47TH GÖTEBORG FILM FESTIVAL
Online festivals — what do we feel about them, really? I’m divided. Something essential is undeniably lost, as watching films from home will obviously never come close to the real festival experience. The atmosphere of the theatres and the city as a whole cannot travel through the screen and touch you in the same way as it does when you’re there, and the feeling of wandering around through the crowds of passionate and talented people speaking all kinds of languages is lost when you’re, in fact, not there. Anyway, I couldn’t be in Gothenburg this year, sadly, but as you might have guessed already, I saw some films from the online programme (thus, I am indeed divided, because the streaming offer is, of course, a great thing to have when you cannot attend in person).
A REAL JOB
★★★★★
Un Métier sérieux
Thomas Lilti
France
A young substitute teacher with an unfinished PhD and not a lot of teacher experience is our main guy in this lighthearted yet heartfelt ensemble drama, that depicts the lives of a group of teachers at a middle school trying to deal with the everyday situations of the classrooms and of their private lives and of the grey areas in between. It’s a sweet little film that mixes social tension with a lot of charm, and a film that manages to portray a pretty wide range of characters and stories during its 100-minute runtime, in an impressively rich way. This is, I would say, mostly thanks to a succinct and focused script and a stellar cast — Vincent Lacoste, François Cluzet, Louise Bourgoin, Adèle Exarchopoulos and William Lebghil, among others — who all do a great job of saying much more than what the lines of their characters actually tell. Labeled as a drama comedy, probably correctly so, A Real Job hits the right balance between the seriousness of its subject matters and the warmth of its characters, generating a film that steadily sneaks into your heart and leaves you with a bittersweet little sensation of this quite unremarkable little film turning out to be quite remarkable in the end. In a way, it’s a slice of life that in its simplicity, for me, basically captures the essence of cinema — I don’t know if everyone would agree with that statement, most people probably wouldn’t, but personally I kind of live for stories like this. This is also the type of film that could only be made by the French, somehow.
HANDLING THE UNDEAD
★★★★★
Håndtering av udøde
Thea Hvistendahl
Norway, Sweden, Greece
Another film that I probably like more than most (looking at a distribution of reviews that is almost perfectly spread across the board from low to high) is this Norwegian adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s (Let the Right One In) book with the same name, telling a strange story of how newly deceased people wake up and come back to life after being hit by a mysterious electric field (or something like that) on a hot summer day in Oslo. It is a very slow and bleak film that is not afraid of taking its time, that is not rushing anywhere and that is not afraid of alienating its audience along the way, and I can definitely understand why one might find the film painfully challenging to get through. But if one can withstand this test and reach beneath the uninviting surface, there is a grotesque yet somehow beautiful story to be found underneath; a story of loss, pain and grief. The thing is, apparently, that even if the loved ones that we have lost would miraculously come back one day, we would still be broken and we would not be able to fix it, and we can never get back what we once had even if it literally comes back to us. And that is such a heavy realization to deal with. Handling the Undead is beautifully shot — and this cannot be understated, it is a visually stunning film — on 35mm, and composed by a series of tableaus and long takes that, in combination with a superb sound design, really capture the ugly beauty and the heaviness of the mundane moments of life in a way that resembles both Roy Andersson and Michael Haneke. I get why some people have criticized the film for its pacing, its unnatural character behavior and its underwhelming final act, and while I can agree to some extent about the ending being a bit rushed or weak given the long buildup anticipating it, for most of the negative critique I believe it simply comes down to personal taste and preference, and whether this works for you or not, more than what it is a question of good or bad filmmaking. For me, it really worked, and I will always appreciate a piece of art that does something new, something bold or something unexpected. This film left me feeling hopeful for Scandinavian filmmaking, and I will definitely be keeping an eye on Thea Hvistendahl and curiously await her next project.
ICHIKO
★★★★★
Akihiro Toda
Japan
A young couple, Hasegawa and Ichiko, have just become engaged on a summer day in 2015. Happiness seems to await, if not already present. But all of a sudden, Ichiko is gone, nowhere to be found. Where did she go, and why? Somewhere between a family drama and a crime thriller, Ichiko starts off with a disappearance and continues with the search for a person and a truth, and for all the stories that need to be uncovered along the way for the search to move forward. We start to understand that Ichiko led a life filled with thoroughly hidden secrets and a dark personal history involving a heavily dysfunctional family and an identity that doesn’t seem to officially exist according to the police. One after another, persons from Ichiko’s past step forward, or are forced to do so, as the investigation proceeds, and bring small pieces to the puzzle, which gets darker and more violent for each piece that is uncovered. Not unlike Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster, Ichiko explores perspectives and conflicting points of view, and goes even further in the way in which it uses time as a primary tool. We constantly jump between past and present, and not as in the past, but as in several different layers of past, and as viewers we are often not sure what we’re supposed to think as we try to make sense of where we are in time, of who says what and whether that does or does not make sense in relation to other statements brought to the table by someone else in another place of the timeline. With a little patience, this all eventually results in a moving and tragic story that in a strong way deals with identity, friendship, secrets, guilt, societal injustices and the inevitable impossibility of relationships built on false pretenses. Driven by a clever script and intense acting, the non-linear storytelling slowly comes together and ties everything into one, leaving us with a story to reflect on and a film to be impressed by.
