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Ordet (1955)
Jesus facepalm.
Ordet is the second Dreyers film I've seen - the first being The Passion of Joan of Arc which at the time both amazed and scared me with its dark, brooding and sinister camera work and acting. I can only wonder what happened in between this and Ordet (I will soon find out though), but the latter surely makes a few steps backward in terms of almost everything I've seen in the Passion.
I'm not a religious person and I can understand that this film may have a great appeal on a Christian (or, as someone else has put it, a quaker). It deals with Christianity, faith, doubt, god and two different ways how to approach it - one represents the "happy Christianity" of Morten, the father and per se the head chief of the Borgen family. The other one is the opposite, a very outdated, medieval way of embracing god through guilt and fear-of-burning-in-hell view of the other family, led by Peter the Tailor. The two views antagonize themselves, causing a conflict. There's something else though - Morten's son Johannes, who thinks is Jesus Christ and ultimately makes the two branches merge together and embrace each other's differences.
The plot includes turning points that trigger and motivate some of the internal thoughts and actions of the protagonists. But as the plot progresses, it really does very little or nothing ,in fact, for the viewer, because everything here is really predictable. It makes sense that the movie is based on a play - the actors themselves look like they're in a play. Which would be good, if their acting wasn't so dull. I mean, really - they have the same exspression from start to finish (the film lasts more than 2 hours, mind you), they move from room to room like they are chained animals in a cage, they are empty, conveying the dialog in such a tiresome and dragged manner, that one can only wonder what the hell was Dreyer doing with them in the first place. The material of the dialog is also tiresome - I could just go read the Bible directly if I wanted endless usage of Christian terms all over. And the worse part of it is that it doesn't really lead anywhere - the praised-by-critics finale is anticipated a couple of times before - the resurrection is just the final nail in the coffin in the form of this movie. Its banality and ethereal pathos just shows you how bad the director is trying to get across the "point", that if you believe in god strong enough and you pray every day, then miracles will happen (including dead people raising back to life). Well, if that's the only thing that this movie can convey across, then it's really shallow, outdated and bizarre at most.
Some folks can argue that it's allegoric, metaphoric and transcends the general conception of Christian religion, meaning of life and death. Not good enough for me. It has been done so much better and in a lesser self indulgent way in so many other films - somebody here mentions Bergman's Winter Light and I agree completely. The latter is an original, intelligent and non pretentious movie that deals with pretty much the same themes as Ordet, but with a whole new prospective and deep interest in the matter. Ordet is just pale in comparison, on all levels. The other one being Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, though its main theme is the artist and the movie is set in the 12th century, it doesn't poke the viewer with endless talk about Christian guilt and morality as Ordet does. Some may also argue that the views expressed in Ordet are just reflections of that time and so it cannot be condemned or viewed as useless or/and outdated. Well, recently I saw Fritz Lang's M, which was made 24 years before Ordet and it didn't even crossed my mind to think it was outdated at any rate. So yeah, Ordet is the "problem", not the time it was made or the topic it deals with.
When I see a movie where the lead protagonist talks to a little girl whose mother is on the death bed and says to her that it's better that her mother is in heaven (meaning is earthly dead), because that means she will always watch over her from a distant, undefined "above", than here on Earth with her, I just feel insulted and very, very sorry for the little girl. At times it really seems like the film is trying to sell some sort of medieval Christian brainwash/phantasmagoric fantasy to the viewer and that's something I cannot digest.
It's still an art film though - the lighting and filming are still very good, at moments even amazing. But the acting and overall ridicule views expressed within (that drag for two hours), make this film a cheap try at finding the meaning of life, death, god, faith and doubt. May be good or even excellent for some people, but I'm pretty much out of this club.
Days of Heaven (1978)
Trying to be a serious drama, but turns out as a cheap soup - opera. Or a comedy.
This movie is a complete mess. I find it astonishing that it gained so much praise and so many high ratings. I think it should be regarded to a degree as a comedy, because there are so many things in the movie that lack coherence, integrity and, must of all, a plain sense of just about anything.
For starters, the story isn't either original nor great. It's a classic love triangle, that could be solidified by a much better script. Because the script is...just lazy - the dialogue between the characters is short, empty and doesn't add anything to any kind of depth. The characters are dull, even the acting is, in my opinion, very forced (I mean, their expressions are always the same throughout the whole film, which is indeed a very comic element), there's no evident reason why anybody should care about them. Hell, most of them don't even have names, which adds to the numbness of their story-arc. Because there is hardly a story arc anywhere - beyond the soapy, almost pathetic role of the protagonists. So yeah, we are left with almost no story at all, because the most of it just flows around the classic love/hate relationships, but in such a yawny, a-hundred-times-seen manner that you know what's going to happen in the first half of the movie.
Then we have the "narrator", which is plain horrible. Or maybe the most comic part of the movie. Both actually. It seems like it's (it's a "she", the fish - faced girl who "portraits" the main protagonist Bill's little sister) just rambling about and on and on about that or this nonsense. At moments it seems that she's trying really "hard" to get some point or other across, but then just returns to her non-coherent babbling about some ghost touching her neck "or somethin'. Her vocabulary is really, um, limited, her accent isn't even Chicago oriented, like the movie states it to be (thank you Qatacyo) and her talent to tell is just...not a talent. Really. I don't know what Malick was thinking while choosing her as the narrator, but he really should be forever imbarrased by his choice.
As the whole story "progresses", we learn nothing new. After Bill gets himself finally killed, it looks like we wasted 3/4 of the film, because life really just goes on for his lover and his little sister like nothing ever happened. The ending is pure "wtf" to me. Like the whole film actually.
Of course, with Malick you know that there's going to be some really beautiful photography and cinematic awesomeness ahead. About that, I can't complain - the shots of the nature, surroundings, pastoral fields, animals and insects are really stunning. But that's the only thing in the film that is really worth praising for. And I can't rate this movie higher than 3/10, because everything else pretty much sucks and just shows all the impatience and suffering the director had to go through in the two years of editing after the shoot. It really shows that he pretty much knew that it's going to end up in a mess. We see that in the way the scenes blend together with no elemental feeling of the story - there's a scene, it's short, we get three lines of dialog and then he pushes us in a new scene that just repeats the formula again and again, without even the slightest coherence. It's all so painfully random and shallow, even the scenes that are supposed to be important "or somethin'". So even in this aspect we are left with a couple of nice, really beautiful shots that can't really follow the story around, because it's so weak and tells us absolutely nothing of a real value.
I enjoyed for example The Thin Red Line greatly - although the story again isn't that much original, it's pieced together in a skillful way. Professional. The same goes for The Tree of Life. And I dig Tarkovski or Kubrick (and many others), who both did manage to blend together average stories with great cinematography with stunning results. So I guess it's not about either the story element vs. the cinematography element, but it's rather a clever and passionate unison of both that make great, exciting and everlasting masterpieces of cinema. Days of Heaven fails the exam on almost every basic field and remains one of my biggest film disappointments. Or maybe just a big laugh.
"...and stuff."