britten-daniel

IMDb member since April 2006
    Lifetime Total
    5+
    IMDb Member
    18 years

Reviews

Es gilt das gesprochene Wort
(2019)

Politically correct nonsense
This supposedly liberal film challenging stereotypes about Turkish people actually manages to create a new stereotype all of its own. Not only is it offensive to Turks, it's also more than a little hypocritical. Turkish people do not have a reputation for being thieves, yet somehow at the end of the film a question has been raised as to whether they are, while the director wants us to think that he is challenging that stereotype. Utter nonsense.

Tobruk
(1967)

Allied tensions
The interplay between the 3 groups of allied soldiers, the stiff upper lipped British colonel,the independent Canadian major (Hudson) and the German Jews is interesting, if bordering on slightly racist at times. But then that's the point. Political correctness would prevent such a point being made nowadays, but it brings out the fact that the so-called allies were often allied in name only, and the fact that anti-semitism was more widespread than people realize. The fraught relationship between Green and Hudson adds an extra frisson, and is very reminiscent of that between William Holden and Jack Hawkins in Bridge on the River Quai.

Pity all of this had to take second place at the end to lots of standard WW2 heroics and blowing up. One more thing - it's not Dean Stockwell. It's Guy, his lesser-known brother.

Den brysomme mannen
(2006)

Groundhog Day meets Kafka
At first sight The Bothersome Man seems like several other movies/books rolled into one. Kafka's The Trial, Melville's Bartleby, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and Groundhog Day instantly spring to mind. A man, Andreas, arrives in a nameless city where he is immediately given a job in an office and finds a beautiful new girlfriend. However, there's a catch: his colleagues are all friendly, bland and utterly characterless, and everyone he knows, including his girlfriend, seems to have only one topic of conversation -interior design. Welcome to the hell of modern consumerism, in which people throw themselves from buildings and no one raises an eyebrow, or spend their days reading furniture catalogues and eating food that tastes of nothing.

Andreas quickly realises his predicament and spends the rest of the film trying to escape, in various ways. Suicide turns out not to be an option, and when he finds a new girlfriend she is just as bereft of feelings as the old one - there is a wonderful scene in a restaurant where he asks her to move in with him and all she can say is, 'I don't mind'.

In fact, much of what The Bothersome Man has to say has been said before, and after about 45 minutes you begin to feel that you indeed are experiencing a certain sense of deja vu. Yet its point is one that is probably worth repeating, over and over again: an unexamined life is one that is not worth living. Added to which, it provides a decidedly modern take on the perennial theme of how capitalism is destroying our souls. More than one character reminded me of people I've known, especially his furniture-obsessed girlfriend, and if by the end of the film the film-makers have run out of ideas, maybe that's the point - there will no end unless you can find other people who share your sense of alienation.

L'amico di famiglia
(2006)

A miserly loan shark finally meets his match
Paulo Sorrentino's latest film confirms him as the Antonioni de nos jours. Beautifully shot with an intrusive and fascinatingly eclectic soundtrack, it is nevertheless irritatingly self-conscious and wilfully elliptical. A marvellous, almost Dickensian fable about a miserly loan shark who gets his comeuppance, is somewhat undercut by the director's own preoccupation with style.

Geremia is a tailor/loan shark who lives with his invalid mother in a squalid apartment in small town Italy. One day, he is asked by a waiter to pay for the wedding of his daughter, Rossana (played by the goddess-like Laura Chiatti). Geremia instantly falls in love, and wastes no time in exploiting the situation for his own dark purposes. However, Rossana gives him more than he bargained for and in a sub-plot he is betrayed by his only 'friend', Gino.

This is very much a film about appearances, and how deceptive they can be. Geremia, whilst grotesquely greedy and physically repulsive, offers some profound insights into what makes other people tick, if not himself. Rossana turns out to be the perfect foil for him, for while he has had to fight for every opportunity he gets, life has been handed to her on a plate. Ultimately they are both motivated, if not undone, by greed and pride in equal measure.

Sorrentino, who directed the stylish but more superficial The Consequences of Love, is certainly developing a distinctive style of film-making. The question is whether he can achieve a more successful marriage of the flashy modern rock sensibility with what are fundamentally old-fashioned values in story-telling. It is something which others, notably Sofia Coppola, have recently tried to do, with equally mixed results.

Japanese Story
(2003)

A masterpiece
In an age when criticism has become debased and few people are really certain about what constitutes true worth in art, it is difficult to use the word "masterpiece" about any film. And yet that word is applicable here. At first this film appears to be just a bog-standard romantic love story, in the Hollywood mould, about two very different characters who meet and fall in love in unusual circumstances. Opposites attract, and so on.

However, as the story unfolds one becomes aware that there are many more levels to it than one would normally expect. Everything, from the title to incidental characters and the spectacular images of the desert, has been carefully thought out. It raises profound questions about a fashionable subject: identity, but also about love itself. Are these characters in love, or is it merely the terrifying starkness of the Australian outback that has thrown them together? Finally a third person enters the relationship, who complicates matters even further. Despite the romantic overtones of this film it is lifted, ultimately, by its absolute realism. Small gestures betoken whole story lines and glimpses of other characters throw the protagonists into sharp relief. Other influences begin to trickle through: Yasujiro Ozu, Peter Weir (in his early days), Japanese Haiku. And yet this is an entirely original work.

This film had a huge emotional impact on me, but it also made me think, about my own life and about the choices I've made. It did everything that a genuine work of art should do, and without any of the fanfare that we, in the West, have come to associate with art. Small wonder that it got little of the attention that in previous eras it would have attracted. Watch it, and discover that it is still possible to make a classic.

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