Peindre ou Faire L'Amour

I have seen Daniel Auteuil naked so many times in all of his movies I have seen recently that I have almost memorized it, the man can take his shirt off. Oh please, do not think that I do not like it, I find Auteuil absolutely gorgeous and it is wonderful to know him by heart, but I find his nose more interesting than the rest of his body. And by the way, would someone please remind me why I jump on every single French movie?

Peindre ou Faire L'Amour, aka To Paint or Make Love, is a 2005 French movie directed by Arnaud Larrieu, starring Daniel Auteuil, Sabine Azéma, Amira Casar and Sergi Lopez. It tells the story of a middle-aged couple moving to an isolated house in the country and how their lives change right after that. It is clear that they are a wealthy couple; Auteuil's character, William has apparently newly retired and has fallen into a sense of feeling he is not used to, with all the time in the world in his hands. On the other hand, Madeleine, his wife, is still working, while she paints in her spare time, to relax. One day, as she is painting in the country, she meets the blind mayor and is quite taken by him, for his sensitive character. William and Madeleine decide to buy the house that Adam, the mayor, has shown to Madeleine, and move there permanently.

In the quite isolated life in the country, the two couples quickly become friends with each other, and then get even closer when Adam and his wife's house burns down one night and William and Madeleine offer to live together for a while, until they build their lives up again; so close, that one night they exchange their partners, leading to a life of, well, swingers. After the first time, William and Madeleine seem to be quite shaken by the whole event, however, they quickly change their minds, and spend another night as such after William and Madeleine's daughter's wedding in the country, and they even decide to move to an island with them, leaving everything behind, but the end would be quite different.

Before I watch a French movie, I always get excited. I lived in France for a while, and I did like their way of thinking, their intellectual minds and even many other things that are the reasons why many people almost hate them. Yet, I do begin to think that I have somewhat blindly fallen in love with every piece of cinema that the French have produced so far, they really can not pull it off every single time. I do get what the movie intended to give; the depth of relationships, friendships and trust, sexual desires versus emotional dependency etc. However, it is what I have tried to read in between the loosely knit story that I actually saw. The scenes were absolutely wonderful, even I, as not so much of a countryside lover, have fallen in love with the beautiful sunset, but it was not enough this time. The little story of their daughter and her marriage did seem a little unnecessary, well, it could have made the whole plot stronger, one believes that even more if pays attention to the daughter's face in the morning right after the wedding, but unfortunately, the scenes were too busy with other stuff.

I believed, for a very long time, that whatever an intellectual French couple did, it was worth watching on screen, however, I have changed, I guess; the Scandinavians have passed well beyond this group of intellectuals and their sense of reality or their sensitivity is what I feel closer now. Yet, I know myself, I am sure that I have not learned my lesson, and will jump on the next French-titled movie I find; what can I say, this could be my addiction.

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Du Levande

"Be pleased then, you the living, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe's ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot."
Goethe

What is it, then, to be the living? Is it about to love, being loved, or about breathing? Or is it the joy of another human being?



The 2007 Swedish black comedy Du Levande tells the story - well, not much of a conventional one - of the glory of existence centered around a bunch of ordinary people, with the repetition of appearance of especially a broken-hearted groupie, a psychiatrist with years of disappointment by his patient's selfishness, an overweight woman and a businessman. It is hard to say that there exists a central plot, however, some of the stories connect to each other though somewhat loosely. There are various concepts that are used repeatedly throughout the movie, such as dreams or music. Among the 50 little stories in the movie, most notable - for me - are;

(1) A carpenter's dream where he is sentenced to death by electric chair, only because he broke a 200-years-old china set while trying to make a tablecloth trick.
(2) A girl bumps into her music idol in a local bar eventually sharing a few drinks, however, she gets false signals from the musician and her heart is broken, leading to a dream in which she marries him with people around cheering for them.
(3) An overweight woman repeatedly expresses her suffering from existence, that noone likes her etc, while being totally self-absorbed. Her overweight boyfriend tries to comfort her everytime but she keeps pushing him away, eventually, at the end of each little capture, agreeing to join him.
(4) A businessman gets his hair kind of butchered by a sad barber, right before an important business meeting with a CEO, and yet, the CEO dies of a heart attack at the most crucial point of the meeting.


