Matty

A journey through the literary landscapes of the well-known Czech translator Anna Kareninová. Found By the One She Seeks is a portrait of a woman who relates to the world primarily through words, by means of which she attempts to capture reality, and whose most intense dialogue with others takes place in the pages of books. It is a portrait whose power lies in words as much as in images. In contrast to the protagonist’s intellectual focus, the 16 mm camerawork accents the materiality of things and the physicality of people, i.e. that which cannot be conceptualised, but only experienced through the senses. Despite this intimacy, which is enhanced through the use of excerpts from Kareninová’s audio travel diary, the director allows the enigmatic translator to keep many of her secrets. Or perhaps he conversely creates new secrets by not asking her to go into minute detail about her relationships, habits or way of working. What she cares about, how and for what she lives, remains apparent in the film thanks to the way that it is attuned to her rhythm and diction, and how it is built around the works of Petr Kabeš, to which attention is repeatedly diverted and whose removal logically closes the narrative. This is an extraordinary film, and not only in comparison with all of the conventional documentary portraits of celebrities that try to shoehorn their subjects into preconceived narratives and roles.

The object of Argento’s psychoanalytical interest is deceptively not the murderer (whom the protagonists search for as if they didn’t even want to find him), but Hemmings’s sensitive pianist. He is effeminate and repeatedly humiliated by his partner, and he constantly struggles with his own dark desires and rages, which are manifested in the person of Carl (who is literally the opposite of the protagonist: in a group scene, one wears black trousers and a white shirt, the other wears white trousers and a black shirt). There are a few mandatory gore scenes, which of course are always followed by a sadistically long and brilliantly conceived overture by Goblin. With its aesthetic qualities, Deep Red will please even the more voracious horror fans. While I survived Blow-Up, I enjoyed its less self-absorbed alternative for the second time. 85%

The first Magic Mike was an uncomplicated social drama, the second a road movie and this, the third one, is a Lubitsch-esque conversational comedy built on the foundation of a backstage musical. Or Pretty Woman in reverse, if you like (a rich housewife buys the company of a stripper with a heart of gold, and the question of “love or money?” stands at the centre of the story). However, there is also criticism of the capitalism/patriarchy that turns everything into a commodity (London is humorously presented through a series of shots of souvenirs) and promises to women, who are at the centre of the narrative for the first time, freedom (the perhaps most expensive shop in the city is aptly called Liberty) and  fulfilment of their most secret fantasies, but only if they give up their wealth and power. In other words, it really has to be a fantasy realised somewhere in the theatre, without any overlap with the real world, where men still make the decisions. Magic Mike’s Last Dance can also be seen as Soderbergh’s effort to subversively play around with the concept of legacy sequels, at which he both succeeds and fails (and reflects his own position, when, like Mike, he has to build on a successful brand, sell himself and rely on patrons instead of building something new because of the systemic conditions). The protagonist wouldn’t have done anything spectacular without someone else’s money and a job offer; he simply would have continued to make a living as a bartender and remained a lone wolf. The old gang only appears briefly during a Zoom call and there are minimal references to the preceding instalments (a flashback with a striptease in a police costume). The dance scenes, thanks to which this is one of the most erotic Hollywood films without sex (and it will make your nipples erect regardless of your gender or orientation) are parodically overwrought (the opening “pornographic” dance à la Fifty Shades of Grey and its moist variation at the end). The deliberate formulaicness with the division of the story into basic archetypes is made visible by the straightforward voiceover, which transform’s Mike’s return to the stage almost into a fairy tale or mythical story. It’s definitely not as silly and shallow as it may seem when viewing it on a superficial level. 75%

