "I can do this, I can give into this, or I can resist it", and I don't know when your moment was, but I bet you there was one."

(Dan and Alice, Closer, Mike Nichols, 2004)

On how cinema and life clash inevitably, and so often tragically

This morning, one of the major dailies in Croatia published an article under the following title:

'Father kills two underage daughters, then takes away his own life/Otac ubio dvije maloljetne kćeri pa si oduzeo život'

In the article, it was stated that the man, D.G., was separated from his wife, who he wanted to get back with, but she apparently didn't feel the same way. He came to her in the early morning, they had an argument, and the whole thing ended as it did, tragically...

Instantly, the images of Cristi Puiu's 'Aurora' came back to my mind, together with the feeling of shame and - at the same time - compassion it envoked in me as I was watching it, and as I was writing about it here the other day. Sure, in Puiu's film, the children stay OK - Viorel is too gentle of a person to be anything less than loving as a father. But besides that, the story looks so familiar...And while it was so easy to be compassionate with the gentle, soft-spoken Viorel once the spotlight was on him, and it was only him we were getting to know, how do I show any compassion with the father here? And (why) should I?

I oh so wish feature film fiction movies could be a little more fictional sometimes...

As all good things have to end...

...TIFF, too, ended today...and my visit to it ended even a tiny bit earlier - and it is already missed. And yes, I have been gathering courage and will to dedicate to it a few lines, like a nice wrap-up of all the beautiful things left behind. However, I can't seem to stop thinking of a question so insanely complex, it seems almost ridiculous to ask it at all...

It all started with two stories.
The first one? Well...C - my beloved partner in crime - and I recently went to see György Pálfi's latest film, 'I am not your friend'. We took lovely company, and, in the dark of the cutest little cinema, enjoyed a film that was - to me - more interesting than good. A hyper-realistic chronicle of relations between a few odd (to say the least) couples in contemporary Budapest, it felt (and indeed was, as we later found out) highly improvised, raw and very authentic in a way. Yet, to my amateur-ish eye and an ear resilient to any sounds in Hungarian (and it is not that I am not trying - but it is just a language incredibly complex, and unbearably rich in words for a poor beginner), Pálfi's movie didn't seem like something so 'new' and remarkable as it could have been - it felt almost 'overdone' at times, and I would have, in my occasional attacks of smugness (of which I am not at all proud, but I am learning to face and control their existence), probably labeled it as an interesting experiment, but nothing previously unseen, before moving on to enjoying something more appealing and exciting to me in its novelty and depth. Yet C's reaction to it made me confused, almost embarrassed: he related to it completely, proclaiming it to be brilliant not because of its style or visual beauty, but because of how authentic it is, and how precise in capturing the decadence of the Hungarian capital; Yet, as the dialogues were untranslatable in all their colloquial glory, and the feel of the city was foreign to me, it was obviously something that I cannot understand or relate to - and the sad truth was that he was right, I really couldn't. And while we were talking after we exited the cinema, for moments it would seem to me like we had seen two completely different films - and the loss, it was obvious, was all mine...

And so, for the next two days, I was haunted by the idea that I will never, even if I really try, be able to understand some things about not only Hungarian, but foreign cinema in general; the topics, the small cultural references, the subtle insinuations to actual political or other happenings that marked the lives of locally rooted heroes, even the fine nuances related to how they spoke (with language transferring all sorts of messages, from their social status to general manners), were just simply 'untranslatable' to my world, and therefore out of my reach - putting me in a position similar to that of an anthropologist doomed to always observe a 'foreign' culture without ever being capable of 'understanding' it. And 'Aurora', the movie I wrote about recently, seemed to be the sole peak of my horror caused by ignorance: the loooong takes depicting details of everyday life which must have had a deeper meaning that was just invisible to me, the football references that mush have had a story behind them, one of which I obviously had no clue about...There must have been - I felt - so much more to those three hours than I ever could have spotted, and that made me tremendously sad in a way. But was this really so? 'No', said the unlikely voice of my newly acquired Romanian friend, a passionate follower of the Festival and a film critic; According to him, there was nothing that I was really missing - most of those references were completely irrelevant for the story anyway, or were not really references at all (for instance, for him, as he doesn't follow football, the football 'sparks' were no less confusing than for me, only he took them as far less relevant) but only 'time-fillers'; besides, the general idea of 'Aurora' was just as understandable to both of us, and it was its universality that made it a really great film.

From that conversation on, I've been thinking a lot about the universality of cinema, and of the 'transferability' of ideas across different cultures and language barriers. How much do I lose when watching a movie in a language I don't understand, and how much of it gets - literally - lost in translation? If a certain story is indeed focused on being a study of something 'locally' rooted, how valid and meaningful can it be at all, when taken out of its original context? And is it really true that the marking of a really good movie lies in the universality of its primary focus(es), or is this just a misconception, based on the ignorance towards the problem of 'translatability'?

Very raw, naive questions, I know - and ones that have to do less with movie-making, and much more with philosophy than I would like them to. And, no, I don't (yet) have a satisfactory answer to share. But I am open to readings, opinions, attitudes - anything that might get me a step closer to my own personal answer(s)...

And this would be...

...the place for a quote. But this time I have none - somehow it always turns out that I forget the Moleskine when it would be of most use...

