Even Cowgirls get the Blues (The Good Girl, 2002)

Miguel Arteta gave us in the year 2000 the polemical and funny Chuck & Buck, written by Mike White. In which, a very creepy individual, Buck O'Brien (Mike White), comes out of nowhere to stock his childhood friend Charlie "Chuck" Sitter (Chris Weitz) many years later as if they where still little kids. From being a very small independent production it jumped into mainstream making a loud noise, I think it's huge success had to do with the way that homosexuality was exploited. The film is grotesque and jarring at the same time that it's sweet and close to the heart. Cinematically, Arteta built a labyrinth of physical spaces that resonate deeply in the characters psychology and in ours. Our intellect doesn't know how to react to certain story points but we don't stop feeling, so the film is very powerful. In the year 2002 Arteta directed again a Mike White's screenplay, The Good Girl. A great opportunity for Jennifer Aniston to liberate herself from being the eternal Rachel Green from the sitcom Friends; Arteta again confirms his talent to move us in different ways that the movies do using the same tools. Justine (Aniston) is bored, working in convenience store in middle of nowhere, with a husband who's biggest ambition is to smoke a joint with his best friend everyday after painting a house. Justine, describes herself as someone who had a perfect life being a child and in a moment when she turned and see there was nothing. One day turning while working, she met Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal). Both are trapped in a childhood that hasn't found the space to mature, to grow up, they start an affair. But is late for Holden who's already lost in the literary fantasies that he has used to survive until then, and also to late for Justine who's reality holds her tight without a possible escape. It's impressive how economically Arteta works, he builds everything from simple things. Extremely basic shots, even shooting for 30 days, and how effective are his results; powerful minimalism with just the correct notions. For example the fact that Jennifer Aniston is cast as Justine, a character that explores her sexuality for the first time, as the actress is exploring it now in the screen in the same way. You are talking about an American sweetheart being part of corky sexual intercourses, and the film continues to be naive, sweet, never grotesque. So again our feeling are affected in strange ways, the film definitely moves us. Justine reacts to problems as we never would imagine she would, but it makes sense, just on the limits of almost not, in those limits we feel in different ways. I heard somewhere that Justine was in the mind of Arteta a modern Madame Bovary, her name is one of Sade's most famous heroins, but the funny part is how in this society a character like that has to adapt to survive, she simply doesn't fit. Fitting with this all new notions that she acquired is what makes the last part of the film so inhumanly warm. Arteta hasn't stopped taking about how the way we treat kids, how we build worlds that don´t exist for them, makes them unhappy later. How do we build unmovable walls that they will never move, thinking that those are real walls, never being able to come out to play.

REST IN PEACE THEO

Rear Window (45m2)

45m2 (Stratos Tzitzis, 2010) it's only the confirmation that something big is going on in Greek cinema today, you can even see it with a normal movie that's only looking for a normal audience. Hristina (Efi Logginou) is tired of her situation, she can't stand living with mom at the same time that her boyfriend is living with his parents, and working selling bags half time is not what she has in mind for the perfect job. So one day she tries to change it; she ends her relationship and rents an apartment by herself, although she doesn't have enough money to do it. Even cigarette money counts, so she stops smoking. She sleeps almost on the floor, just a mattress lies in between, but there are other things in between like her search for freedom that starts giving her a way of life; she starts moving boxes around property of the person who use to live there before and starts to use them as furniture with some personal style. One day she can't stop her curiosity and she starts to look for the boxes' content, like Pandora; but instead of ruin she finds love. An artist used to live in her present space, an artist that has what she's searching for. He starts existing in a notebooks, then in words that kept living inside her long after reading, coming to form her new reality, until finally those words get out to the city walls; indirectly he teaches Hristina that there's no border for the soul. We only need to be that soul that we are already, outside our mind; we just need to feel and stop thinking. Maybe stop thinking with our brains but with our heart, at least with our guts to start from somewhere I guess. Thank you very much for your simplicity Mr. Startos (nice name though, makes me imagine a cloud). With a neutral usage of camera and montage, we follow Hristina around trying to cope with life in terms that she finds as her own. She's learning, living, feeling, and falling in love with freedom without even understanding it.

The Weight of the Moon (Hanezu, 2011)

Hanezu (Naomi Kawase, 2011) is based on a very old haiku about a love triangle that ends up in a metaphysical threesome between three mountains. In Mexico, it doesn't sound that weird; we can understand those themes thanks to our old Aztec inheritance, we've been listening about legends of the mountains that surround Mexico City that still in love don't stop looking at each others snow on top of their earthly cloth. In the movie a woman lives happily in couple, when she meets a strong and sensible (she can almost taste him in his cooking) sculptor. Surprisingly we don't sense the infidelity until almost an hour of film has passed, remember that the picture is directed by a very subtle and elegant Japanese woman; and you can just feel it but never know it for sure. Naomi Kawase's aura is registered in particular places during the narration (declamation): a huge moon flies over the hill to dive into the dark clouds of the night, some birds build a nest inside the room where the characters start their affair, the water receives the natural red tint from the woman's hands, the cloth with a new color hangs from the wind. Although the perfect balance between naturalism and the lyrical metaphor that we could enjoy in The Mourning Forest (Kawase, 2007) is broken, the camera of Kawase is still finding certain realities that can affect us in many ways. The balance was broken because the metaphor won over reality forgetting about cinema's nature; Pasolini comes to mind. It was more important to justify the legend with the red of the blood in a bathtub that echoes the taint in her art, than really working a screenplay that justified human relations; it was more important the past than the present. But let me tell you that those insects roaming the mud of the cave of the night with the sound of the voice over will continue to walk in my perception for a while; we can't be less than thankful for a bunch of images that Kawase (who came to Mexico to present her visual poem) gave us, triggering a thousand more inside of us. Images of our past, even if we didn't experience it ourselves with this body.