“Hurt people hurt people.” Greenberg is as pleasant as a boil on your backside (like most of Baumbach’s protagonists). He is self-centred, obsessed with control, impatient, unsociable and with occasional outbursts of rage. We only gradually find out the reasons for his behaviour and begin to understand him and perhaps even empathise with him. Like Florence, who is much more open to the world around her and seems to be fine, except she isn’t. Almost no one is. Not even the dog named Mahler, thanks to which the central couple meet and toward which everyone in the film is more perceptive and compassionate than to any human. Greenburg is simply not a feel-good romantic comedy about a flawed protagonist who gains understanding and sees the light, but rather an ironic, unapologetic portrait of an unhappy man who pines for his wasted youth and searches for a fulfilling existence and a soulmate with whom he can get along at least as well as with his friend Ivan (Rhys Ifans in one of the few normal roles). Communication is a stumbling block. The characters don’t listen to each other, as they think and speak only of themselves (the film ends hopefully when one of the characters is about to listen to another, even if only from the answering machine). They are unable to synchronise their rhythms. The main thing that I appreciate about Baumbach is the distance that he manages to keep from the protagonists of his stories (which perhaps helped here by the fact that Jennifer Jason Leigh co-wrote the story with him). He doesn’t pressure us to like them and he doesn’t shy away from ambivalence and awkwardness. With its clever, relaxed humour and numerous casually delivered lines that you think about long after seeing the film (“nobody cares if I get up in the morning”), the dialogue is subordinated to the directing, with precisely timed cuts, compositions that tell us about the relationships between the characters, and a narrative pace that corresponds to the pace of the characters’ lives. Noah Baumbach is an excellent director and screenwriter, and in Greenberg – as compared to the “hip” Frances Ha – he doesn’t feel the need to show it off. And I like that. 75%

I like how every plot shift is tied to familial relationships (as family comprises the whole ecosystem of Pandora in this case), how the film works superbly with parallels (between the characters’ relationships and the past and present – the villain goes through the same initiation as Jake in the first film, but with a different result) and how divine the water and underwater CGI looks, and I’m not offended by the simple eco-friendly plot about finding a home and saving one’s family through a connection to an ancestral heritage, but Cameron is far too enamoured with his moon/planet and his singing whales, and he revels in both of these aspects far more than is necessary for the narrative. You can imagine the middle part of the film, which is followed by the comparatively interminable final act, as a sequel to My Octopus Teacher, with big fish instead of octopuses (which I don't mean as a compliment). Whereas the first Avatar flew by quickly and, due to its focus on building a fictional world and evoking fear for its fate, you weren’t bothered by the two-dimensional characters communicating through poorly written dialogue, here I felt every minute passing by, missing the mark emotionally by several nautical miles, because when the going gets tough, you will probably have trouble even remembering the name of the character whose life is at stake. At least the protagonist’s sons are similar to each other and interchangeable in terms of character. An unbearably long three hours. P.S. Some of the action scenes in 3D and 48fps look like cut scenes from a highly advanced video game (which is not a compliment either) and the non-action scenes are reminiscent of a soap opera. 60%

“Do you like sweets?” Even in Buñuel’s last film, the bourgeoisie still has a target on its back. This time, a man whose main concerns are food, sex and the fear of losing face is deservedly dragged from one situation that takes him out of the concept to another. Mathieu prides himself on his absolute control over his surroundings. He remodels the apartments in which his flings are to take place according to his own ideas in the same way that a director transforms a theatre stage. Control over the prepared performance gives him a feeling of superiority, the loss of which (i.e. deviation from the script) is severely punished. Any other disturbance of the order or the space of which he considers himself to be the master must be immediately eliminated (the absurd scenes with a dead rat and a fly in a drink). Every object belongs in a firmly specified place according to the protagonist’s opinion. It is thus no wonder that he attempts to integrate Conchita into the other interior furnishings. For Mathieu, she is not a sentient being, but merely a means of sexual gratification, a fetish. However – as it happens in Buñuel’s social satires – she is aware of this and is able to deal with it. Thanks to the degree of independence that the female character exhibits, That Obscure Object of Desire comes across as a delayed reaction to women’s liberation. The increased interest in social events, previously reflected by Buñuel on a more subliminal level, is also revealed by the violent inclusion of terrorist acts in the narrative. It seems that the lifelong surrealist shortsightedly embraced this new form of anarchism as an effective defence against the rottenness of the bourgeoisie. As with the film’s other motifs, Buñuel fortunately uses exaggeration in working with this one. Such exaggeration is present in That Obscure Object of Desire both at the level of individual scenes and in the overall narrative structure (the initial situation is reminiscent of an anecdote in the style of “A bourgeois, a dwarf and a respectable lady meet in a train compartment...”). In comparison with his previous films, it is more difficult to tell when this was still a matter of the director’s subversiveness and when it was simply a lack of creativity and ideas. For example, the sound – with the exception of the gag at the very end – is very shoddy (which, however, is entirely understandable in light of Buñuel’s deafness), too many scenes are stylistically indistinct and blend together, and the story is essentially just a variation of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. In that film, members of the bourgeoisie are unable to sit down to dinner together, while in That Obscure Object, Mathieu cannot lie in bed with his chosen girl. Despite its richness of thought, That Obscure Object of Desire is mainly just an echo of the better works by a filmmaker from whom others (Saura, Almodóvar) had already taken over the surrealist baton by the time it was released. 70%