Du Levande by the brilliant director Roy Andersson is a surprisingly heartwarming movie with characters that look ordinary and yet that are somewhat at the same time quite extraordinary. Their stories look like the themes of everyday life but they lead to a greater look on humanity. One of the most interesting facts about the production is that all the cast is amateurs and all the scenes except one had been shot in one take. Another important characteristic of the film is the use of the colours; not without much of a contrast, creating a calming and somehow more intense ambience. In the director's own words;

"I want to have a so-called monochrome colour scape. Monochrome; not too strong colours and not too strong a contrast because that is irritating to me. There is more intensity, in my opinion, when you create a picture with not too much contrast concerning colours and even contrasts. I want light that has not much shadow because I want light where people can’t hide in – light without mercy."


It is hard to believe that the glory of life and existence can be expressed by such mostly selfish and hardly satisfied or happy characters, and yet, the best explanation roots from the Norse proverb taken from Hávamál in the Poetic Edda;

I was once young,
I was journeying alone,
and lost my way;
rich I thought myself,
when I met another.
Man is the joy of man.

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I'm back.

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Chillin'.

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Goin' through mp3s.

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Antonia

I have been thinking a lot lately, about how wonderful it is, to be a woman, especially in a society like ours. It is tough, it needs a great effort and resistance, it is too tiring sometimes, and yet, all these are also those that make it a unique kind of struggle, that make it powerful, that make it worth, to stand up and go on, when you stumble and fall. I, am discovering my power as a fighting woman. And so did Willeke van Ammelrooy's Antonia and her family line of four generations, mainly consisting of daughters after daughters.


Antonia's Line, or Antonia's Line for English-speaking world, is a 1995 Dutch movie by director and writer Marleen Gorris, about a close-knit matriarchal community, with Antonia as the head of the family. The matronal Antonia goes back to the Dutch village she was born, with her daughter Danielle, after the World War II. It is a town where women are silent outside but torn inside, and where men are loud and mostly dull, with a false perception as they are the owner of everything, including, women. Antonia takes over the family farm, and starts building her life again with the help of her daughter. They visit her close friend Kromme Vinger (Crooked Finger) regularly; Kromme Vinger never goes out of his home where he is surrounded by thousands of books, and is philosophically depressed because of mankind's cruelty, ignorance and the on-going suffer and pain, known as life; Danielle saves a neighbour's retarded daughter after witnessing that her brother has been raping her and takes her in; Antonia refuses the marriage proposal of another neighbour who is simply seeking for a mother for his five children, finding that too overwhelming, and instead offers him a nice breakfast table for him and his five boys, every sunday morning, which would be, in years, a long long table, where everyone around it is simply happy, looking for good in each one, and not criticizing anyone. The next generation starts when Danielle, who receives art education and becomes a painter thanks to her open-minded mother Antonia, decides to have a baby, without the need of a husband and eventually she gives birth to a daughter, named Thérèse, who happens to become a genius. An affection grows between Danielle and Thérèse's teacher, forming a new couple while the movie covers yet another topic, lesbianism. And so the generations are formed each after another, as new couples are formed, and all new additions to Antonia's line are again and again, daughters.


Antonia won the 1996 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Toronto International Film Festival People's Choice Award and the Netherlands Film Festival Golden Calf Award. But the most important award is the movie itself, to the patriarchal society of today. In the beginning of the movie, when Antonia and Danielle arrive in the village, they see a sign on a wall, "Welcome to our Liberators!", and one would like to think that about the two women, although it is intended for American troops, for Antonia is the one that brings the real humanity and love that the village lacks, and the movie shows how the society could be, in the hands of women, which brings hope to our hearts, although some may call it a feminist fairy tale. All the characters, including the side characters, from Olga the cafe owner to Mad Madonna howling at the full moon for she cannot marry her protestant lover as a Catholic, are highly detailed and extremely impressive and unique.

