NORTH-ICE-SNOWLAND

Last work of Bergman, but he made several more for TV.

Excellent. One of the most important works of Lars von Trier.

Another double written film. Again and again. Flixster needs a person to delete them.

http://virtual.finland.fi/netcomm/news/showarticle.asp?intNWSAID=26197

Filmed in France with French dialogue ? even from the Finnish members of the cast - La Vie de Bohème (The Bohemian Life) would seem to be aiming to be a reasonably faithful adaptation of Henry Murger?s novel, the original source of Puccini?s famous opera La Bohème. But for the character names and their social status as bohemian artists living hand-to-mouth however, Kaurismäki?s modern-day version bears almost no resemblance to either the novel or the opera in its situations or characterisation. Stripped back to its core elements though, its view of marginalised people struggling to live their lives in the manner they choose and find true love against the odds, is at the heart of the piece as it is in much of Kaurismäki?s work.

Kaurismäki regular Matti Pellonpää is the film?s Rodolfo, an illegal Albanian immigrant in Paris who is struggling to make ends meet as a painter. Between himself, his friend Marcel (André Wilms), a struggling writer and Schaunard (Kari Väänänen), an impoverished musician, they manage to get the occasional commission to support each other through the difficult periods. Rodolfo, a romantic who falls in love easily, has met Mimi (Evelyne Didi), a girl just arrived in the city from the provinces, who has found work in a Tobacconists. Fate, misfortune and poverty however conspire to keep them apart.

?I love you, but life is difficult? Mimi tells Rodolfo with typical Kaurismäkian concision and matter-of-factness at one point in the film, and essentially that sums up the essence and commonality of La Vie de Bohème with its source material. In the modern day world, Mimi is not dying of consumption, Rodolfo is a painter rather than a poet (although curiously, in the one scene barring the finale that is in any way close to the original, the artist drags out some old poetry he has written to burn on the fire when he and Mimi can no longer afford to heat their room), but there are other factors like illegal immigration that place obstacles in their way.

I?m not convinced that this achieves anything great ? neither illuminating the themes of the source material nor adding anything particularly new to the director?s oeuvre. Although the Finnish members of the cast acquit themselves well in French, it?s less clear why the director has chosen to shoot the film in France or how it relates to the essential Finnish character of his other works, and it ends up coming across feeling lifeless rather than droll. Murger?s original novel was based on the author?s own personal experiences with the Bohemian life of Paris in the mid-1800s and rather than recount those, it would appear that Kaurismäki perhaps examines how the themes that arise there relate to his own life experiences. In this respect at least La Vie de Bohème remains timeless and universal.

Without naming the greyish, ghoulish, dull city, one evening a series of absurd occurrences take place there: an uncaring boss , while lying in a gym's tanning machine, orders his servile chief executive to downsize and sack a longtime obedient clerk as redundant, who when fired can't accept his misfortune and reacts by degrading himself; a lost foreigner is violently beaten by passing young thugs just for asking where to locate someone, as the bystanders on a busy street just watch without helping; a magician makes a critical error by sawing deeply into the stomach of an audience volunteer in his sawing-a-man-in-half act; and, the town for no explainable reason comes to a grinding halt in a massive traffic jam and is also experiencing a catastrophic crash in the stock market signaling the possible end to world capitalism.

The main character is a portly, elderly, tired furniture showroom owner Kalle , who has snapped without cause and burned down his business to collect the insurance money. He's despondent and still walks around with his face covered in soot, as he meets his younger struggling son Stefan in an empty restaurant. He's mainly despondent because his older son Tomas wrote poetry until he went nuts and is now catatonic in an mental institution, where he visits and goes berserk because Tomas just stares without recognizing him or saying anything.

There are a few more absurdly comical vignettes. The most striking is a visit by uniformed soldiers to a former army general they served under, who is celebrating his 100th birthday in a luxury nursery home. The frail old timer is sitting up in a hospital crib with a bedpan under him as if imprisoned, while the doctors are expounding to the nurses about his enormous wealth. When a speech is delivered the senile general gives his best wishes to Hermann Göring and offers a Nazi salute. In another scene meant to disgrace the main character even more so, Kalle encounters a former business acquaintance, Sven, in the form of the 'walking dead'?a suicide from whom he borrowed money-- and in a conversation, he relays that he's really glad he's dead because he doesn't have to repay him. Perhaps the film's signature vignette, where it brings despair to the fullest, involves some corporate bigwigs dressed in robes who decide that the way to save themselves and their world of capitalism is by going through a religious-like sacrifice of a young woman. Afterward they sourly meet at the Grand Hotel content to tell themselves they did everything they could to save the world, even offering a ritualisitic sacrifice of the younger generation.

The film argues that Western civilizations' hopes are derived from its economic system and not from its religious beliefs, and if that system failed its citizens they would be left without hope. It's a strangely amusing film and offers to the willing viewer a slice of absurdist Nordic surrealism. Its main problem is that it can't sustain its gimmicky idea throughout, and the 40 or so vignettes all lead to the same kind of apocalyptic insanity and to a sophomoric kind of Beckett-like exchange over humiliation. The film can be best judged in how provoked the viewer was by it as a genuine oddity. Though I didn't find it a masterpiece, I was more than delighted with its comical pronouncements and its overall effect. By DENNIS SCHWARTZ.

http://www.royandersson.com/en/index.htm

Cunning, clevar and intellectual.

A family tragedy from DENMARK. World is full of tragedy. We have to confront of it. T. Vinterberg is disclosing one of them. What is yours ?

http://www.dogme95.dk/celebration/

Dogme 12.

One of the best Danish films I have ever seen.

Changing destiny of her son from dark to light when there is no chance for her-self.

I see some people are not able to read this film when they have no-problem with their eyes.

62nd Cannes Film Festival.

Lars von Trier is re-establishing his own and private 16th century. Indicating burned virgins as a witch by religeous barons of the Middle Age, when Nature was the church of Satan and three beggars appeared for pain, despair and grief, life will be re-started. Don't scare it. Just lie down on the grasses with new epilogue. Dedicated to Andrey Arsenyeviç Tarkovski .

In the review for Sara Johnsen's understated and intelligently realized debut feature Kissed by Winter, Mode Steinkjer writes, "The last part of the film's key moments are accompanied by Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah sung by Jeff Buckley in his version that is both beautiful and atmospheric. For me the song works to elevate the drama because the connection is unconsciously linked to Buckey's own fate". This insightful association does, indeed, reside at the core of the film, as the emotional trajectories of three families converge within the arc of an unexpected - though perhaps, not entirely unforeseen - tragedy and its ensuing repercussions in a small, provincial town in Norway: a country doctor, Victoria (Anika Hallin), who recently separated from her husband (Göran Ragnerstam) and the painful memories of her life in Oslo in order to start over, a snow plough driver, Kaj (Kristoffer Joner) who painstakingly built a dream home for his wife only to be abandoned by her, and a stern and devout Iranian immigrant couple, (Michalis Koutsogiannakis and Mina Azarian) whose troubled, missing son Darjosh (Jade Francis Haj) was found dead on the side of a snow embankment without shoes and curiously marked by a series of puncture wounds on the soles of his feet. Unfolding as a seeming whodunit mystery, the film is, instead, a muted, yet incisive portrait of the underlying grief, guilt, pain, and internalized, misdirected trauma felt by the characters as they struggle to come to terms with their own insensitivity (or more appropriately, obliviousness) and sense of moral culpability in the tragedy of a young man's death. Filmmaker Johnsen demonstrates a natural ability to convey the gentle humor of, and quiet affection for, her endearing, but emotionally isolated characters, a compassion that is exquisitely captured in the remarkably rendered performance by Swedish actress Anika Hallin (who remarked during the Q&A that her acting career had, up to this point, been mostly playing the role of law enforcement officials in crime dramas).