A DIFFICULT YEAR
★★★★★
Une année difficile
Éric Toledano & Olivier Nakache
France
Given the director duo’s previous hits (Intouchables and Le Sens de la fête — yes, I’m deliberately not using the terrible English titles for these) and the self-made comparisons with the comedies of Ettore Scola, it is fair to say that I went in with high expectations for this film. It is therefore with considerable disappointment that I need to recognize that the Toledano & Nakache comedy of 2023 did not come even close to living up to those expectations. A Difficult Year is a film feels painfully out of touch with the story it tries to tell, with the people it tries to portray and with the themes and politics it tries to comment on. The film follows two middle-aged men with recurring spending problems, who try to find creative ways of reducing their debt, through which they mostly fail. By accident, they run into a group of climate activists that offer free beer at one of their meetings (who’s gonna say no to that?) and all of a sudden our protagonists are mixed up in some kind of Greenpeace movement, arranging protests and blocking roads. Soon they get involved in planning a big manifestation at the Bank of France, while simultaneously both falling in love with the woman leading the project (to be fair, she is Noémie Merlant, so that part of the plot is a fully believable development). This is all an OK outline I guess, but it doesn’t take very long into the movie before the vibe and the angle of this whole thing becomes clear, and it all feels very… boomer-coded? First of all, the jokes about climate activists being naive vegan nerds with corny nicknames, who only care about material overconsumption, do not work, at all. Not that they are offensive or in bad taste or anything — they are just not funny, and certainly not innovative. These jokes have been made a thousand times already, a decade ago, and it’s been a long time since they even had the potential of being funny. The world has moved on from people rushing through storefronts on Black Friday and that is not a topic for a comedy in 2023, at least if you aspire to make a comment with any relevance for our times. (Off-topic, but speaking of Black Friday sequences: the opening scene of this film is unexpectedly similar to that of Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving.) The way the film depicts environmentalism is shallow and tiresome, and the filmmakers seem uninterested in, or incapable of, making a political statement with any real value. The message of the film is unclear; what does it really say about anything? What’s the moral of the story? It cops out on calling out the real villains of the ongoing environmental murder (i.e. the rich, the political leaders, the major corporations, the united forces of capitalism) that actually is relevant for today’s audience, and instead focuses on a bunch of working-class people who are just trying to find their way forward in a society that has repeatedly let them down. Furthermore, the film is at times French in a bad way (i.e. sexist), not necessarily in an upsetting or offensive way, but just, again, in a tiresome and outdated way — and I guess that sums up my opinions on this movie pretty well. I’ll give it two stars for some undoubtedly good actors and a few moments of chemistry between them that actually make the film watchable (and a shoutout to Mathieu Almalric who is naturally funny by just being in the frame), but after reflecting on A Difficult Year for a few days, the aftertaste isn’t very pleasant.
ANIMAL
★★★★★
Sofia Exarchou
Greece, Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Romania
Set on a Greek island during the summer season, Animal follows a group of animators (performing entertainers, one could say) working at an all-inclusive tourist hotel where they set up dances and performances for foreign visitors. The lead role, Kalia, intensely and thoroughly portrayed by Dimitra Vlagopoulou in a physical and raw way, is our guide to the lives behind the scenes and introduces us to an odd group of people. Some of them have been working there for many years, others are new for the summer. Some are old and hardened while others are young and inexperienced. Some of them carry dreams, others have stopped dreaming. All of them carry stories, and while remaining largely unspoken, these stories are at the center of this film. An almost documentary-like drama, Animal produces some great acting and a highly relevant look into the realities of the people delivering the product of tourism, wrapped up by what has to be the most heart-wrenching use of Baccara’s Yes Sir, I Can Boogie ever presented. It’s a nuanced observation of the spotlights of the stages, the cold mornings on the rain-soaked beaches and the late hours of drinking cheap wine from plastic cups in the dressing rooms, and the consistent sense of realism is the core strength of the film. However, Animal suffers from being a bit too long and monotonous, and the story doesn’t really take off until right before the end. In a way, the repetitiveness of it all going round in circles, without ever really climaxing, captures the emptiness of both Kalia’s existence and modern tourism as an industry, but I think this film could have been more effectively delivered in a tight 90-minute format, and I can’t help but feel that Vlagopoulou’s protagonist deserved a more distinct and complete arc. Nevertheless, a good film well worth the watch.
