I was introduced to Joachim Trier‘s films at a Scandinavian film festival a few years ago. Since then I have been following him and I try not to miss any of his films. Four years have passed between his previous movie – which I really liked – ‘The Worst Person in the World’ and ‘Sentimental Value‘ (original title is ‘Affeksjonverdi‘). When I heard that it had won the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, I knew that it must have been worth the wait. I have now seen the film and I was not disappointed. ‘Sentimental Value‘ is a beautiful and sensitive film, profound and well-constructed, about the art of making movies, about home and family and about old age. In the best tradition of quality Scandinavian films (and I am thinking especially of Ingmar Bergman) it asks questions about the place of art in today’s world and its power to heal personal traumas.
Gustav Borg is a great film director, but he has reached 70 years of age and has not made a feature film in 15 years. When his ex-wife dies, he returns to the house he left decades ago, a house that remained his property. On this occasion, he reunites with his two daughters, who are very different in destiny and character. Nora, a talented and devoted theater actress, is constantly struggling with stage fright and the uncertainties of an unfulfilled personal life. Agnes is a history researcher and seems happily married, living with her husband and a son who is turning ten. Gustav brings with him a film script. Like his previous success, perhaps his most famous film made many years ago, the subject is related to the family history, more precisely to his mother who committed suicide, possibly as a result of the trauma of detention and torture during the Nazi occupation. The director tries to offer the role to Nora, but she refuses. Is the father who abandoned his family and the two girls trying to win them back by joining his project? In Nora’s place, he casts Rachel, a young and talented American actress who comes from a very different film school. Will Gustav Borg make this film, perhaps his last major film? What impact will the film project have on the relationships in the family that seemed to have long been broken? What role does the family’s history and the house where several generations have lived, which Gustav wants to turn into a film set, play in all of this?
These are some of the questions that crossed my mind while watching. Other viewers will, of course, notice other details and ask themselves other questions. Not all of them will get explicit answers, and that’s good. Joachim Trier (who is also a co-writer of the script) has built four complex and real characters, whom the audience gets to know and whose problems they will understand and perhaps identify with some of them. The setting plays an important role. The house, perhaps typically Scandinavian, becomes a kind of small Hitchcockian mansion, where the lives and deaths of the family members unfold, and which gradually reveals some of its secrets. Stellan Skarsgård makes of Gustav another formidable role, one of those that propelled him among the leading actors of his generation in the world. Renate Reinsve, who had played the lead role in Joachim Trier‘s previous film, returns here as Nora and is excellent, as is Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, who plays Agnes, Nora’s sister. The hand of aces (three of them being she-aces) is completed by Elle Fanning, who plays the role of the young American star, excited to be cast in a film by a famous European director and experiencing the confrontation not only of two acting or cinema styles but also of two ways of seeing life. ‘Sentimental Value‘ is a film that allows for multiple interpretations and points of view. I recommend watching it and urge you to pay special attention to two scenes – the one that opens the film and the one that ends it. Through two subtle yet different procedures, Joachim Trier introduces us at the beginning into the setting in which the film’s story unfolds and extracts us from it throwing us back into the real world at the end. However, the characters and their problems will stay with us beyond the screening time.
The year was 1950 and film director Max Ophüls was returning to Europe. He had spent the decade of the 1940s in the United States, where between 1947 and 1949 he had made four films. He was returning to France, which had welcomed him in 1933 after the Nazis came to power and had granted him citizenship in 1938. He would live another seven years and complete four more films in France, but until 1957, when he died prematurely, he would never return to work in Germany. ‘La Ronde‘ represented his film of reunion with French cinema and European culture. I do not think the choice of subject was accidental. It is the screen adaptation of a play by Arthur Schnitzler, written in 1897, but which had been extremely controversial and censored and could not be staged before 1920, triggering scandals that even reached the courts. Posterity would be much more favorable to it, the play enjoying a growing international success and theatrical and cinematic remakes. In fact, this adaptation of Max Ophüls was also part of the relaunch of the play and the dramatic and cinematic formula invented by Schnitzler.