Finally saw Cristi Puiu's 'Aurora' last night, as the last movie I managed to 'catch' so far at the TIFF; and in a way, it was disturbing and moving enough for me to still think about it today, and it caused in me a need to write a couple of quick lines about it, even tho I really didn't want to in a way...and yet, it wasn't what I expected it would be.

'Aurora' is a tremendously sad film, one about a man who has lost love in his life, and will do anything in order to 'improve' that - but his choice of 'improvement' is just unbearably wrong, tho, it seems, it is the only one he can think of, a sort of a last attempt to make things right, by making them completely wrong.

The topic in itself is beautiful; and so is Puiu as the understated, silent, not-really-existing-anymore Viorel. But all this still doesn't amount to a beautiful film. The biggest problem is, paradoxically, the movie's length; In his previous film, 'Lazarescu', capturing the slowness of time passing was necessary as a way to illustrate the slowness of the system. 'Aurora', however, has no intention of dealing with the system - it is a film so tremendously private, it made me feel like a voyeur on occasions; and as much as Puiu tries to root it in the contemporary Romanian society (and he does so through a number of amazing little details, conversations, nods and looks; unfortunately, while some of them were visible to me, I was painfully aware the entire time that most of the finesse is just slipping through my fingers like fine sand - as a foreigner, it is hard to relate to little everyday things that are, to me, completely unknown, and for which I just have no interpretation, or even feeling. But this is always the danger of film as medium - its narrative is never quite translatable, and a lot of it gets lost in between layers; luckily, some of the messages are universal - were they not, it would make watching foreign films completely impossible...), its story is universal in a way that allows it to re-play itself anywhere and everywhere. The pacing of the movie thus becomes a decision, rather than a necessity derived from its intention - and Puiu makes a somewhat bad choice deciding to observe his (anti)hero with such a lazy, drowsy cinematographic eye, as the final 'finding' just isn't 'big' enough to justify for all the seconds spent in waiting for its revelation. But it is definitely sad enough, regardless of whether one perceives the poor Viorel as insane, tragic, or just unbearably lonely (and, as one of the characters of the movie labels him, 'a big softie'). Puiu's film might be viewed as a study of human nature, and our capability of committing a crime (in that view, it shares an overlapping territory with another amazing film I've seen recently, Bong's 'Mother') - and seeing it like this, pulled through the filters of morale that places the biggest value on the the life of a person, feels 'right' somehow. But for me, it is more a study on sadness of an individual, who is only 'crazy' when thought of as of a number, a general Someone, and not an individual with emotions and dilemmas - as much as saying this makes me feel shy, almost embarrassed for my moral drift. Whether the director's decision to shoot it in a slow pace was 'programmatic' (keeping his reputation of the 'initiator', if not the ideologist of the Romanian New Wave cinema) or purely instinctive is maybe less important. More important is his tremendous arrogance in titling the film - 'Aurora', he explained after the screening, means the beginning, and every beginning is a good in itself. For Viorel, however, there is no real beginning anymore - nothing that opens before him promises a field of opportunities, only a prison cell and some more loneliness, just of the kind he was trying to escape in the first place. And only someone completely insensitive of his suffering could play on him such a cruel language trick. But knowing that Puiu and Viorel, for the three hours of the movie, become one (literally, as the latter is both created and embodied by the former), one should maybe think of it only as of self-irony, and not an offense. In any case, 'Aurora' is not an easy experience to live through for sure, but also not an easy one to watch.

Or maybe I just got it all wrong again?

A short one from the road...

"Massimo je vrhunski glazbenik koji svoje emocije prenosi publici, a u njegovom izražaju nema nimalo agresije, samo ljubavi prema glazbi./Massimo is a top class musician who transfers his emotions to the audience, and in his expression, there is not a bit of aggression, only love towards music."

Gabi Novak, a singer, on her colleague Massimo Savić, in Jutarnji List, 26.05.2010

I was reading the newspaper on the train today, and I ran into this quote...quite honestly, at first I thought it doesn't belong here, as it is not at all about cinema, and it is most certainly not a movie quote either; However, it somehow stuck with me, and I decided to bring it to this page of the universe because, for me, she so perfectly summarized (speaking about music) the things that I have been missing in cinema recently - the love of the art of film, instead of the need to conform to the financial restraints or, in the case of what we label as 'festival' or 'art' cinema (both misleading and wrong tho, but that's besides the point), to the taste of the festival juries and the trends in movieshooting at the moment. I am not a fan of either of the protagonists, but she gave him the most beautiful compliment she could have given - no aggression, just love. Absolutely mesmerizing.

Have been missing a lot of great cinema recently, much more than I have actually seen...but on my way to here, and we'll see where that will get me in terms of visual pleasures...but with Radu Muntean's latest film on board, the Cannes-complimented 'Tuesday, After Christmas', the expectations are high...

On things too mesmerizing not to be shared

"Do you have a lot of friends?"
"Not really..."
"Do you ever wish you did?"
"Yeah"
"When?"
"Well... like... now, for instance."
"Why?"
"Well... I just met you. And I feel like telling somebody about it."

(Christina and Eric, Exotica, Atom Egoyan, 1994)

I should make a promise to myself, and everyone who might read this, that my next quote will have nothing to do with love, or human relations in general...it should be a happy thought, but one of a completely different kind...

On sparks, desire and just letting go

"I'm having trouble sleeping. I keep dreaming about you."
"You don't even know me."

(Sissi and Bodo, Der Krieger + Die Kaiserin, Tom Tykwer, 2000)