Over the course of seven one-hour episodes, Adam Curtis examines the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union year by year. This time without extensive off-screen commentary and aptly chosen songs. However, another Curtis trademark is present here, namely shots of awkwardly dancing individuals. The absence of explanatory words and sounds is not a bad thing, as it forces viewers to watch more actively, to search for secondary meanings and to draw their own conclusions. Using well-chosen and even better composed materials from the BBC archive (often apparently unofficial, previously unused materials) and some laconic explanatory captions here and there in the picture, Curtis creates a kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation that first tentatively rejected communism and then lost itself in capitalism and various ideas of what democracy means. He arranges events that his colleagues such as Sergei Loznitsa and Vitaly Mansky had previously dealt with relatively honestly, though not with such a broad scope, in chronological order – Chernobyl, Afghanistan, the attempted coup in August 1991, the attack on parliament two years later, the two wars in Chechnya, Putin’s elevation to the Kremlin. However, he constantly veers away from the major events toward seemingly incidental, often bizarre episodes and the reflections of random passers-by, who are increasingly frustrated by the ongoing developments. Curtis is interested in the relationship between the centre of power and the periphery, between the problems of Moscow and the rural population of Russia and the former Soviet republics. Through ironic juxtaposition (which often occurs within a single shot, so rich in meaning that it really doesn’t need any further commentary), Curtis succeeds in capturing the tragicomedy and absurdity of the post-Soviet reality without resorting to literalism (or rather enriching it with a metaphorical dimension; for example, when the exhumation of a 2,500-year-old corpse found in Siberia conveniently coincides with the renewed worship of Stalin and the unveiling of a statue of Peter the Great). On the one hand, the first McDonald’s in Moscow is opened with great fanfare and the state invests massively in senseless military conflicts, while on the other hand, there are civilians who have nothing to buy (or eat) because of economic reforms, and dejected soldiers sleeping in barracks with a hole in the floor and wondering why and for whom they are fighting. Curtis takes into account the increasingly wide chasm that is forming between corrupt politicians (connected to the oligarchs, who best managed to exploit the possibilities of the free market) and impoverished citizens while the space for constructive dialogue is shrinking and the sense of belonging and collective identity is disintegrating. For a large part of the Russian population, the starting point was either cynicism and total resignation to democracy or a return to the values (and methods of governing) that they associated with lost certainty and security (of course, the joke consists in the fact that Putin was not brought to power by Communism, but rather by strong opposition – backed by oligarchs with connections in the West – to the strengthening Communist Party). ___ Because of its linear structure and adherence to familiar narratives, TraumaZone is not the highlight of Curtis’s filmography (which, in my opinion, remains the more formalistically and intellectually bold and well-thought-out Can’t Get You Out of My Head), but it is still a fascinating audio-visual accomplishment and a valuable, darkly humorous socio-political study of where Russia is today and how it got there. It is also a warning of how easily the rest of the former Eastern Bloc could find itself in the same place.

Blonde is an exceptional work for the same reasons many people hate it: its fragmentation, the excessive length of many scenes, the focus on the surface, the inconstant visual identity, the building of pressure without catharsis, it’s not an empathetic biopic but a pessimistic collection of horrors with a dissociated protagonist who wanders through her own subconscious – the whole film can be seen as her nightmare (also, the Badalamenti-esque soundtrack by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is reminiscent of Lynch, who had prepared and ultimately shelved a film about Marilyn Monroe in the 1980s). The breaking down and decontextualisation of the myth and iconography of Marilyn Monroe work better in images than in Joyce Carol Oates’s graphomaniacal book on which the film is based (though the film uses the book’s narrative and storyline relatively consistently, its nihilism is closer to Ballard or Palahniuk). I understand that sexual violence, nervous breakdowns and ideas outside the boundaries of taste (a foetus talking to its mother) may be too much for some. I understand that not everyone will accept the concept of a film in which beauty is almost always associated with pain and sex with humiliation, a film that places the viewer in the extremely uncomfortable position of voyeuristic accomplice. However, I would expect critics to at least have the ability to distinguish between a real historical figure and a textual construct that serves a certain narrative or symbolic purpose, or rather between a misogynistic film and a film about misogyny (and the cruelty of the looks that strip a person of their identity and turns one into a projection screen for someone else’s fantasies). 90%