The way in which ‘La Ronde‘ is filmed and staged, as a fantasy in an explicitly theatrical setting, immediately reminded me of Wes Anderson’s recent films. The story also has a host (played by Anton Walbrook, an Austrian-born actor who had also fled Europe during the war) who introduces the audience to the story, connects the episodes and plays various secondary roles in the plot, accompanying it with an obsessive waltz that remains in the memory for many days. Each of the ten episodes features a couple of lovers and a more or less passionate relationship. One of the two will be in the next episode, creating thus a chain of connections that crosses social classes, material situations, power relations between men and women. A prostitute picks up a soldier, who in the next episode dances with a maid, who is seduced by the masters’ young son, who has a married woman mistress, who … and so on. The chain of relationships finally closes when the last man, an officer, wakes up in the bed of the prostitute from the first episode.
Each of the 10 episodes lasts less than 10 minutes, and obviously there is not much time to go into the depth of the characters’ psychology. The overall impression is about the whole, and it can be read as a gallant stroll or as a satirical commentary on male-female relationships and Viennese mores at the beginning of the 20th century. After all, each of the characters maintains relationships with at least two people of the opposite sex, so the censors had reason to be concerned. The atmosphere is erotically charged, even if sex is never explicitly shown on screen. Later versions of the play would try to delve deeper into the fabric of relationships and adapt them to contemporary times. I saw in Bucharest a stage version of David Hare’s ‘The Blue Room’, inspired by Arthur Schnitzler‘s play, which premiered in London in 1998, directed by Sam Mendes and starring Nicole Kidman. In Max Ophüls‘s 1950 version, the cast is impressive, and here I found the second common element with Wes Anderson’s films. The cast of ‘La Ronde‘ includes a handpicked selection of the most famous French actors of the mid-20th century, happy to be in the film, even for a few minutes. Among them: Simone Signoret, Danielle Darrieux, Serge Reggiani, Jean-Louis Barrault, Gérard Philipe. The fluency of the long-shot filming in sumptuous settings is also remarkable. The return of Max Ophüls leaves the feeling of a joy of the director’s reunion, after returning from exile, with a Europe that no longer existed except in memories and imagination.
When he wrote and directed ‘The Barefoot Contessa’ (1954), Joseph L. Mankiewicz was coming off the huge success of one of his previous films – ‘All About Eve’ (1950). That film depicted the twilight of a Broadway star’s career, and it is very possible that Mankiewicz wanted to make a kind of sequel focusing on the lives of Hollywood actresses. However, to fully understand the context and sources of inspiration for ‘The Barefoot Contessa‘, I think we need to refer to two other films also released in 1950: Billy Wilder’s ‘Sunset Blvd.’ and Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Rashomon’. From the former, I think Mankiewicz took on his extremely critical point of view towards the film industry and its patrons. From the latter, he was inspired in terms of narrative technique.
‘The Barefoot Contessa‘ begins at the funeral, in a torrential rain, of the film’s main heroine – actress Maria Vargas. Three men attending the funeral recall, in turn and alternately, episodes from her life, from her discovery in a restaurant in Madrid where she sang and danced, through the main episodes of her life as an actress in Hollywood and as a beautiful woman admired by the public and coveted by the rich men of the world, to the tragic end. The voice-over process, which I generally dislike, works very well here, because each of the three narrators presents his or her own personal perspective, well differentiated from the others. Each had meant something different in the heroine’s life, and the testimonies of the three fill in to a complete vision of the discovery, rise and fall of a woman who becomes, despite her modest origins, a screen diva, but is also a victim of the system that promoted her and especially of social prejudices.
The character of Maria Vargas deserves careful examination. Screenwriter Mankiewicz clearly started from the figure of Cinderella in the fairy tale, even making the metaphor explicit. The singer, who comes from a modest family and is also struck by the tragedy of her mother’s murder by her father, will spend her life searching for the right prince. She does so by moving from one of the world’s richest men to another – an American multi-millionaire and producer, a South American tycoon, an Italian count. All her choices prove to be catastrophic in one way or another. It is a critique of a world dominated by rich and powerful men, but perhaps also a Freudian reflection of the conflict with her mother, who had behaved like the evil stepmother in the fairy tale. Unfortunately, Ava Gardner does not rise to the complexity of the role in this film. She is beautiful and dignified, but not naive and is not believable as a victim. I can only do an exercise in imagination by recasting the young Sophia Loren (she was 21 at the time) in this role. Or Rita Hayworth, whose life inspired the screenwriter, who was offered the role but turned it down. Humphrey Bogart, on the other hand, is formidable in a more ‘soft’ role than the most famous other roles in his career, although the signs of the illness that would take him down three years later are already visible. The script is interesting not only because of the narrative structure that is influenced by Kurosawa but also because it is a film about the film industry, but without any scenes filmed on a set. Life sometimes imitates film, Bogart‘s character says at one point, but of course, it is about life on the screen. The ending is one of the memorable classic endings of Hollywood in the ’40s and ’50s. It is worth getting to it.
