Matty

I would very roughly describe We Have Never Been Modern as a period detective melodrama, but it cannot fulfil any of the characteristics of that genre, because it is a film with a fluid genre identity. This corresponds to one of the film’s central themes, which is the inconstancy of gender identities and social roles, as well as the impossibility of incorporating certain facts into familiar frameworks and categories. Though the story takes place in the 1930s, its strength lies in something that isn’t often seen in Czech period dramas – it clearly relates to problems that are relevant to the present. The essence of the film is not the black-and-white struggle against Nazism or Communism, but rather the current feeling of anxiety caused by a society that is only outwardly modern while it allows the restriction of human rights and individuality under the pretext of rationalisation, automation, security, economic growth and building a better tomorrow. If we wanted to identify a villain in the narrative, it’s not the state or the group representing a particular ideology, but the company and its capitalist logic based on thoughtless expansion and exploitation. This is connected with the key theme of the clash between tradition and modernity, where it is again shown that even though we have state-of-the-art production processes, that doesn’t help us much if there isn’t any progress in the thinking of people who cling to certain prejudices and stereotypes and who have the need to determine for others what is normal and to tell people how they are supposed to live. The consequence of that is that this emerging better world is accessible only to those who submit to the given norms and fall in line. The intersex character is a threat to the given order and rationality. In how the others treat her, we see an example of the reactions that we can still encounter today. Ridicule, denial and elimination, as well as the effort to ascertain the necessary facts and to understand exactly what it means not to unambiguously be either a man or a woman from the biological perspective. Together with how the reaction of the female protagonist played by Eliška Křenková evolves, the genre of the film also evolves. Mysterious crime thriller, science film, melodrama, social drama… Though I understand that the changes in genre and making the otherwise imperceptible style visible (the animated interlude, Helena’s glances into the camera, the pointing out of how every retelling of events is also an interpretation over which the participants in those events have no control) may be unsettling for some, they are based on what the film thematises, i.e. rebelling against norms, being uncategorisable, deviating from convention. This brings both anxiety and an awakening (or a new perspective on the matter), which is true both for both Saša and Helena, who realises who or what is important to her in life. Just as the film is ambiguous in terms of genre, the characters are not black-and-white. The complex female protagonist, again something quite rare in Czech cinema, is portrayed superbly by Eliška Křenková. Her Helena convincingly transitions between bitterly commenting on the events happening around her and displays of sensitivity, while also imposing on others her idea of what she thinks is right. The clash of different worlds and attitudes is not conveyed only in the scenography or the work with colours, but also in the contrasting acting performance (the informal Křenková vs. the deliberately affected König), as well as in the use of anachronisms (for example, the fact that the characters use modern language), which highlights the parallels with today. Whereas, in the end, Helena looks to the future with legitimate concerns (as we should too), the future of Czech audio-visual art appears to be somewhat more promising with creators such as Šifra, Douba and Chlupáček. Their We Have Never Been Modern is in fact a modern, refreshing film with a well-developed concept that I believe can spur a discussion of issues that should be addressed today.

Abounding with nudity and violence, Friedkin’s merciless (to both the viewer and the characters), testosterone-fuelled, electropop-laden neo-noir (the big city, mercurial women and a cynical lone-wolf detective) can be thought of as a bitter postscript to The French Connection. The biggest threat to law and order in yuppie-era America is not drugs, but counterfeit money; the lifestyle and methods of the good guys and bad guys are comparable and though 1980s cops have the same bulldog nature as Popeye Doyle, they don’t hunt bad guys down so much for the sake of justice, but for the adrenaline rush. The overabundance of delights offered by consumer society pushed them into a state of numbness that forces them to seek out stimuli of a more extreme nature. Dangerous games with master criminals are as much an adrenaline sport for them as bungee-jumping. The multiple storylines, the preference for depersonalised sets and fetishistic interest in phenomena characteristic of the time (music, art, fashion) indicate an attempt to offer a portrait of the Zeitgeist rather than individual characters, whose perspective the camera adopts only in order to amplify the visceral effect (the chase, the point of view of a victim staring down the barrel of a gun). Besides the fact that this good-bad film is unconventional in terms of genre and narrative, you will learn more from it about the ideological foundations of American society in the 1980s than you would from any history textbook. 85%