AFIRE
★★★★★
Roter Himmel
Christian Petzold
Germany
Whenever Christian Petzold has a new movie out, I will always be seated, and I very much enjoyed this one as well. This peculiar little summer film takes place at a house on the German countryside where two young dudes, a writer and a photographer, arrive to get some peace of mind for finishing their respective work projects, all the while the looming threat of wildfires lurk in the background. After realizing an accommodation misunderstanding has occurred, the two men have to share the place with a young woman who they don’t really know, leading to some irritation and frustration. They were supposed to be alone, after all, and we should all know that if you disturb a male writer in his work process, he will become an asshole. “Don’t give me a smiling Paula Beer in a summery dress making me coffee and asking me to come to the beach — I’m a writer who needs to work!!!” Apparently, the woman also has a lover, who stirs up some more tension in the group, and these dynamics proceed to shape the direction of the film, painting a, when you look at it soberly, quite pleasant picture of a generally pretty nice situation (some cool people chilling in the sun) but that, due to our protagonist having woken up on the wrong side of the bed, cannot fulfill its pleasantness. I did not really know where this film was going, and I still don’t really know what it was all supposed to mean — and I say this in a positive way; I liked it. It’s about writing and storytelling to some extent, about acquaintances and communication to some extent, and just about vibes and summer days and hanging out with people to some extent, before it gets quite dramatic and profound towards the final act, still remaining quite light in tone somehow. I don’t know… Reading my own words here and reflecting on this film, I’m not sure what I’m trying to write. I think I liked it. Quite a lot actually, so why only three stars? I’m not sure what it’s missing, if it even is missing anything. Maybe a rewatch will make me realize everything’s here already. Anyway. For now it will have to settle for three very strong stars, while Wallners’ In My Mind keeps playing on repeat… in my mind.
FREMONT
★★★★★
Babak Jalali
USA
Here’s a cute and cool little film, about Donya, a young Afghan woman living in Fremont, California. After leaving work as an English translator back in Afghanistan, Donya now spends her days working at a fortune cookie factory in San Francisco, having dinners at an empty local Middle Eastern restaurant and talking with her neighbors about everyday stuff. She is also trying to get a doctor’s appointment for sleeping pills, as she suffers from insomnia, and after finally being able to get an appointment she is told she must attend therapy sessions in order to get those pills. So, she starts having conversations with an eccentric therapist who asks questions about her past and her aspirations, her complicated relationship with the home country and her views on the US as a new home. A calm and toned down film carried by a composed and guarded main character approaching her circumstances with silent thoughtfulness, Fremont hides its charm beneath layers of deadpan dialogue, rich black-and-white contrasts and almost motionless cinematography in a combination that makes Jim Jarmusch comparisons inevitable. Anaita Wali Zada does a splendid job in keeping Donya’s inner life hidden yet ever present, and one wonders how it all went for her in the next episode of her new life. Did she find the love she was looking for? I don’t know, but she did find Jeremy Allen White, the lonely mechanic working on his cars, eating his lunch sandwiches, having his quiet cups of coffee, somewhere along the highway. (And yeah, this is another film that I might have rated too ungenerously with some afterthought — the three stars are strong.)
THERE’S STILL TOMORROW
★★★★★
C’è ancora domani
Paola Cortellesi
Italy
This was Italy’s big domestic audience hit of 2023, and the symbolism of a proper work of feminism that is not also a doll and car commercial beating Barbie at the box office is uplifting in many ways. Paola Cortellesi has not only written and directed this film, but also stars as Delia, a mother and housewife in post-war Italy dealing with a lot of stuff, including kids running around the house, an abusive husband and his elderly father who is stuck in an even more misogynistic time than his son, and a daughter who is about to grow up and get engaged. It’s fair to say that Delia is carrying a lot of weight in her life, and that the societal norms and structures of Rome, 1946 do not ease that burden. Centered on the working-class household of Delia and her family, the film paints a lively portrait of a highly dysfunctional family — and society — that balances between comedy and drama in a mostly successful way, getting its heavily serious points across while not losing its entertainment value. I say mostly successful, because there were a few parts of the film where I’m not sure it really worked (making comedy out of domestic abuse is hard, man), and while I very much appreciate the ambition and some of the unconventional stylistic choices being made (a scene of a husband hitting his wife being acted out as a dance, for instance) it wasn’t a complete home run for me personally. With that said, it is an impressive and unique film in many ways, and the type of attack on patriarchy and telling of female liberation that we (people in general but probably men in particular) really need. And for it to be effective I am pretty sure that it has to be delivered by a female auteur that is not sponsored by Mattel. Again, three strong stars.
GREAT ABSENCE
★★★★★
Kei Chika-ura
Japan
A slow and patient drama set in the Japanese calmness, Great Absence follows a young man’s (Takashi) reuniting with his long-estranged father (Yohji), who is drifting away into dementia. They haven’t been in touch for many years, but when confronted with the news of his father’s state, Takashi recognizes his urge to revisit their relationship. Trying to understand the fabrics and dynamics of an old man’s life from talking to strangers and deciphering incoherent stories from the old man’s own confused mind filled of unorganized memories and imaginations, is not easy. This film does a great job of illustrating this process, and the hardships of committing to trying to confront it all, instead of just trying to move past it. The film is beautifully shot and sincerely acted, and it is obvious that the story is very personal and meaningful for the filmmaker. Tatsuya Fuji is extraordinarily good as the father (the character), comparable to Anthony Hopkins in The Father (the film). The runtime (152 minutes) is pushing it a bit, though, unfortunately, and a part of me feels that the film is missing a narrative punch that could have taken it up a notch. It is more a film to contemplate and reflect on than a film that hits you really hard, and there’s nothing wrong with that — I just wished it had punched me a little bit harder emotionally, and maybe a few darlings would have had to be killed here in order for the end product to really come together more neatly. It floats out a bit sometimes, and while I can love that in a way, I can also see why the film loses some momentum as a result. Once again, a largely beautiful film that almost reached a fourth star — let’s call it a 3+ rating.