Articolul de astăzi se bazează pe o știre de la sfârșitul verii, care a trecut aproape neobservată în vârtejul de evenimente care constituie actualitatea noastră curentă. Pe 26 august a intrat în funcțiune Observatorul subteran de neutrini de la Jiangmen (JUNO) din China și a început activitatea științifică de colectare a datelor. Rezultatele inițiale ale testelor și primele date colectate arată că indicatorii-cheie de performanță au fost atinşi sau depășiți, permițând ca JUNO să abordeze una dintre principalele întrebări deschise ale acestui deceniu în fizica particulelor: ordonarea maselor neutrinilor, sau dacă a treia stare de masă (ν₃) este mai grea decât a doua (ν₂). Sună puțin chinezește? Să încercăm să traducem.
Inaugurarea acestui important obiectiv științific este un argument suplimentar al fenomenului de integrare și participare a Chinei în programele internaționale cele mai avansate de cercetare științifică. Semnificativ este faptul că este vorba despre un domeniu de vârf al cercetării fundamentale în fizică, iar China face eforturi vizibile pentru a se poziționa nu doar ca factor activ, ci și că lider al acestor programe. JUNO este un proiect de colaborare finanțat de instituții internaționale, finanțarea principală provenind din surse chineze, inclusiv Academia Chineză de Științe și diverse universități și instituții de cercetare chineze. Deși este implicată o expertiză internațională (peste 700 de cercetători din 74 de instituții din 17 țări și regiuni), construcția și majoritatea finanțării pentru proiectul de circa 2,2 miliarde yeni (aproximativ 330 de milioane de dolari americani) au aparținut Chinei. JUNO este, de altfel, o continuare a Experimentului cu neutrini din Reactorul Daya Bay, un proiect multinațional de fizică a particulelor care studiază neutrinii și în special oscilațiile neutrinilor, situat în sudul Chinei, la aproximativ 52 de kilometri nord-est de Hong Kong și 45 de kilometri est de Shenzhen. JUNO era inițial planificat să fie plasat în imediata apropiere, dar prezența deja a trei reactoare nucleare în regiune ar fi putut influența măsurătorile. Locația aleasă este îngropată la 700 m adâncime într-un munte și accesul este posibil cu un tren care călătorește zece minute. JUNO este plasat la 53 km distanță de două reactoare nucleare care emit particule ale căror măsurători comparative fac parte din procedura științifică aplicată de fizicieni.
Pentru a încercă să înțelegem importanta acestui program de cercetare, să recapitulam câteva noțiuni fundamentale ale fizicii. Particulele elementare sunt cărămizile de bază care alcătuiesc lumea materială. Ele sunt de 12 tipuri, inclusiv 6 quarci, 3 leptoni încărcați și 3 neutrini. Proprietățile și interacțiunile lor fundamentale sunt descrise de Modelul Standard al fizicii particulelor. Din anii ’50 încoace, 17 savanți care au adus contribuții legate de Modelul Standard au primit Premii Nobel. Cu toate acestea, Modelul Standard încă se confruntă cu două probleme importante: căutarea și confirmarea bosonului Higgs (i-am dedicat și acestuia un articol cu câțiva ani în urmă) și numeroase mistere legate de neutrini. Neutrinii există în trei forme cunoscute sub numele de electron, muon și tau. Ei iau naștere în urma reacțiilor nucleare care alimentează cu energie stelele (inclusiv Soarele), dar și centralele atomice. Sunt extrem de ușori, însă cu o masă diferită de zero, nu au sarcină electrică și rareori interacționează cu altceva. Asta este foarte important, deoarece înseamnă că fluxurile de neutrini se deplasează în mare parte nestingherite și invizibile printre stele, dar și prin corpurile solide opace. Savanții îi numesc în glumă ‘fantomele lumii particulelor elementare’. Pentru a-i observa, trebuie construite instalații speciale cum este uriașa sferă de sticlă acrilică transparentă cu diametrul de 35,4 metri a lui JUNO, care conține 20.000 de tone de lichid scintilator, înconjurată de o grindă din oțel inoxidabil care susține aproximativ 43.200 de tuburi fotomultiplicatoare.