And so, just as the warm and long breakfast tables of Antonia, the movie welcomes you with all its sincerity as a celebration of love, life and hope. There are for sure dark moments, as in real life, such as the rape of Thérèse by the son of the neighbour, however, he does receive what he deserves. One can not wish for nothing but one loving, understanding and also strong parent such as Antonia, instead of a distant, over-protective father who would not comprehend you deeply. The fact that every new generation of women in the family has yet another talent develops another admiration for them; Danielle is a painter, the genius Thérèse is a composer and mathematician and her daughter Sarah is a writer, whom we find, in the end, that is the narrator. Their talents which are the ways that they perceive life, are best stated in the last scenes, while Antonia is about to die, and Sarah, one by one, describe each one's later expression of such a great and important moment.

There are tons of movies that would fill you with hope and love for sure, however this one seems to give you the strongest one, especially making you proud of who you are, when you see it, as a woman. I have written above, I love, just love, to be a woman, for I am a fighter.

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People..

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Rise and shine, come on let's go!

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Summer ending?? No way! Not yet?!

Le Scaphandre et Le Papillon

What is your worst fear? You may be scared of many things; darkness, society, or like me, you may have a phobia for insects. There are actually solutions for most of them, at least you may learn how to deal with them in minimum damages. But; what if you find yourself in an extremely scary and hard situation and what if this is forever?

Jean-Dominique Bauby, a well-known French journalist and author, and the editor of the French fashion magazine Elle, suffered a massive stroke at the age of 42, leaving him with a condition known as locked-in syndrome; a condition that paralyzed him entirely, except for his left eyelid, however he was mentally awake and fully aware of what was going on around him. Now I call that, the worst fear.

Le Scaphandre et La Papillon (aka The Diving Bell and The Butterfly) is the 2007 film based on the memoir of the same name by Bauby, depicting his life after the stroke. From the beginning of the movie, for a long while, we, the audience, see everything through Bauby's one eye left; then as the movie goes on, we start seeing Bauby and his environment which may be interpreted as the development of his unique communication with those around him. People read him a different version of the alphabet, based on the frequency of the letters used in the language; he blinks his left eye to stop in the right letter in order to make sentences, and when he passes the very first depression of his condition, he writes his memoir with the help of an assistant, the memoir named Le Scaphandre et Le Papillon.


Jean-Dominique Bauby was a very successful author and journalist, and he was also known to be a very lively, active man, with also multiple love affairs. It is extremely sad to see what he had to live through in the last stage of his life, and it also leaves you short of breath; however it is also interesting to learn about how he dealt with that, and how he managed to leave his inner world behind him as a memoir, for one can do nothing but return to his inner-most self when trapped in his physical cage of body. Locked-in syndrome is described as "the closest thing to being buried alive", therefore the memoir is like one from a grave.


I still could not decide whether I really liked the movie itself, or what affected me most was the reality of the story and the fact that there is actually a condition like this with many known cases. Yet, with the existence of the book, it is, I believe, really important to find out about the inner-self I wrote above, and thus, the movie becomes one to be certainly viewed; at least, it is a preparation before reading the memoir itself, which, I sure will do, soon.

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An extremely lazy sunday for extremely clever minds.

Encounters At The End Of The World

Not so many people may have the courage to go all the way south to Antarctica, to make research, to meet people, to experience and to experiment. You must be either a very enthusiastic scientist or you must be nuts. It turns out, as seen in Encounters At The End Of The World, that those scientists are nuts.

Encounters At The End Of The World is a 2007 documentary film by Werner Herzog. The name may suggest some that the movie would be about interesting creatures, animals or organisms of the nature in Antarctica, after all it is certainly a place of mystery and not a place that would easily be seen, however, this is yet a Herzog movie and thus the encounters that is searched for is not the fluffy penguins, as Herzog himself would state, but the dreams of the people living and working there, accompanied by the vast landscape.

The journey begins at McMurdo Station and then goes on to a nearby seal camp, a diving camp, Mount Erebus and to ANITA project base. While the landscape and elements of nature such as volcanos or a group of penguins where one of them goes on to an individual journey leaving the group for a certain death in the barren interior of the continent, the people such as the scientists and workmen are all very interesting characters, closest to madness. One fascinating fact about those people is that apart from the scientific researches and experiments, these are also the people responsible from the basic needs of the population, such as cooking or cleaning etc. It is certainly an impressive way of community life; after all, one should not expect to find there the normalities around us.


Encounters At The End Of The World received very positive reviews from the critics, with the consensus that the film "offers a poignant study of the human psyche amid haunting landscapes". The movie was shot as part of the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. The crew consisted only of Herzog, recording the production sound and of cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger. They went to Antarctica without any opportunity to plan filming locations and subjects of interviews and they had only seven weeks to do the whole footage, thus Herzog often met his subjects only minutes before he began interviewing them. Nonetheless, this seems not to have prevented him from having a deep insight to those people.


I had seen Encounters At The End Of The World before I saw Man On Wire, yet another masterpiece that competed for Academy Award for Best Documentary, and I was amazed that it did not receive the award (well, yes, I did change my mind after viewing Man On Wire). You cannot help but get a peaceful state of mind with the beautiful and stimulating landscape as well as get surprised with the somewhat striking states of minds of those people. It certainly is an impressive 99 minutes, worth to watch again and again.

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Good morning!

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Waking Ned

Couple of days ago, I bought a lottery ticket. The prize was not huge but still, my roommate and I dreamed of many things from a brand new tenori-on to any graduate program abroad. At around 21:30 that day, I found out that I did not win anything, not even the smallest prize. Yet still, it was fun and exciting waiting for the result. The old man named Ned in this movie, however, is lucky for he wins the huge prize of over 6 million pounds, yet no so lucky to take it and spend, for he dies of a heart attack the minute he hears the result.


Waking Ned is a brilliant comedy set in a little village called Tulaigh Mhór (Tullymore) in Ireland. One of the most exciting things for some people in this town is the weekly lottery. The movie starts with that week's results being announced and the first people we meet is Jackie and Annie O'Shea, an old couple who are one of the regulars of lottery and they do not win anything as usual that week. However, Jackie finds out, from a little piece of information in the newspaper, that the winner is from their village. So a search for that lucky person starts by Jackie (Ian Bannen), his wife Annie (the beautiful Fionnula Flanagan) and his best friend Michael (the amazing David Kelly), among the people in the village. They buy drinks to make them talk, pretend to be their best friends and they even prepare a dinner party for the 18 regular lottery players. Just when they spend lots of money searching for the winner, they finally realize that one of those regular players, Ned, has been missing in the party. Thus, Jackie takes one piece of the dinner to Ned, sure that he is the winner, only to find out that Ned has been dead for days since the lottery night.

So what happens next? Jackie, seeing Ned in his dream that night and interpreting it as Ned wanting him to claim the prize, comes up with a brilliant idea: they will act as if he is Ned, and take the money, sharing it among the O'Shea couple and their good friend Michael. However, things do not quite go according to plans and poor Michael has to act as Ned, which convinces the guy from the general directorate of national lottery but he is still to make an investigation in order have the other people in town to certify that Michael certainly is Ned. Therefore, with a little change in the plan, Jackie and Michael decide to share the prize with all the town, which makes a total of 52 people, and this becomes the little gift Ned Devine leaves to those people, right before, and after, his death.



The 1998 movie Waking Ned is a heartwarming and hilarious comedy and directoral debut by Kirk Jones. Yes, it surely has a sad part in it, and yet, it all turns out to be a story of friendship, hope and innocent dreams. The relationship of Michael and Jackie is one of a kind which everyone would like to have, a life-long friendship filled with love, loyalty, laughter and tears every once in a while, thus, caring for and looking after each other. The speech Jackie gives in Ned's funeral about his friendship with Michael (a little twist in the names about which I will not give the details here, not to spoil it) is one that would bring tears to your eyes, while smiling or maybe even laughing. Not only that, but also the carefully developed, mostly uniquely personified, characters in the town are all brilliant, and all that human touch blended well with the peaceful nature of Isle of Man leaves you with a perfectly happy mood in the end. I watched the movie twice, first a few years ago, second, last night, and I had the same mood after both.


Do not watch only the movies that really matter the most to the world, to humanity. Do yourself a favour every once in a while, to just laugh, after all, life is not only about some serious subject matters that we usually think about, scowling. Take some time and see Waking Ned, to toast to life, while you're still alive.

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Chaotic dreams.

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