This method of popularising (astro)physics seems somewhat unfortunate to me. Roughly a quarter of the runtime of every episode is taken up by CGI and spectacular shots of desolate landscapes with a bombastic soundtrack (the cost of the gratuitous global travel – it’s a show about distant planets and galaxies after all, so the narration could have been recorded in any TV studio – must have swallowed up more of the budget than all of the CGI images of space). Together with Cox’s flowery speech when he waxes poetic about the beauty of the stars and speculates about the existence of extraterrestrials, it should rather inspire the same sense of wonder as a Hollywood blockbuster. For a person who is watching in order to learn something, however, it is mostly an annoying waste of time. The endless scientific facts could be condensed into thirty minutes max in each episode. The rest is ostentatious fluff with a load of metaphors, adjectives and dramatic pauses that together tell us nothing. With a similarly charismatic, erudite and rhetorically gifted host, this is doubly regrettable. But I understand that the BBC wants to keep up with the times (or rather Netflix) and is adapting to trends in its documentary filmmaking. By keeping the show digestible for the broadest possible audience, it remains only on the surface, the informational value is forsaken in favour of “cinematic” spectacle, and style wins out over substance (which mostly consists only of recycled material from other BBC docuseries).

The Big Bang Theory 1940s style. Compared to Hawks’s previous comedies (Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday), Ball of Fire has a less hectic pace, which isn’t too surprising, given that the characters aren’t half-mad or journalists. With the exception of the boisterous female element, they are dignified professors who are mindful of every syllable they utter. Issues that defy rationality (such as the opposite sex) remain outside their area of interest.  Naturally, this staid fraternity is rather thrown into disarray when a woman who doesn’t watch her mouth comes into their world. Her vocabulary and the lies that she tells shift the plot to that of a multi-layered comedy in which the lady’s violation of the 1960s rules of grammar are a greater offence than her association with the criminal underworld. The battle of the sexes, in which the forces are evenly balanced despite the numerical superiority of the men, brings about the improvement of character in the both of the main protagonists. As Gary Cooper’s familiarisation with street slang becomes more of a full-contact activity than he had originally intended, the protagonist has no choice but to learn to fight with his bare hands as well as with his words. There is no doubt that the radiant Barbara Stanwyck, who bring her legs and the rest of her body into play at every possible opportunity, is worth his efforts. The film progresses from a crazy comedy in the guise of a gangster movie to an unexpectedly serious romantic climax. For once in a Hawks film, the intellectuals don’t go solely for laughs from beginning to end, which – together with Toland’s sophisticated cinematography – I think denies Ball of Fire the right to bear the “screwball” label. Despite that, however, the film ranks among the masterpieces of classic Hollywood. 80%

Like the participants in Philibert’s other documentaries, the visitors of the L’Adamant Day Centre in Paris try in many scenes to find the right words or other means of expression inspired by art therapy to convey their emotions and stories, or rather to establish contact with others. Through patient observation as well as through listening to and preserving conversations in their entirety, e.g. without deleting the moments when his subjects address the crew members, Philibert highlights the uniqueness of the individual participants’ manner of communication, their diction and their choice of expressions (some invent their own), and the gestures, facial expressions and tics that accompany them. Whereas in hierarchical social systems we try to fit into an artificially constructed role with which we have become familiar and to think and speak in a standardised way in the interest of preserving our status, on the Adamant – a somewhat utopian world with its own rhythm (corresponding to the fact that people are constantly coming and going and nothing is as permanent as the Seine, on which the floating daycare centre is located) – such games are not played. Or rather, when someone does play that game, it’s usually done consciously in the context of therapy. Role-playing and constructing a fiction that’s nicer than one’s own disordered reality is tellingly the topic of the films (8 1/2, Day for Night, Through the Olive Trees) selected for a festival that the social actors organise in one of the workshops and whose preparation is defined by the timeframe of the narrative.  ___ The people on the Adamant aren’t concerned about how they appear to others or whether expectations are met. Everyone is in the same boat. Philibert’s new film can be seen as an argument for psychiatric care reform or generally for a more understanding approach to people afflicted with mental illness. For me, it is primarily a film – exceptionally powerful in its honest humanism and empathy – about the art of living together in spite of our differences and regardless of the fact that some people think and speak differently. On the Adamant is very deserving of the Golden Bear that it won. 85%

