Nov 25, 2015

29th Nov 2015; Aki Kaurismäki's LE HAVRE


LE HAVRE
A film by Aki Kaurismäki
2011 / Finland-France / Runtime 93 minutes
5.45 pm / 29th Nov / Perks Mini Theater


Le Havre is a a perfect, deadpan, impishly optimistic fairy tale from the great Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki. Le Havre offers the director’s usual humour, pitch-perfect acting and compassionate message.  It is set  in the French port city where many of the cargoes are human: illegal immigrants arriving from Africa. The film's hero, Marcel Marx with no plan in mind becomes in charge of protecting a migrant African boy from arrest.
 
The movie's other characters are all proletarians from a working-class neighborhood. We meet Marcel's wife, Arletty (Kati Outinen), who joins her husband in his scheme. Marcel and Arletty are long and happily in love. They cherish each other. Childless, they care for the boy and enlist others in the neighborhood to hide him from Inspector Monet.
 
Filmed in a high, nostalgic style that gives its setting the gleam and romance of another era, "Le Havre" is a movie composed entirely of fantastic faces. Another classic Kaurismäki characteristic very much in evidence is his vivid and idiosyncratic use of color. Working with his regular cinematographer Timo Salminen and French set designer Wouter Zoon, the director does wonderful things with a pastel palette and loves to put unexpected visual accents where you least expect them.
 
This movie is as lovable as a silent comedy, which it could have been. It takes place in a world that seems cruel and heartless, but look at the lengths Marcel goes to find Idrissa's father in a refugee camp and raise money to send the boy to join his mother in England. Finnish film maker Kaurismaki  has set his story of timely issues and timeless values in the French port city of the title.  (Source:Internet)
 






Aki Kaurismäki

Aki Kaurismäki was born in Finland in 1957. After graduating in media studies from the University of Tampere, He started his career as a co-screenwriter and actor in films made by his older brother, Mika Kaurismäki. His debut as an independent director was Crime and Punishment (1983), an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novel set in modern Helsinki. He gained worldwide attention with Leningrad Cowboys Go To America. Kaurismäki has been influenced by the French directors Jean-Pierre Melville and Robert Bresson. He  has tried and managed to stick totally to the inseparable realities of the real world.  His minimalist style is all his own (and that of the great cinematographer of all his films, Timo Salminen); he never entered the Finnish Film School (as he was suspected to be "too cynical").


Much of Kaurismäki's work is centred on Helsinki, such as the film Calamari Union, the Proletariat trilogy (Shadows in Paradise, Ariel and The Match Factory Girl) and the Finland trilogy (Drifting Clouds, The Man Without a Past and Lights in the Dusk). His vision of Helsinki is critical and singularly unromantic. Indeed, his characters often speak about how they wish to get away from Helsinki. Some end up in Mexico (Ariel), others in Estonia (Shadows in Paradise, Calamari Union, and Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana). The setting of most of his films is the 1980s, or at least contains elements from that decade. Kaurismäki is, in fact, almost single-handedly responsible for rejuvenating the failing Finnish film industry in the 1980s with a series of highly original comedies made with his brother Mika. Over the past twenty years, Kaurismäki has become one of the pre-eminent auteurs of international art cinema, fusing minimalism and melodrama to poignantly depict the hardships of Finland’s blue-collar class.

Nov 3, 2015

8th Nov 2015; David Lean's BRIEF ENCOUNTER




 

BRIEF ENCOUNTER

A Film by David Lean

1945 / UK / 86 minutes / B&W

5.45pm; Perks Mini Theater




Brief Encounter is about average and perfectly genuine people in an average and perfectly genuine situation. Here love, more than the grandness of life in total, is the cause for dramatic tension and identification.  Laura Jesson is  happily married.  A chance meeting with Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) sends her emotions reeling. She loves her husband; they don’t have any  domestic issues. But this brief encounter becomes something she never could have imagined. Indeed, she probably never dared. 


The story, set in pre-war England, 1938, is told quite sensitively through a series of flashbacks, with the same scene opening and closing the film (with a short addition included to finish it off.) The action centers almost exclusively on Laura's point of view, her eyes and facial expressions communicating a full range of emotions as she experiences her midlife whirlwind.

Brief Encounter is also a beautiful film to watch. Shot by Robert Krasker (who would photograph Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) and Luchino Visconti’s Senso (1954) – two other gorgeous looking movies), the images only add to the dream state of the characters. For Laura, this is exactly what’s it’s like – a dream, a fantasy. But can it be real,  or is this love only to be a fleeting one? Will she eventually just wake up? Either way, it’s extraordinarily romantic.


Touching, emotional, accessible and realistic performances are delivered by the two main, middle-aged characters. Brief Encounte is  one of the great romantic films of all time, with a very downbeat ending. The screenplay was adapted and based on playwright Noel Coward's 1935 short one-act (half-hour) stage play Still Life and the film  maintains chaste minimalism.   ( Source: Internet)






 

David Lean

David Lean is one of the most popular and well-known of British film-makers.  He was the  chief editor of Gaumont British News until in 1939 when he began to edit feature films. In 1942 Noel Coward gave Lean the chance to co-direct with him the war film In Which We Serve (1942). Lean first directed adaptations of three plays by Coward: the chronicle This Happy Breed (1944), the humorous ghost story Blithe Spirit (1945) and, most notably, the sentimental drama Brief Encounter (1945). "Brief Encounter" was presented at the very first Cannes film festival (1946), where it won almost unanimous praises as well as a Grand Prize.

After  Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948) he returned to prominence again with the prisoner-of-war drama The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). It won seven Academy Awards. Lawrence of Arabia (1962 is often considered Lean’s finest film. It was followed by Dr. Zhivago (1965), a love story set against a backdrop of the Russian Revolution and the romantic Ryan’s Daughter (1970),  both exhibiting the grand scale, lush cinematography, and breathtaking landscapes that had become the hallmark of Lean’s work. His last film, A Passage to India (1984), based on the E.M. Forster novel, was regarded as his best work since Lawrence of Arabia. Lean was knighted by Queen Elizabeth that year, and in 1990 he was awarded the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award. At the time of his death, he was preparing a screen version of Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo.