For those interested in women's and senior issues, Strangers in Good Company is a Canadian film about a group of women from a senior center who are stranded in the middle of nowhere when their bus breaks down. Low key but fascinating and based on the actual lives of the cast members.
Nobody Knows is a Japanese film about children whose single mother abandons them, leaving a pile of money and no word about where she has gone or if she is coming back. Led by the oldest child, a 13-year-old boy, they try to pretend that everything is fine so that they will not be split up.
A New Life tells the story of international adoption from the child's point of view. The director was actually adopted from Korea to France, and evidently the story is semi-autobiographical. A young girl is abandoned at an orphanage and keeps hoping that her father will return to claim her. After she resigns herself to his never coming back, she strives to become the child that foreigners will want to adopt.
Two French films will please lovers of quirky and twisted suspense:
Roman de Gare is so complicated, that I'll leave it to the Internet Movie Database to outline the plot:"The successful novelist Judith Ralitzer is interrogated in the police station about the disappearance of her ghost-writer. A serial-killer escapes from a prison in Paris. A missing school teacher leaves his wife and children. In the road, the annoying and stressed hairdresser Hughette is left in a gas station by her fiancé Paul while driving to the poor farm of her family in the country. A mysterious man offers a ride to her and she invites him to assume the identity of Paul during 24 hours to not disappoint her mother. Who might be the unknown man and what is real and what is fiction? "
With a Friend Like Harry is about a family traveling to their summer home. At a freeway rest stop, a man named Harry comes up to them and claims to be an old classmate of the husband, who does not remember him at all. But Harry knows everything about the husband, and he is extremely generous with the family. They invite him to join them at their summer home. What happens next is very much like something Alfred Hitchcock would dream up.
I'm half Norwegian, but that's not the reason I like these four Norwegian films:
Sons is a Norwegian film about a loser who has a dead end job at a swimming pool and makes extra money robbing the clients of the prostitute who lives upstairs. One day, he spots a familiar face at the pool: the man who molested him when he was younger. This is traumatic enough, but he notices that the man is grooming another boy. However, no one will listen to him, and he decides to become a vigilante avenger. There is some violence in the film, but the psychological angle is really well done, looking at the question of what kinds of children would be vulnerable to a predator and how predators may hide behind a respectable facade. The last two or three minutes of this film are amazing.
The Other Side of Sunday is about a young girl in the early 1960s being brought up in a fundamentalist branch of the Norwegian state church. Her parents don't allow her to do anything, not even go to a cafe with her friends. Her upcoming confirmation fills her with dread, because she doesn't want to end up like the drab, repressed women she calls "church hags." She finds a kindred spirit in one of the women in the congregation, but this cannot end well.
Max Manus The true story of one of Norway's World War II resistance fighters, a man with nine lives. He pulls off amazing acts of sabotage and escapes from impossible situations, including in one case jumping out of a hospital window. As we all know, the Nazis were defeated and Norway was liberated, but the movie's treatment of that event is definitely not what Hollywood would do. (I saw this film at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival, and the last survivor of Manus's group of rebels was present.)
The Kautokeino Rebellion It's astounding how many similarities you find when looking at the history of European contact with indigenous peoples, and the story of the Norwegians and the Sami ("Lapp" is considered derogatory) is no exception. Itinerant reindeer herders in the Arctic, the Sami have come to rely on Norwegian trading posts for supplies, and the trading post merchants have discovered that a way to keep the Sami dependent is to sell them booze (sound familiar?). Upset that their husbands are drunk all the time and no longer do any work, the women start a temperance movement, which the traders see as a provocation, especially since the men tend to get "uppity" (i.e. don't take shit) when they're not drinking.
Two older Soviet films that blew me away:
The Cranes are Flying is the story of lovers separated by World War II. Veronica and Boris are engaged, but when World War II breaks out, the draftees are hustled out of Moscow so quickly that the two of them don't even get a chance to say goodbye. When her apartment building is bombed and her family killed, Veronica moves in with Boris's family and experiences all their hardships. The last scene of this film is bittersweet in a way that Hollywood wouldn't have the imagination or the guts to try. This is one of the first films made after the denunciation of Stalinism, and it is remarkable in two ways: 1) It is a World War II film that doesn't mention Stalin and has almost no political content, 2) The camera work and acting are amazing.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors Based on a Ukrainian legend, this is a bit of magic realism that predates the popularity of Latin American magic realism. The story is simple: Ivan and Marichka are young lovers, but Marichka dies, and Ivan goes crazy with grief for a time, recovering only gradually. Two things make this film remarkable: It is the most visually beautiful film I have ever seen, with the Carpathian mountain landscapes, the costumes, the artifacts, and the interiors of the houses all portrayed in dazzling arrays of color. The soundtrack is wonderful, too, with gorgeous folk music. However, the director Sergei Parajanov, got in trouble for a couple of reasons: 1) The authorities didn't like the supernatural elements (Marichka appears as a ghost on occasion) or the portrayals of the villagers' religious life, 2) Parajanov insisted on making the film in Ukrainian and not dubbing it into Russian, 3) Parajanov was gay.
Enjoy!
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