Care este problema pe care vor să o rezolve oamenii de știință? Modelul Standard al fizicii particulelor, descrierea de referință a particulelor și forțelor cunoscute, una dintre cele mai reușite idei științifice din toate timpurile, prezice că neutrinii nu ar trebui să aibă nicio masă. Totuși, acest lucru este în contradicție cu ceea ce au observat fizicienii în realitate. Acum aproximativ 30 de ani, oamenii de știință care lucrau la Super-Kamiokande (sau Super-K), un observator de neutrini din Japonia, situat într-o mină la 1.000 metri adâncime, au observat ceva ciudat. În timp ce numărul de neutrini muonici care soseau la detectorii săi de sus (formați prin coliziunea razelor cosmice de înaltă energie cu atomii din atmosfera superioară a Pământului) era în conformitate cu predicțiile, numărul de neutrini care veneau de jos (formați prin aceleași procese în atmosferă de cealaltă parte a planetei și apoi călătorind prin miezul Pământului) era prea mic. Aceste observații i-au condus pe oamenii de știință la concluzia că neutrinii trebuie să se transforme dintr-o formă (stare de masă) în alta pe măsură ce călătoresc prin spațiu. Dar o astfel de „oscilație” a stărilor, după cum o numesc fizicienii, ar fi posibilă doar dacă neutrinii ar avea masă. O înțelegere mai profundă a maselor neutrinilor este esențială pentru un Model Standard îmbunătățit. Prin urmare, unul dintre obiectivele JUNO va fi acela de a stabili care neutrino este cel mai greu și care este cel mai ușor. Sarcina aparatelor din programul JUNO va fi de a număra neutrinii care sosesc de la cele doua centrale nucleare, fiecare situată la 53 km de observator. Cu aproximativ 700 de metri de munte de granit deasupra, detectorul este bine izolat împotriva razelor cosmice, particule încărcate din spațiu, extrem de pline de energie, care altfel ar putea interfera cu măsurătorile sale primare. Oamenii de știință știu câți neutrini de un anumit tip sunt produși la centralele nucleare. Cei care ajung la JUNO reprezintă, prin urmare, fracțiunea care nu și-a schimbat forma pe parcurs. Aceasta va oferi o măsură a frecvenței la care are loc oscilația. Valoarea aceasta depinde de masele diferite ale fiecăreia dintre cele trei categorii de neutrini. Wang Yifang, cercetătorul principal al observatorului și directorul Institutului de Fizică a Energiilor Înalte din cadrul Academiei Chineze de Științe, estimează că procedura va dura aproximativ șase ani.
De ce este important? În primul rând, de rezultatele proiectului JUNO și de perfecționarea Modelului Standard este legată soluționarea unui mister fundamental al structurii Universului. Modelul Standard afirmă că toate particulele au echivalente de antimaterie, care au masă identică, dar sarcină electrică opusă. Unele particule, cum ar fi fotonul, sunt propriile lor antiparticule. Ele poarta numele de ‘particule Majorana’, după numele savantului italian Ettore Majorana, care a emis ipoteza existenței lor în 1937. Un grup de propuneri de extindere a modelului sugerează că acesta ar putea fi cazul și pentru neutrini. Pentru a testa dacă neutrinii și antineutrinii sunt într-adevăr identici, fizicienii trebuie să studieze izotopii radioactivi ai unor elemente precum calciul și germaniul. Uneori, aceste elemente vor emite doi electroni și doi antineutrini atunci când suferă o dezintegrare radioactivă. Dacă neutrinii sunt într-adevăr propriile lor antiparticule, atunci oamenii de știință ar trebui, foarte rar, să observe o versiune a acestui proces în care nu se emit deloc antineutrini. Există teorii încă neverificate experimental despre așa-numitul „mecanism de balansoar”, în care neutrinii ar putea avea mase minuscule dacă ar fi conectați și la alți neutrini, încă nedetectați, cu mase mult mai mari. Neutrinii mai grei ar putea fi chiar candidați pentru structura materiei întunecate, un alt fenomen fizic misterios care până acum nu a putut fi observat ci doar dedus prin efectul său asupra mediului înconjurător. De asemenea, cercetători asociați proiectului JUNO vor caută neutrini în stelele care explodează, cunoscute sub numele de supernove. Deoarece neutrinii trec prin materie într-un mod în care lumina nu o poate face, aceștia pot părăsi acele stele și pot ajunge pe Pământ înainte ca explozia propriu-zisă să devină vizibilă. Detectarea lor le va oferi astronomilor un răgaz pentru a-și orienta corect telescoapele, astfel încât să poată apoi observa exploziile în acțiune și, astfel, valida teoriile cosmogonice sau descoperi noi informații legate de istoria Universului. Mai aproape de noi este utilizarea neutrinilor că sonde. JUNO vă căuta, de exemplu, neutrini din adâncurile Pământului, ceea ce va oferi informații despre distribuția elementelor radioactive în manta și scoarță. Ținând cont că limitele resurselor materiale și energetice ale omenirii vor fi foarte curând atinse, o astfel de metodologie ar putea deveni esențială progresului tehnologic și economic.