“You see?” This postmodern neo-noir flick elevates the traditional questioning of elementary certainties to a new dimension. In an age of memory set fully in media, when people themselves become a recording medium and memories are a very marketable commodity, the boundaries between present and past, between public and private, between work and artist are irreversibly obliterated. This is a post-ideological age in which all schools of thought are disparaged and the only persistent logic is the logic of the market, making it impossible to express real feelings, to express an idea and to mean it seriously. Romantic relationships have been replaced by one-night stands, in the extreme case only virtual. In Strange Days, the dissolution of the long-term cohabitation of two people is symbolically linked to the loss of Faith, as Lenny’s girlfriend is called. To escape into an idyll, into a world that hasn’t been made exceedingly technical and to days literally and figuratively permeated with light, a device, a means of representing not only drugs but, in a broader sense, all of life, is used. The dissemination of information without context, with emphasis on immediate emotional (and, if possible, physical) response, deprives people of accountability and the necessity of thinking. It suffices to see and experience this here and now. The need to define one’s ungraspable experience of the world has reached absurd proportions. Because the real possibilities of getting to know the world better have been exhausted, the realm of the imaginary has come into play, though it has little in common with the atrophied human imagination – the content of the mind can now be converted into a common code that, thanks to technology, is easily understandable and rewritable by anyone. The last form of private property has become widely available. The relativity of the subjective perception of the world has been multiplied many times over. What do we see when we see what someone else has seen? The flashback, that classic means of film narrative, has penetrated reality. But, “Are you sure it’s real?” Cameron’s visionary screenplay offers enough philosophically substantial material for several films, which is both Strange Days’ greatest strength and its greatest weakness. There is something for everyone – media theorists, prophets of the apocalypse, sci-fi fans and feminists (the women here are at least morally stronger than the men). Kathryn Bigelow is also deserving of admiration, as she succeeded in taming this monster of an idea. The dark settings jam-packed with images (and images of images) and sounds and filmed in long Steadicam shots with minimal depth of field almost induce vertigo. Attention is permanently stress-tested due to the distractions created with light and sound. We are not told what we should notice; to some extent, it relies on how well the human eye is trained in a person whose visual mode is characterised by the word “inattentiveness”. The impermanence of the perception of reality that needs only to be retrieved and replayed displaces the need to gaze at the object of interest for a moment. It is not a pleasant experience to watch it twice and everything tends to peculiarly fall apart, shattering the image (in the climax, which is reminiscent The Lady from Shanghai), but this is how we experience reality and thus how we live. Life in the unconscious and in the unseen. 85%

Mr. Morgan’s Lost Love is an autumnal sonata about parents and children. I am surprised by how lifeless the film seems despite the participation of the charismatic Michael Caine. Like Haneke’s Amour, it emanates an academic coldness. The reason for the film’s strange lifelessness is not the slow pace of the narrative (the result of a combination of longer shots, scenes that blend together in terms of mood and visuals, and the refusal to make sharp camera movements), but rather the abstracted reality with which the narrative works. The film is interested exclusively in phenomena that do not disturb its melancholic tone and deepen the motif of late reassessment of one’s life values. Last Love attempts to rise above the details of everyday existence (unlike the neorealist Umberto D, which was based on those details), which causes it to lose touch with reality. For the director, who dedicated the film to her father, Last Love was perhaps a useful form of self-therapy and a way to express her awakening; for me, it was two hours of predictable relationship experiments. Due to the expansion of the narrative with the addition of a new character, you will get a sense of the ending long before the two storylines begin to converge. Instead of telling a story about the autumn of life without prejudice and exaggeration, as she most likely intended, Sandra Nettelbeck’s stark narrative style makes it an utterly bland time. 65%