THE UNIVERSAL THEORY
★★★★★
Die Theorie von Allem
Timm Kröger
Germany, Austria, Switzerland
Someone described this as Hitchcock directing a Christopher Nolan script, and there’s definitely a point to that (although the end result is not as great as that sounds). Set in the Swiss Alps in 1962, the film follows a young physicist (Johannes) who attends a conference somewhere up in the mountains together with his doctoral supervisor. Strange things start happening: he meets a mysterious jazz pianist named Karin, and soon there are suspicious deaths occurring. The style of the film is suggestive and a bit weird, and as viewers we start asking ourselves questions of the concept of time, of conspiracies and of the supernatural — what the hell is going on here? Director Timm Kröger has mainly worked as a cinematographer, and that really shines through the highly stylized flim-noir depictions of the mountainous landscapes, and the style is as much (if not more) of a driver of the plot as the plot itself — which is why the film also gets a little lost within its own experiments. The old-school Hitchcockian soundtrack is very intense and quite overused in my opinion, and there is a lack of drive or direction to the story. The film recaptures some momentum towards the end, but then it also changes style and narration completely, making it feel like two separate films hastily taped together. There are some really cool shots and moments in this film, especially a sci-fi-like sequence in a cave with flashing lights and the concept of time somehow looping around itself, but as a whole it does not come together, and it was all honestly quite exhausting to sit through. That’s a shame, because there is a lot of potential here, and I hope that Kröger can refine his ideas a bit and come back stronger with a more complete film, because he obviously has the raw talent for it.
DAYS OF HAPPINESS
★★★★★
Les jours heureux
Chloé Robichaud
Canada
I still haven’t seen Tár, so I won’t be mentioning that fil… oh. Well… Anyway, here’s another film about a conductor. She is Emma, from Montréal, a young and promising talent of the city’s classical music scene. Her father is her agent, and he’s primarily trying to get her a good gig, but he’s also pushing her hard and very keen on remaining in control. It’s complicated. She goes out with Naëlle, a cellist in the same orchestra who loves Emma very much but is also in therapy with her ex and very focused on raising their child. It’s complicated. Emma constantly hears from people in the business that she’s highly talented, but a bit stiff, or emotionless, or unsurprising (or any other word for “boring” that doesn’t sound as harsh), and she’s trying to figure out how she can use all the frustration she carries from life and relationships and bring it into her profession. That is also, yes, complicated. Days of Happiness is an excellent character study that captures the duality of the dilemma that I believe many “good students” face in life, i.e. the ambition of doing everything correct and to the instruction, and the simultaneous wish for being able to do something more out of the box. I’m struggling with that all the time — for instance I feel that the reviews I try to write here much too often just become square and formulaic, and don’t really provide something interesting or unexpected for the reader. Days of Happiness explores this, among other things, in a nuanced and not too overly dramatic way with great acting and some nice close-up-dominated cinematography, telling a story that is quite simplistic in format but rich and succinct in its execution. Sophie Desmarais and Nour Belkhiria lead the cast with distinction, to utilize a university term reserved for the best in class. I’ve been wondering, however, as someone pointed out: Are those days of happiness in the room with us right now?
LAST SHADOW AT FIRST LIGHT
★★★★★
Nicole Midori Woodford
Singapore, Japan, Slovenia, Philippines, Indonesia
I always feel bad writing down films with inherent qualities that just lack some crucial other quality to come together as a whole, but nevertheless, one must be honest and constructive. Last Shadow of First Light is a poetic and narratively loose story about the victims of the tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, involving supernatural elements of the souls of those who died and exploring their relationships with their living children and grandchildren. It’s a nice film to look at, and story-wise interesting at its core, but it lacks drive and direction and relies too much on voiceovers, fragmentary dialogue and retellings of memories, without a thread keeping them together in an engaging way. I don’t want to be the guy telling filmmakers to “cut it down”, because that’s not really my role and I always respect a director’s vision for their film, but I must say I had a very hard time keeping my interest up during these 110 minutes, and that’s a shame given the potentially highly interesting film that I believe still exists somewhere on the cutting board.
TÓTEM
★★★★★
Lila Avilés
Mexico, Denmark, France
Mexico’s submission for the Oscars this year is a fly-on-the-wall depiction of a birthday party involving a big family and a lot of friends, as seen through the eyes of a seven-year-old girl named Sol. It would have been a solely happy day if it wasn’t for the fact that the birthday boy, Sol’s father, is seriously ill with cancer. Instead of the evening being a carefree celebration of life, Death squints its eye and lurks in the walls of the house, while everyone try to keep the mood up and arrange the best birthday party imaginable. They succeed to a large part, but in the end of the day, how can one keep the sorrows and the fears away when your friend, your brother, your father, can barely stand, let alone join you for dinner? In her introduction before the film, director Lila Avilés urged the audience to hug a loved one and make sure to appreciate them before it’s too late, and it doesn’t matter that those words have been uttered many times before, because it’s a message that will always need to be uttered, and heard. Life is fragile. Tótem starts off pretty chaotic, with a lot of characters running around, and I think it’s deliberately shaped as a chaotic depiction of the universally familiar concept of a family gathering where everyone has a lot to do, and where the reasons for doing it all easily gets forgotten between the cooking and the cleaning and the running around. Most of us can probably remember some day from when we were kids and we went to some party that we didn’t really understand, where there were a lot of people and kids we didn’t know and people were running around and talking to each other while we just wanted to find a corner and some toy cars to play with. This film is about that, I guess, and, for good and bad, a bit messy in structure, as it is for a kid trying to navigate it. It’s a heartfelt story that doesn’t fall into the sentimental traps that it could easily have done, and while it is lively and colorful, it is also profound and sorrowful. Yet again, my three stars here are strong, and reading my positive words about this film, I don’t know what was missing for me to reward it a fourth star, but I believe I, for some reason, wasn’t fully as captivated and emotionally hit as I would have wanted to be. I lived it through and took it in, but it didn’t stay with me for very long. That might just be festival fatigue, though (this was my third film of the day).
RED ISLAND
★★★★★
L’île rouge
Robin Campillo
France, Belgium, Madagascar
Another kid’s perspective comes to life in this interesting but slightly underwhelming film, by the director who did 120 Beats per Minute (120 battements par minute), an excellent film about AIDS activism in Paris during the 1990s. The red island is Madagascar, where Robin Campillo spent his own childhood in the early 1970s, and the film follows a ten-year-old boy whose family is stationed at a French military base. Madagascar was at this point in time independent but still under French supervision, if I understand it correctly (at least they still had military personnel stationed on the island), and the colonial dynamics of this arrangement permeates everything. The French are white and rich and live in more or less gated communities while the local population in many cases earn their living by serving the French. The kid, of course, is just a kid, and the concepts of power and colonialism are not something he understands or cares about, although he nevertheless exists within them. Red Island is an interesting film with a lot of scattered ideas and fragments worthy of exploration, but it does not succeed in wrapping its ambitions together, as it feels a bit confused as to what it wants to be or what it wants to tell, and it shifts towards the end to being something that feels very different from what it started out as. The pacing and the act structure is a bit off, and the two-hour runtime makes it unnecessarily stretched out. It has some nice visuals, recounting of poetic memories and strong scenes of family turbulence and the tests of a military dad and a housewife mom, but they get lost in a film that does not really come together.
LA CHIMERA
★★★★★
Alice Rohrwacher
Italy, France, Switzerland
Possibly my favorite from the festival this year, La chimera is a visually stunning film that just screams of creative vision and ambition, and while it took some time for me to get into and to understand what it was actually about, it left me hooked and stunned. It starts off on a train, where we see a tired man in a worn out suit. We soon learn that he’s an English archaeologist (brilliantly played by Josh O’Connor), who comes back to an Italian village, with which we don’t know his history but understand he has one. We also start to understand that he is involved with a band of tombaroli (tomb raiders) and that he has a special power that makes him able to read or feel the ground beneath him, to find spots where valuable items might be buried. The experience of watching this film works in a similar way, as nothing is given to us instantly, and we have to slowly uncover bits and pieces of backstory to figure out who this man is and what has led him to this place in life. It gets more captivating and moving the more we get to know, and by the end I was fully invested in wishing some sunlight would shine on this man’s soul. The whole film is captured by a jumpy, scratchy, soulful 16mm cinematography that is incredibly rich of color and light, and that visual language is instrumental for carrying the whole film forward, reflecting the inner beauties of the otherwise depressed surroundings in which the plot takes place, working as an allegory of Italy as a shattered society built on ancient beauty buried beneath a lot of dirt. There is a timelessness to the film that made me not even know what time period I had just spent two hours in (apparently it’s the 1980s, but I could easily have gone +-20 years wrong in my guess, and for the story I don’t think it really matters). It’s a film about loss, and digging beneath (figuratively and literally) to try and reach something to hold onto, seen through a very Italian lens of magic realism. The desperation and finality of the ending floored me completely, and I urgently need to dig into Alice Rohrwacher’s filmography, because this is some vivid stuff, man.
HEROIC
★★★★★
Heroico
David Zonana
Mexico, Sweden
I’m glad I won’t have to do military service (depending on how much the current Swedish government keeps militarizing our country, of course — maybe I’ll stand there one day with a helmet and a gun in my hand helping our NATO buddies bomb a village in the Middle East, who knows), but I’m especially glad I won’t have to do it in Mexico, because that seems to be a particularly fucked up experience, if this film is to be trusted as a truthful depiction. Heroic takes us inside the Heroic Military Academy (Heroico Colegio Militar) in Mexico City, where 18-year-old Luis hopes to build a foundation for a career in the military. Not because he’s particularly interested in it, but because it offers a stable income that could support his family. He soon understands, however, that the culture and the power structures of the military aren’t for the weak, and he encounters a system that every day tries to break him and his peers down, in order for them to grow and become proper soldiers, “real men”, in the long run. He sees young men being beaten and harassed, he sees discrimination and straight up bullying from his leaders, and he struggles to choose a path between keeping his head down and prioritizing his own progress, and helping and supporting his more vulnerable classmates. Things get further complicated when his closest superior insists that he help him with suspicious activities outside of school (violent, corrupt, gun-in-hand stuff), which he obviously has to accept if he has any ambitions of staying and progressing at the military school. Heroic offers a Full Metal Jacket-like peak into a world of unhealthy ideals and toxic masculinity, and what that environment does to young men, and to their leaders. It’s an uncomfortable viewing with highly relevant themes, but in the end the film falls a bit short in its attempts to fully confront its subject matter, rolling the credits before any real reconciliation has been made with what has just happened on screen. It uses dream sequences and nightmares as a tool for portraying the inner horrors of our protagonist’s mind, and while that’s clear and handy, the film never goes beyond that, and never fully takes a swing at its central conflict. Nevertheless, it’s a good film well worth watching, but that definitely had room for more than what ultimately made it into its 88-minute cut.