Cu reactorul JUNO, China a construit cel mai mare reactor de acest fel din lume și și-a asumat rolul de lider al programelor științifice asociate. În prezent, este un proiect sponsorizat de Institutul de Fizică a Energiilor Înalte al Academiei Chineze de Științe. JUNO este conceput pentru o durată de viață științifică de până la 30 de ani, cu o cale credibilă de modernizare către o cercetare de vârf la nivel mondial a dezintegrării duble beta fără neutrini. O astfel de modernizare ar investiga scara absolută a masei neutrinilor și ar testa dacă neutrinii sunt particule Majorana, abordând întrebări fundamentale care acoperă fizica particulelor, astrofizica și cosmologia și modelând profund înțelegerea noastră asupra Universului. Mai avem de așteptat doar câteva decenii.
Articolul a fost publicat inițial în revista de cultură ‘Literatura de Azi’
Diane Kurys, the director and co-writer of the film ‘Après l’amour‘ (or ‘Love after Love‘ in the English distribution) is one of the few woman filmmakers who has managed to make a name for herself and build a career and her own artistic identity in French cinema. The only one who surpasses her in quality and fame is – in my opinion – Agnès Varda. Feminine themes, portraits of contemporary women and stories about their destinies in today’s world dominate the filmography of both directors. ‘Après l’amour‘ is a story about a woman and her love relationships in Paris in the 1990s. The film is built around Isabelle Huppert, perhaps even written for her. The actress creates a solid and interesting role, but her presence is just one of the reasons why ‘Après l’amour‘ is worth watching or rewatching.
Lola is a writer. The story in the film takes place between her birthday parties #35 and #36. She has published a novel inspired by her own life, is struggling to write the second one and is not really succeeding. The reason may be that her own love life – her main source of inspiration – is going through a crisis. She is involved in two romantic relationships at the same time and does not want to decide on one of them. Determined to remain single and not have children, she has been since she was a teenager in a long-term relationship with the architect David, who in turn has a family and two children. We are told that this type of polygamy is (was?) very common in Paris. Lola also meets and falls in love with Tom, a successful musician, handsome and somewhat younger man. This relationship seems more physical and passionate, although Tom is also married and has two children. Both relationships become complicated and Lola will have to do what she had always postponed or thought she would never have to do – make decisions about where her life is going.
This is one of the films that marks the transition of the formidable actress that is Isabelle Huppert from the roles of her youth to the much more complex and often much darker ones of the second part of her career. I really liked the way she approached the character of Lola in ‘Après l’amour‘. Perfect as always in playing the role of a woman who internalizes her feelings, Isabelle Huppert exposes in this film a personal trait rarely found in her characters – a vulnerability full of feminine sensitivity, which will also dominate the postponements and choices that she will make in the end. The roles of the two men in her life are played by Bernard Giraudeau and Hippolyte Girardot, and in two secondary roles appear a young Yvan Attal, then at the beginning of his career, and the Portuguese actress Lio, beautiful and talented and who I think deserved a more visible career on the screens. Diane Kurys‘ direction is discreet and balanced, the female perspective is visible through its psychological depth, without being strident. ‘Après l’amour‘ is a film that has stood the test of time over three decades since its creation.
The most appropriate way to honor the memory of a filmmaker or actor who is no longer with us is to see or re-watch their films. ‘The Way We Were‘ from 1973 is one of the films that consolidated Robert Redford‘s position as a top actor and a success with the public in the generation that conquered the screens in the late ’60s and early ’70s. It is also one of his first complex roles, through which he tries to overcome the limits of the attractive young man typology, being cast in the film directed by Sydney Pollack, written by Arthur Laurents and based on a book by him and having Francis Ford Coppola as co-writer. The major challenge was the fact that his partner in this film was Barbra Streisand, an actress with a unique personality and an expressive power that risks shadowing any other actor or character with whom she happens to be in the same frame. What resulted was a meeting between two great actors that became a Hollywood legend from the day it premiered and has remained so for more than half a century.
