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Sou suo (2012)
If you like enigmatic irony, this is your movie!
You can watch this movie as a straight drama/comedy, and its perfectly entertaining that way. But once you start to think about it, things that seemed quite straightforward at first, grow more and more obscure and uncertain.
The major character is a beautiful young woman, personal secretary to a self-made millionaire whose company is just about to go multi-national. Early in the movie she gets some very bad news, of a kind that would make one want to go somewhere secure and peaceful to think.
So, does she take a cab home? No, she rides a bus, not her usual mode of transport. On the bus she violates a social taboo, then rubs it in by mocking the victim of her transgression. The entire incident is filmed by a trainee reporter on her cell-phone. Reporter follows the woman when she leaves the bus to ask her why she did it, and gets a snotty brush-off.
At this point one is confused because the woman's behavior is so out of character, and you can't satisfactorily explain it away as reaction to her bad news. Instead you come to realize that she has done all this deliberately, and that her bad news merely provided the impetus to set something in motion that she had probably been planning for some time, and had been just waiting for the right moment.
And the consequences of her action ramify, affecting all of the other major characters in the same way; each of them become caught in their own personal webs, and in each case it is a web of their own devising.
I think this is a very subtle movie, very good indeed.
Tsotsi (2005)
Psychopath with heart of gold??!
The male lead has an uncompromising glower, and that is the extent of his repertoire. With his gang and his glower he stalks through shanty town, striking terror into the townsfolk? Actually no, derision, they're jeering at him. Camera concentrates on his glower, what will this badass of all badasses, this gangsta's gangsta, do to reduce these sniggering jackals to a state of grovelling terror? In that time-honored gesture of defiant helplessness, he raises his middle finger to them. That's the first descent into bathos.
Gang on subway, glower spots victim flashing paypacket, gang surround him, glower skewers him with skewer to heart, Train stops at station, and every other person in the compartment gets off, and no one gets on. Total improbability number 1.
Gang in bar, member upbraiding glower, apparently offing folks is a new departure for the gang. Glower beats upbraider to a pulp, then flees in terror through the night and the undergrowth and the pouring rain. His rain (or tear) streaked face keeps being interspersed with that of a lookalike young boy, tear-streaked. What do we have now? A psychopath with a conscience? Total improbability and descent into bathos number 2.
Glower emerges in the suburbs. Car drives up, garage door won't open, woman gets out to call her husband on intercom. Glower takes car at gun-point. Woman objects, glower blows her away. Woo-wee, we're back in psycho mode again! 30 seconds later, baby in back seat wakes up and starts crying lustily. Glower stops car, we witness his inner torment, and find ourselves on our knees before the screen, hands clasped in supplication and imploring "Please, please, just once stay in context, will you. Just pick the kid up by the scruff of the neck and toss it out the window". Not a chance; now we get total improbability and descent into bathos number 3. Glower decides that all he's ever really wanted is a 2 month old baby to love and care for.
At this point, ten minutes into the movie, I tossed it. It was either that, or my cookies.
Till det som är vackert (2010)
The corruption of innocence
Things like music, poetry, philosophy etc are essential details of this film, but otherwise have nothing to do with its theme.
That theme is the corruption of innocence. Which puts it in company with other films like "The Go Between", "Rosetta", "Mouchette" or "Lord of the Flies", but "Pure" is realistic rather than romantic. The director, Lisa Langseth, probably has much in common with Anthony Trollope, who was once described as "compared to Trollope, even Balzac is a romantic".
The entire film depends on the performance of Alicia Vikander as Katarina, and that performance is flawless, first as a young girl of passion, through her disillusionment, and, at the very last scene, to her "graduation".
And special mention should be made of Per-Eric Winberg's music soundtrack, both his own compositions and those he selected from other composers are first class.