THE QUIET MIGRATION
★★★★★
Stille liv
Malene Choi
Denmark
As if it was Past Lives‘ distant cousin, The Quiet Migration zooms in on Carl, a young man living with his adoptive parents in the Danish countryside. They expect him to take over their farm and keep their agricultural business in the family, but Carl is reflecting on his existence and senses that he would like to go to Korea and see his native country. His Danish parents are understanding of this, it’s not a strange thing and maybe Carl is not cut out for the farmer’s profession, not everyone is. He just needs to figure it out himself. Malene Choi’s slow and meditative drama is a nice and peaceful one where nothing is forced and time is given, with a few supernatural symbolisms thrown in for good measure. It is nice to look at, with beautiful camera pans over Scandinavian landscapes that could make an exiled man like myself start longing back. Dialogue is sparse, and the main focus is the inner reflections that we can surmise from a distance. It’s a less-is-more kind of film, and some of the dialogue actually works as a reminder of this, being a little on the nose at times when the themes of the movie is expressed unnecessarily explicitly by some of the characters — the film’s strongest parts are the silent ones. Some scenes stand out as particularly moving; the scene from which the picture above comes actually made me cry for a brief moment, consisting only of two people leaning on each other’s shoulders, not a word said.
COBWEB
★★★★★
Geomijip
Kim Jee-woon
South Korea
Films about filmmaking do not always resonate with me, because they (obviously) keep you aware of everything being fake — you cannot hide in this fictional world, because you are constantly reminded of its fictionality. With that said, Kim Jee-woon’s (A Tale of Two Sisters, I Saw the Devil) is an entertaining depiction of filmmaking in 1970s Korea and a director’s (Song Kang-ho) desperate attempts of completing his definite masterpiece, a black-and-white horror film (I think — it seems a bit all over the place genre-wise) which ends with a scene taking place inside a burning house. It all needs to be done quickly and within the chaotic frames of an already shut-down set gone rogue, where the director has taken things into his own hands, where executives are held locked up in offices in order for the filming to proceed without interruption, and where actors and crew have no idea whether things have been greenlit or not and whether they will get paid. People are stressed not only from the production mess itself, but also from affairs and colds and tangled-up relationships, and it is all just very, very messy. Cobweb is a fun and entertaining film about the madness and obsessiveness of filmmaking, and it is very obvious that a lot of love for the medium has gone into the making of this film. It’s probably not a film that will be remembered as a classic or an essential viewing, but it’s a fun and chaotic watch, so if you have 135 minutes to kill — go for it!
WHEN THE WALNUT LEAVES TURN YELLOW
★★★★★
Demo ke pelê gozan bîyî zer
Mehmet Ali Konar
Turkey
It’s always nice to be able to see films that almost no one else has seen, and not knowing whether you will ever be able to see them again — that’s the beauty of film festivals. That’s the case with this film, as it had its world premiere in Gothenburg. Mehmet Ali Konar’s slow drama follows Ciwan, a father and a humble family man, who is also the village chief in the scarce landscape of northern Kurdistan. He’s trying to keep things on good terms with both the Turkish military and the PKK guerrilla, while also raising his son and doing the daily rounds at his farm, all of this while also trying to figure out how to break the news of his life-threatening cancer. This is a beautiful film in many ways, visually and thematically, with a moving father-son relationship at its core. It’s well-paced and well-acted, and the scope of the story is well-measured. It took a while to get into though, due to the many characters that are introduced (or just mentioned) during the first third or so, and I’ve got to say I had a hard time figuring out who everyone was or who they were talking about, especially given the intricate political dynamics of the Turkish and the Kurdish, of local politicians and the military and the PKK and so on. Maybe I just don’t know all of this well enough, but I believe the film would have helped itself reach its audience a little more effectively had there been a few more pointers during the establishing phase. With that said, the film grows during its runtime, and it is especially the development of the storyline of the boy following in his father’s footsteps that is truly affecting. Had I been able to get into it more full-heartedly already from the start, a fourth star would have been well-deserved, but with reference to my slight aforementioned criticism (with emphasis on slight), it will have to settle for three very strong stars, plus the addition of Mehmet Ali Konar to the list of filmmakers that I will keep an eye out for in the future.