‘The Way We Were‘ oscillates between being a romantic story turned into a drama about sentimental relationships and a political drama set in the American intellectual and cinematic milieu between the late 1930s and the early 1950s. The first meeting between the two heroes takes place during their college years. Katie Moroski is a politically engaged student, a far-left activist in the years before World War II. Hubbell Gardiner is a talented novelist, but also the type of boy without material worries, eager to live his life and taking everything easy. Katie falls in love with Hubbell, but it will be many years before their love will materialize, in the final year of the war. Everything seems to separate them. She is Jewish and politically involved, interesting but not beautiful according to the canons, takes everything seriously, maybe even too seriously, including love. He is handsome as an icon, comes from the WASP aristocracy, has no firm political beliefs, just wants to succeed in his career and live well in the American style. Love seems to overcome any obstacles for a moment, including an obvious mismatch that even the two are very aware of. Everything seems to go OK for a while, until history catches up with them.
Robert Redford makes visible efforts in this film to give consistency and depth to the character. He succeeds about 90%, in my opinion. Ryan O’Neal was originally proposed to play Hubbell Gardiner, he being at that time (after ‘Love Story’) more famous and popular. That casting did not work out, and then Laurents challenged and convinced Redford to take the role. Laurents and Pollack wanted the film to be much more political, but several test screenings with the audience convinced them to eliminate many of the scenes that were still too critical of 1950s Hollywood. The evolution of Katie and Hubbell’s relationship, however, is also linked to what was happening in the studios under the terror of ideological purges, and the result was that the romantic story doesn’t really hold up either. What remains are the masterful performances of the two main actors and the entire cast, including a very young James Woods, who had debuted a year earlier in an Elia Kazan film. After all, ‘The Way We Were‘ is still Barbra Streisand‘s film. It’s fascinating to see her or see her again after half a century, and the magnetism of the love between the two on screen remains intact. Perhaps love wins it all in the end.
In 1965, the year he filmed and released ‘Giulietta degli spiriti‘, Federico Fellini had long since ended his neorealist period and had made two of his best-known (perhaps even his best) films – ‘La dolce vita’ and ‘8 1/2’. His biographers claim that his relationship with his wife and muse (at least from the first part of his career) – Giulietta Masina – was in a complicated phase. The formidable actress had not been cast in either of the two previous great successes. ‘Giulietta degli spiriti‘ would therefore have been a kind of compensation because it gave Giulietta Masina a major role again and perhaps also a kind of act of penance, if not conjugal at least artistic, because unlike the previous films, the perspective and attitude are intended to be explicitly feminist. It was also Fellini‘s first color film. The Italian director would from then on add a dimension to his visual universe. The result is a film that is very Fellini-esque in appearance, but not as coherent and expressive as the best films that preceded it. Had the decline begun, which would be long and marked by a few significant films, but a decline nonetheless?
The heroine of the film is also called Giuletta. She is a rich woman, one of those who have all the money and all the time in the world at her disposal. She is over 40, while her husband, Giorgio, seems to be over 50. He is a very busy man, almost always away from home, with good excuses for absenting nights and days and forgetting his wife’s birthday. For the woman with big eyes and a candid face, Giorgio is the love of her life and perhaps the only man she has ever known. Giuletta seems a little different from her surroundings, conservative in her clothing, reluctant in assuming the eccentric and decadent behaviors of her friends or her new neighbor, a blonde and exuberant woman. However, she believes in spirits, which she invokes in seances or visits all kinds of gurus who sell advice on spiritualistic debauchery. When she has reason to suspect that Giorgio is cheating on her, she seeks advice and refuge in this alternative world.
The character of Giuletta is one of the most interesting ones created by Fellini. Practically, everything we see on screen is the reflection of her visions, dreams, memories, and experiences. Reality, nightmares, and memory meet in a fantastic and colorful world, haunted by spirits and the anxieties of the woman whose real universe is about to fall apart. But is it really a feminist film? The vision of women’s feelings is Fellini‘s – surrealist, a tribute to psychoanalysis, with a subliminal social commentary. Giuletta is obviously unhappy, but is she at least satisfied with her own decisions? Actress Giulietta Masina delivers a performance that is even deeper and more sincere in this film than in any of her other films. We can admire Fellini‘s unbridled visual imagination, the fantasy and nightmare universe he creates around his heroine, identify themes and quotes from his other films and enjoy Nino Rota‘s music, but this film is more than everything else Giulietta Masina‘s film. The sadness in the eyes of the woman who has passed young age and is about to lose her love, that is, her world, will haunt us for a long time.