Far and Away (The Mourning Forest, 2007)

I just end up watching The Mourning Forest (Naomi Kawase, 2007) which I really liked because it takes you by surprise. In the beginning we see Machiko (Machiko Ono) entering to work as a nurse in a country side nursing home, she starts a relationship with the old Shigeki (Shigeki Uda) that seems will be the stereotypical I help you and you will help me and we'll be alright at the end, I can leave the nursing home with a smile and credits roll. Nothing like this happens, we are in a film by a humanist that doesn't care about telling a story. Every minute we get further into the forest, away from the nursing home representing the world of commodities, into a green ocean of a fantastic soundtrack that just puts you out of your body.
The virtuous Kawase uses her documentary learned abilities to empower a drama with ultra realistic qualities, in the detail and in the whole aspect. You can see hints of this activities in the names of the characters and the names of the actors, or the way that the magnificent light and camera positions of Hideyo Nakano work with certain acting directing. In the other hand Kawase is very rigid with certain production design decisions of fictional cinema that considerably raised the budget looking for an specific aesthetic, like constructing the nursing home instead of finding.
It´s is curious how the scene of the rescue at the end is absent, is it needed? I have to ask myself, for whom is Kawase filming? The funny thing is that watching the making of I realized that the sequence was shot but is not on the final montage. In a much more poetic way, ambiguous, Machiko looks at the sky playing the music box, her eyes full of faith, the helicopter starts to enter the soundtrack approaching, but they are in a zone completely under huge trees, can they see them?

Here an INTERVIEW with Naomi Kawase.

All About my Mother (Fish Tank)

It has taken me a while to write about Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009) why? Well, it's interesting but I didn't know what I thought about it when I saw it for the first time, but I saw it again. Like 6 years ago I saw the short film that she did called WASP and I also didn't know what to think about it. The short was about a young mother living with not much money, she already has a kid and when the guy that she really liked comes from the past and invites her to the pub to drink, having nobody to leave her kid with she just leaves him out on the back of the pub in his baby car. The thing is that it happens what you would never think could happened, a wasp comes flying and stings the baby on the mouth. How would you feel about this really well made moment on the screen? An over the top moral lesson from the gods?, a melodramatic animal planet tacky gadget, an out of nowhere element of a screenplay that wasn't serious enough? but so surprising.
I should have written about Fish Tank the first time I saw it just for one scene, just with that scene it is a great film, not just the scene but where in the screenplay is the scene situated. When 15 years old Mia (Katie Jarvis) finds out who really is the man for whom she shares with her mother the problem of being in love with. Mia runs after a little girl dress as a princess in a marsh, the scene is so many things at the same time and it works in so many levels perfectly justified, but the realism is outstanding. This is what puts Andrea Arnold next to a filmmaker like Lynne Ramsay (taking more about Ratcatcher and her shorts) the expressiveness that comes from the realism that they construct is used to jump into surreal illuminating moments made with things inside the frame from the reality that mirror the mind of the subject. It's difficult to explain it, you need to see the films, but it's a powerful ability made with a strong sensibility; maybe Ramsay used to make it much more with the camera support but its similar. The film talks about certain characters that Andrea Arnold knows perfectly, about the main's character world, and she never leaves her main character. We see through Mia's detailed actions and surrounding what she is like, and we understand why the things that happen in the film affect her in such a way, we are made part of everything; but Mia's reactions can't be calculated and that's where the film is so fortunate. I just read that the actors didn't know what was going to happen the next week of shooting, so maybe that's where this quality resides. We don't feel in such a perfectly ordered specific way about Mia as in Hollywood movies you feel about the main character, that's a delight indeed.

No-Do (The Haunting, 2009)

A false prophet in a strange land, Guillermo del Toro, has been giving mainstream Spanish horror film industry an international face for a while now. On the side we have seen different interesting proposals by native Spanish directors like the prolific Jaume Balguero or the more radical Nacho Cerda. Spain has a long time TRADITION of more campy low budget cryptic horror film since the 60's with directors like Jesse Franco, Jose Ramon Larraz, or Armando de Ossorio. I mean even an orthodox successful director like Vicente Aranda, started his own career with a film of these, The Blood Spattered Bride (1972) which I recently had a chance to check out. Here a very weird TRAILER that holds the spirit of those crazy times.
We can't stop saying that Franco died in 1975, a couple of years before was when this films where born, and they are so much intertwined.

During Franco's dictatorship years, there was an official newsreel called No-Do, supposedly there where certain No-Do reels that where kept private only for certain officials and people in the Vatican to see; this idea gives life to The Haunting (Elio Quiroga, 2009). Francesca (the almost cinematic fetish Ana Torrent) is trying to get her psyche straight after her daughter died many year ago, in company of her husband she moves to a mansion on some deserted creepy hills in the country side. Of course there are trapped demons behind its walls and of course there is more than a very dark story; the main one shows an opposite version of what happened in Fatima in the year 1917.

The film is good and it is because it takes time to develop things, not just took the time to take care of the details in the screenplay or the actors reactions, also the post production is like frame by frame museum art. It's made with such a good craft by La Huella (visual effects) that I really hope that Quiroga makes his next feature in Spain not in Hollywood (despite his success in America) so he can maintain his complete freedom and he can deliver only what we can imagine for the times being. It's just a question of certain texture reworked many times and the film gives you the creeps, it takes you inside the screen, instead of making you feel that you are in a Disney's ride.
Quiroga understands that horror film works thanks to the correct atmospheres, but he also knows very well that every look, every cut, every sound is part of that atmosphere.