MAY DECEMBER
★★★★★
Todd Haynes
USA
Alright, this is kind of cheating, because I saw this film already in December over here in England. But I never wrote about it, so I thought I might as well go ahead and do that here (because after all, it was part of the programme for this year’s GFF). Much has been said already and I know many people ranked it as one of the best films of 2023, and the strange thing is that I fully understand that and feel that that could have been the case for me as well, but for some reason I didn’t really connect with it as a film experience as much as I did with it as a film text. May December is a highly meta-layered film about an actress (Natalie Portman) visiting a married couple (Julianne Moore and Charles Melton) with a controversial age difference and a complicated past, based on the real-life story of sex offender Mary Kay Letourneau’s relationship with the 22 years younger Vili Faulaau in the late 1990s. She was 34 at the time and he was twelve, so… Yeah, not cool. She went to prison, got out, they married, had kids and continued living together as a couple. Portman’s character enters the plot in 2015, when Moore and Melton’s characters are ages 59 and 36 respectively and their children are becoming adults, and while things seem to have settled and become a bit more normal (relatively), it becomes very obvious to the actress that things aren’t really normal after all. It is especially apparent that Melton’s character hasn’t had the chance to reflect on his life properly, and that he never got the chance to be a kid and explore his own growth as a teenager and as a young adult in the way that he should have — beautifully illustrated in a scene of him smoking weed on a rooftop together with his son, realizing that his son gets to experience stuff he himself never got to — and the more the film progresses, the more these traumas come to life and reach the surface of the relationship in center. This is a film with a lot of strengths and indisputable qualities. The acting in particular is exquisite from all three leads, and the script is incredibly rich in terms of layers interacting with reality and the perspectives of the audience, the media and the characters themselves. Every single scene in this film could be interpreted as making a meta statement of some sort, and while that is extremely interesting, I think that it could also be the reason why I was perplexed by my own experience of watching this film — it didn’t captivate me as powerfully as it should have done, looking at all the components that were obviously there right in front of me. I have been trying to understand and explain this, and my theory is that I, as a viewer, was a bit taken out of the on-screen story by the constant feeling of the film trying to say something else, on another level, and that the characters of the story work more as carriers of these statements than they work as real people in the film. And that is absolutely fine, there’s nothing wrong with that at all — on the contrary, it could be argued that this is one of the film’s major strengths and a reason why it would be even more interesting than just a straight-up drama telling the story in a more conventional way — but it just didn’t do it for me this time. I have found the discourse of the film to be more interesting than the film itself, which further speaks to the strengths and relevance of its meta-driven qualities. With that said, May December is a fascinating and mostly great film (my three stars are as strong as they get), and maybe a rewatch will make it sink in better with me. Todd Haynes keeps making interesting stuff and I know there is a way in for me — I loved Carol, for instance, a film that I could fully dive into and connect with emotionally on a whole other level than what was the case with May December. They are different kinds of movies, I guess, Carol being its own universe and May December being an extension, or a reflection, of our own.
THE ZONE OF INTEREST
★★★★★
Jonathan Glazer
USA, UK, Poland
OK, this is cheating again (yes, I saw this film in the UK too, but it was on the festival programme and I am therefore entitled to write about it here (and even if it wasn’t, this is my platform and I can do whatever the hell I want to)). I haven’t fully stepped through the door of Jonathan Glazer’s oeuvre yet — I saw Under the Skin when it came out ten years ago (liked it, couldn’t fully understand it) and recently caught up on Sexy Beast (an absolutely great film that made me realize I hadn’t been familiar with Ben Kingsley’s bad-guy game). The Zone of Interest is not an easy film to sit down and watch, and it must have been a nightmare to promote. How do you even put together marketing material for a Holocaust film completely devoid of good guys? It did reach the cinemas at last, and given all of its awards nominations, the people at A24 must have done something right in the promotion of the film. It is set in, or around, rather, the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in 1943, where Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig live with their five kids in a big villa with a beautiful garden (if it wasn’t for the monstrous wall delimiting the garden from the camp). The film follows this family’s daily lives, which they try to live as if it was the most normal thing ever, while gunshots and screams can be heard in the distance, and the bizarreness of that is basically what the film is all about — how in God’s name could they all be cool with this? The extension of that question is obviously exchanging “they” with “we”, because this is not simply a question of seeing other people doing horrible stuff in another time — this is about the present, about us and about the world we live in today — how far away are we, really, from letting something like this happen again? With European governments being led by far-right extremists, with democracy and freedom of speech being constantly challenged, with xenophobia and straight-out racism being fueled by the people in power and genocides being publicly supported rather than called out for what they are, I am sincerely not sure that we can guarantee that the Holocaust could not happen again. Or rather, I am certain that it could happen again (as a matter of fact, it is happening again, and it’s all over the news, but for some reason the West supports it), if we keep being so relaxed about how fucked up things are turning right now, in real time. I digress, I realize, but that speaks to the point of The Zone of Interest, in that it shocks you, it gets you thinking, it horrifies you and it stays with you. Glazer’s work showcases such an effective way of approaching the ultimate human horror, barely showing it and keeping it out of frame, but constantly reminding you of it and putting it in contrast to the life that, somehow, keeps going on right next door. It is an audiovisually fascinating and unpredictable experience, with sound effects jumping at you when you least expect it, unconventional visual effects and a cinematography and editing that captures the natural beauty and stillness that surrounds everything (which makes for a confusing and slightly disgusting feeling). See it in a cinema if you get the chance, for it is a powerful experience for both eyes and ears (and mind) that everyone should take part of. One of the most relevant and important films of recent years that depicts the horrors of the Holocaust in a way that has, I dare say, never been done before.