If you like detective novels and the Scandinavian movies inspired by these novels and you also appreciate British television series, but especially if you like intelligent films with interesting heroes, then you will probably want to watch ‘Annika‘. It is a British mini-series (two seasons of six episodes, at least so far) whose action takes place in Scotland, more precisely in Glasgow and on the land and by the water surrounding this city. The atmosphere and colors of the waters and the sky seem imported from Scandinavian films, and the main heroine who gives the series its name is a police inspector of Norwegian origin newly appointed head of a team in the city’s maritime criminal police. In addition, she is also a literature lover and each episode is related to a famous literary work, from Scandinavian legends, through Ibsen’s theater to Aeschylus’ tragedies.
‘Annika‘ uses the recipe for success of police series in which the private lives of the police officers occupy an equally important place as the enigmas they have to solve. Police inspector Annika Strandhed is Norwegian by origin and raises Morgan, her 15-year-old daughter, alone. Almost inevitably, Morgan will have problems at school and will go through the turmoils of adolescence, the mother will not have enough time to take care of her, and the phones related to her daughter’s problems will ring at the most inopportune moments. In addition, like any single woman in her 40s or 50s, obsessed with her profession, intelligent and quite beautiful, she cannot avoid her own sentimental adventures. The team under her command is multi-ethnic: a policeman with a family of Caribbean origin, a policewoman with a family of Asian origin and a local policeman who had dreamed of her job before Annika landed as their boss. In addition to all this, at least one body will surface in each episode on the shores of the Clyde maritime lake or river. The police team will solve the cases while also dealing with their own personal problems.
All of these may seem quite banal and viewers may have the feeling that they have seen it before in other places. What saves the show is the quality of the writing and acting. The series is created by Nick Walker and is based on a radio series that had been successful a few years before. The plots are interesting, the dialogues flow naturally, the solutions to the puzzles have logic. The main role is played by Nicola Walker, an actress specialized in television, who is, I read, in her eighth role as a policewoman in a British series. You can feel the experience, humor and control of the means of expression. In addition, Nick Walker adds a sympathetic trick, with the goal of erasing the conventional distance between the heroes and the viewers. From time to time, the main actress looks directly at the camera and comments on the situations she finds herself in or consults with the viewers, making them share her thoughts. The procedure is interesting, breaks the narrative routine without disturbing and adds humor. The two seasons of ‘Annika‘ were created and broadcast in 2021 and 2023. I have only seen the first one, for now. I understand that there are no new episodes planned. What a shame!
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a film with such a strong visual impact as Hideo Sekigawa‘s ‘Hiroshima‘. I have no hesitation in saying that, at least in my experience, what this Japanese director, whom I didn’t know at all, made in 1953 comes close in terms of expressiveness of images to the masterpieces of Eisenstein and Fritz Lang or to the films of his contemporaries, the masters of Italian neo-realism. The film was made only eight years after the nuclear explosion in Hiroshima and its production has a specific context that also explains the rhetoric of the message, which was controversial at the time and remains open to debates today, due to the different historical perspectives of the event it describes. ‘Hiroshima‘ was not financed by the major studios but by the Japanese teachers’ union of the time and thousands of extras, many of them survivors of the nuclear explosion, participated voluntarily in its making. It is a film that deserves to be seen both as a historical document and as a document of the way history is reflected in the art of cinema.
The film is organized in two temporal planes that also delimit two cinematic styles. The story begins in 1953, describing a society that tries to heal its wounds and understand what happened, by using the micro-universe of a school class. The children were old enough eight years before to remember what they went through. They are divided into two distinct groups, as the entire Japanese society of that time was probably divided. Some of them carry the traumas in their bodies and souls and a few of those are affected by the ‘atomic disease’, that is, the effects of radiation. Others try to forget, leave the past behind, and continue with their lives. The narrative then returns to August 5-6, 1945, on the eve and the day of the nuclear attack. The quiet of the sunny day is interrupted by the hum of an airplane, the alarm doesn’t even sound, a blinding light bursts out, and hell on earth breaks loose. The 15-20 minutes that follow are among the most dramatic ever created in world cinema. I’ve seen countless apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic films, but what Hideo Sekigawa and his team achieved 72 years ago not only anticipates, but equals and surpasses in expressiveness and realism almost everything that followed. The use of black and white film accentuates the feeling of immersion in history and horror. In all this nightmarish chaos, a few characters begin to stand out, whose stories are followed when, towards the end, the film returns to the present day of 1953, following their destinies.