On the surface, Fatal Attraction is a fully adult (in terms of subject matter and consistency of approach), flawlessly made (anti-)romantic thriller, but the real interpretive fun starts when we go behind the genre mask. What scares an affluent yuppie lawyer, whose life has gone according to plan so far? A murderous stare. Consuming passion. Irresistible temptation. Female sexuality. An irrationality that respects no logical or legal standards. The embodiment of his phobia is an emancipated (i.e. economically self-sufficient) but psychologically unstable woman. She is a feminist of the type that American men in the late 1980s might have shuddered to imagine. She seduces him, she initiates, she is a danger. She is not the man’s wife, who has unquestioningly accepted the role assigned to her by the patriarchy and thus possesses the power necessary to restore harmony (with the final act, she merely keeps her earlier vow and confirms her maternal submissiveness). The film’s happy ending is as false as the idyll between Dan and Alex (there is something deceitful in the “androgyny” of that name). The man has lost the composure that he had in the opening scene. The very idea of femininity itself newly terrifies him, which is illustrated by his fright when his own wife approaches him from behind. What he saw through the looking glass (the white rabbit is not absent here, though it turns out a little differently than it did with Alice), and what he was compelled to see (increased aggression, a reassessment of his view of the relationship between the law and morality), has permanently shaken him. I would like to see a sequel focusing on how Dan recovers from his post-feminist trauma (the series remake attempts to do that, but it ultimately does a disservice to the original and to the characters). The problem is outwardly resolved and the intangibility of the evil that is sown in the protagonist is not dealt with further. Doubts remain hanging in the air, but they are not directly mentioned. Because of the overly simplistic way this is addressed, which was chosen only after the dissatisfied responses of viewers at a test screening, the film actually comes across as chauvinistic. At any rate, Fatal Attraction is a fascinating example of the defensive reaction of men who sensed danger after the second wave of feminism had achieved some successes. 80%

After the promising first shot, the quality only deteriorates. First there is an inept attempt at show-business satire, which in the context of the issues addressed here might have been relevant at the beginning of the millennium, with good-looking people dancing and smoking, then more dancing and smoking people in nicely lit shots, and finally a bit of similarly chaste eroticism that doesn’t cross any boundaries as in Fifty Shades of Grey (only the moaning is louder here). The dialogue has about as much in common with the actual speech of real people as chicken nuggets have with real meat. The rhythm is completely off and all of the actors (most notably the Weeknd) are all over the map with their speech, rarely ending up in the same place. It’s provocative only by how many levels on which it doesn’t work. The whole thing has a sort of embarrassed pubescent vibe, as if Sam Levinson wanted to shoot a porn flick but was afraid of what his parents/HBO would say, so he awkwardly fabricated the illusion that he is pursuing a purpose higher than mere (self-)gratification through his work.

The protagonist’s journey of self-discovery was covered in Andrea Arnold’s previous films, but in American Honey, it is written directly into the unconventional structure of the film for the first time and is manifested both by the choice of setting and the segmentation of the narrative by means of longer musical interludes, during which we enjoy the present moment with the protagonist and do not think about how the film (and the journey) will continue. Whereas Star’s inner liberation happens below the surface, the American landscape through which the protagonist and her companions travel undergoes a significant transformation. Through poetic shots of the setting sun and oil-field fires, we are – like Star – repeatedly pull out of the harsh reality of the lives of those who have who have nothing to lose, which is filmed with an unpleasant degree of detail. Unlike other female wanderers depicted in films, however, Star is not a defenceless figure preyed upon by men. She quickly masters the rules of market capitalism and begins to confidently offer what she has in order to get what she wants. Despite that, the matter-of-factness with which she repeatedly gets into strange men’s cars makes her nervous and raises within her the question of when she will pay for her trustingness. Though the expansive American plains across which the characters travel call for a widescreen picture, Arnold remains faithful to the narrowed academic format. Thanks to that, most of the shots are dominated by Sasha Lane, who also determines who and what we see. The pairing of the energetic protagonist with the movement of the camera gives the film an immediacy and liveliness that grow even stronger during the authentic erotic scenes and other moments when Star lets her instincts guide her. Despite its sensuousness, American Honey is also a merciless portrait of a country in which everything can be converted into a medium of exchange and where you can achieve your dream only if you sell yourself. 90%

Based solely on the first impression, Clara Bow plays the dictionary definition of a girl who has “it” and who wants “it” (the concept of the “it girl” arose from this film). She is turned into a sex object personifying That Which Every Heterosexual Man Desires mainly by men who are incapable of accepting her as anything other than a cute imp. A longer-term relationship with such a girl just for fun is unthinkable for them. If she became their wife or the mother of their child, she would lose “it” and would no longer be the unattainable personification of secret desires without her own subjectivity (the id would turn into the ego, if you like). Therefore, Cyrus loses interest when he sees her as a mother (though a fake mother, which he doesn’t know). The rejected Lou returns to her life as an obsessive thought (of “it”), as a bad conscience, in order to take revenge by reversing roles. The hunted newly becomes the hunter. Lou realises that her power consists in the fact that she can refuse what a man desires without being his girlfriend (whether at work, where she receives money from a man for her various services, or outside of it). This is just the mutual recognition that without “it”, they are free, not controlled by lust, not forced to play the expected roles, and capable of a fulfilling relationship. With its ambiguous intertitles, the amount of exposed (female) skin and the open thematisation of sexuality, It is raunchy entertainment that rivals the pre-Code films of the talkie era. 75%

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.