AL DOILEA JOC (Rumänien)
BRIDGEND (Danmark/Storbritannien)
BUTTER ON THE LATCH (USA)
EKSTRA BLADET: UDEN FOR CITAT (Danmark)
EX MACHINA (Storbritannien)
FILIP & FREDRIK PRESENTERAR TREVLIGT FOLK (Sverige)
I WON’T COME BACK (Ryssland/Finland/Estland/ Kazakstan/Vitryssland)
IMAGINING EMANUEL (Norge, 2011)
OUT OF NORWAY (Norge)
INHERENT VICE (USA)
JAUJA (USA/Brasilien/Danmark/ Tyskland/Frankrike/Mexiko/ Argentina/Holland)
KYOTO ELEGY (Japan)
LISTEN UP PHILIP (USA)
MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN (USA)
MISS JULIE (Norge/Storbritannien/ Irland/Frankrike)
NATT TIL 17. (Norge)
NEXT GOAL WINS (Storbritannien)
DE NÆRMESTE (Norge)
NØGLE HUS SPEJL (Danmark)
P’TIT QUINQUIN (Frankrike)
RELATOS SALVAJES (Argentina/Spanien)
LA SAPIENZA (Frankrike/Italien)
STILL ALICE (USA)
TERRE BATTUE (Frankrike/Belgien)
TRI DRITARE DHE NJË VARJE (Kosovo)
LA TRATTATIVA (Italien)
THE VOICES (USA/Tyskland)
WIR SIND JUNG. WIR SIND STARK. (Tyskland)
Har ni tagit er ända ner hit återstår bara för mig att gratulera, för nu är det slut. Gå nu och utrusta er med kaffe och se en god film. Tips har ni fått.
Boyhood. Richard Linklaters smått unika uppväxtsskildring, som spelades in bitvis under tolv års tid i takt med att huvudrollsinnehavaren Ellar Coltrane själv växte upp, har länge varit favorittippad och vann exempelvis på Golden Globes. Utmanaren är Alejandro González Iñárritus Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), som seglat upp som en stark kandidat. Min ganska nervösa tippning faller på Boyhood.
Eddie Redmayne. Han spelar känd person med sjukdom i en biopic – den ultimata rollen för att vinna en Oscar. Michael Keaton utmanar med sin stora comebackroll i Birdman, men jag går på Redmayne och hans Stephen Hawking-gestaltning i The Theory of Everything.
J.K. Simmons. Han har vunnit typ allt hittills under Awards Season och är superfavorit, så det är ingen idé att tro något annat. Han är också mycket riktigt grym i Whiplash.
Patricia Arquette. Ännu en kategori som känns relativt självklar, i detta fall kanske mest för att utmanarna inte är tillräckligt starka. Pyttechans för Emma Stone att skrälla, om någon mot förmodan skulle göra det.
Alejandro González Iñárritu. Som i kampen om bästa film står det här mellan González Iñárritu (Birdman) och Richard Linklater (Boyhood). Eftersom jag tror att Boyhood tar hem bästa film tror jag också att det kan öppna upp för González Iñárritu här istället. Det är ju praktiskt om man kan dela på saker och ting. González Iñárritu har dessutom en fördel i att hans film är mer tekniskt avancerad och ambitiös, mest tydligt i det faktum att den är redigerad som om den vore filmad i en enda tagning. Teknisk innovation brukar premieras, lex Alfonso Cuarón för Gravity förra året. Så mexikanen tar det, tror jag. González Iñárritu alltså, det vill säga årets mexikan.
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson & Hugo Guinness). Eftersom Wes Andersons stora Budapesthotell inte lär ta hem några av de största priserna (typ bästa film, regi, skådespelare) är manuskategorin som klippt och skuren för hans och Hugo Guinness finurliga manus. Birdman utmanar dock och får ses som en farlig konkurrent. Liten, liten outsiderchans på Boyhood.
Whiplash (Damien Chazelle). Egentligen hade jag trott på antingen The Imitation Game eller The Theory of Everything, men jag kan inte bestämma mig för vilken av dem, och för att slippa detta dilemma gör jag något helt ologiskt och säger Whiplash. American Sniper har minichans på skräll (snälla Gud, nej) medan Paul Thomas Andersons Inherent Vice sorgligt nog verkar helt borträknad. Men i huvudsak står det mellan de tre förstnämnda, och egentligen tror jag kanske inte mest på Whiplash, men jag gamblar (lite spännande måste man ju få ha).
Boyhood. Experttippningar säger Boyhood, och jag har inga argument att sätta emot och därför ingen anledning att säga något annat än Boyhood. Andrahandsalternativ: Whiplash.
THE MASTER
SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK
MAGNOLIA
CAPOTE
BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III 
THE GREAT GATSBY (2013)
SAVAGE GRACE (2007)
LAST TRAIN HOME (2009)
THE WILD BUNCH (1969)
MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY (1993)
TRON (1982)
TRON: LEGACY (2010)
LADY VENGEANCE (2005)
THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998)
SOMEWHERE (2010)
LA PROIE (2011)
RUST AND BONE (Frankrike/Belgien)
MOONRISE KINGDOM (USA)
BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD (USA)
do you like phil collins? 