The political commentary is engaged and critical, and it is remarkable that it does not only refer to those who triggered the disaster but also to the deeper causes of the conflict – Japanese militarism and the blind veneration of the imperial institution. The government rhetoric is ridiculous and the appeal to patriotism in moments of catastrophe seems pathetic. A meeting of the governors is more concerned with the propagandistic denial of the disaster than with recognizing reality and organizing aid for the survivors. The ceremonies organized at the site of the bomb with symbolic monuments and pacifist slogans seem devoid of content in the absence of popular engagement. But history was only just beginning to be written, the debate remains open and the danger of atomic apocalypse has not been eradicated. I think Sekigawa‘s ‘Hiroshima‘ could be screened together with Christopher Nolan’s recent and much-awarded ‘Oppenheimer’. They are two very good films that depict the two sides of the event that changed the course of history.
‘Dinți de lapte‘ (‘Milk Teeth‘) is, in its way, a unique film. It is the second auteur film (written and directed) by Mihai Mincan and made as a co-production with international financing and participation. This time, unlike his debut film, the story takes place in Romania, during a critical period of radical change, the year 1989 and the beginning of 1990. It is not new territory for Romanian cinema, many of the films of the Romanian New Wave addressed those months in which the fate of Romania took a radically different turn after half a century that seemed to last an eternity. What is special in Mihai Mincan‘s new film is the perspective from which the change is perceived – through the eyes, soul and dreams of a 10-year-old girl who lives her childhood (as childhood was lived in the final years of the dictatorship) and goes through a traumatic event and its consequences.
In the opening scene of the film, we see a pair of hands cracking nuts, collecting the kernels in a bowl and throwing the shells in a trash can. The second scene begins from a ‘bird’s eye’ perspective to descend into a playground, actually a vacant space between ugly apartment blocks where several children are playing. One of them is Maria. Her sister passes by with a trash can in her hand, we understand that it contains the shells from the previous scene. She exits the frame, the film, perhaps from life. The elder sister disappears, perhaps kidnapped by men in a black car that some witnesses say they saw, but not the viewers. The black cars were used by the authorities and the privileged of the regime. The absence of the missing girl dominates the film. The militia investigates the parents, but the routine of inefficiency and the distrust between the people and the system’s officials can also be felt. Maria does her own investigation and explores, together with two other children, an abandoned industrial hall where a vagrant is sheltering. The girl matures in the atmosphere of resignation and depression that characterizes people’s lives, she feels guilty for the disappearance of her sister (in fact, it was her turn to throw out the garbage). The childhood ceremonies invented by the system (admission in the pioneers’ organization) cannot fill her life devoid of toys and hope. Reality and dreams (more like nightmares) are difficult to delimit. The little girl also witnesses the breakup of her family. The father, who internalizes his pain by trying to focus his affection on his remaining daughter, leaves the mother who had continued her obsessively but in vain searches, desperate and frustrated by the apathy of the authorities. A revolution is happening all around, but we do not see it at all in the lives of the heroes. The spring of ’90, the first in freedom, finds the family divided and equally devoid of hope.
Young actress Emma Ioana Mogos plays the role of the little girl exceptionally well, and part of the credit goes, of course, to the director. She is present even when we don’t see her, because the camera takes over her role, either in reality or in imagination or dreams. George Chiper‘s camera is held in the hand in most scenes, as in amateur films, emphasizing the atmosphere of authenticity, the heroine’s perspective and the general state of nervousness and psychological pressure. The reconstruction of the gray and horizonless atmosphere of the late 1980s is very precise with the ugliness of the urban and industrial landscapes and the ridiculous school uniforms with their humiliating personal numbers visibly sewn. I noticed a few inaccurate details – closing balconies was prohibited in the last decade of the dictatorship, insulated glazing was not yet practiced, also I don’t think DNA tests were practiced by the Romanian militia in the 1980s -, these could have been avoided, but probably some of the filmmakers were not born then. In a way, ‘Dinți de lapte‘ feels like it comes too late. It could have been made 15 or 20 years ago. But it has a quality and consistency in style that gives me a lot of hope and confidence in what Mihai Mincan can do. I look forward to his next films with great interest.
