Abigail Alvarez

Another sunday spent among the rude crowds that pest Camden town on weekends. It hasn't been a very exciting week , if i can call it like that , apart from the loss of one of the most important writers in Hollywood, John Hugues, my usual complaints about my PC being too slow, and five days of drinking , a birthday , insomnia and long walks around covent garden trying to find new ways to get to an unknown and not predestined direction, seem to be unimportant when I think about it, oh and almost forgot a new green velvet jacket!!!!

FILM RECCOMENDATIONS

Oh well this week , I havent watched that much films , but I would pick a few and would talk briefly about them.

First of all , before I get on to the talk about Bergman .I'm almost, almost done with Freya and six days I finally "finished" writing the final part, that it would still be subject to changes, as I'm not that much of a writer , so obviously it's not finished entirely, coz I need an extra help.

Freya and six days is about two strangers who meet one night in the platform of an underground/metro station and the subsequent 6 days after their unsual meeting that would take them to change their lives forever, that if the term forever could be applied to it.

Wild Strawberries (Bergman , 1957)

There's always a day , yeah a special day on which we sit down and think back and try to reflect on our lives , so we can mend our ways and start a new journey . However as we start this new journey the past is forgotten and the scars are still visible, maybe specially the ones we can see. It is in this way that the special day comes for Professor Borg , a day where dreams bring the thought of mortality , vulnerability and the forgotten past make him reflect and try to mend everything that he'd already built during his lifetime.Every character present that day , are demons and angels reminiscent of his past that led him to renew his spirit towards the end and start a new beginning.In addition ,as many say , Borg might be seen as an alter ego for Bergman , aged 39 , when he shot the film. The film is a homage to the human spirit , second chances and the scars that cant be simply ignored, nevertheless be transformed into memories that make us  get thorugh the new journey and never go back where we were before. I think the first dream sequence is one of the most powerful ones , when a man confronts his mortality , being dead and alive,and it somehow reminded me of Un chien Andalou (Bunuel , 1929). I love the simplicity of the film , it creates a sense of sweetness sometimes, specially when Borg narrates, because he finally sees what he didn't see before , and how the surreal and reality are divided and how  that division is merged together in the film , just like life itself.

Water drops on burning rocks -Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes (Ozon , France,2002)

A witty comedy in which you don't actually laugh , but you recognise the bare , naked and painful truth about desire , jealousy, with cruel characters, emotional mood swings and the coldness and naivety of not having lived enough to experience, and this is what I like , so Fassbinderian, so German!!! , but with a great film style that differs so much from what we would have seen if this script would have been shot in the 70's .Water drops on burning rocks is written by Fassbinder and filmed with a clean faithfullness to the style of the German director, Ozon creates a perfect environment, for a cold and gruelling atmosphere, following the trend of a Sirkean psychological melodrama , in which the mise-en-scene tells more about the characters than the dialogues themselves, however , as i must say , the french filmmaker makes the film so entertaining and less painful to watch with the use of music contrasting the dull and dreary atmosphere of Fassbinder .Additionally, I don't know why or maybe I do , but I've always seen Ozon , since I watched 8 women (2002), in the same trend as Almodovar and obviously Fassbinder , nevertheless I think his beautiful and elegant , chick style clearly rivals the one from Almodovar, Ozon for me is the French Sirk of our times ,(well not completely though, so don't judge me for saying this), a Fassbinder with class , Unlike Fassbinder , Ozon creates characters that can be ironic and extremely funny and simpathetic at times . Water... might not be the best film by Ozon , but certainly very , very entertaining , I still think Fassbinder would have liked it.

Persona (Bergman ,1966)

This film is visually striking and confusing sometimes, for the first 30 minutes , I found myself going back to what had happened previously , because I didn't quite get it at times until I actually watched the whole film , although i think it deserves a second viewing , because there are still some unclear things to me.Nevertheless I think that was Bergman's purpose to challenge the viewer to ask himself/herself questions about personal identity , plus to what extent an artist could go to portray/express something.I can't say I really like it ,,as I was confused , but I would say it's one of the best films I've seen and probably my favourite Bergman film.

Plata Quemada=Burning money(Marcelo Pineyros,Argentina,2000)

Yeah I secretly enjoy love stories and specially the ones that involve moody characters , in which a partner always suffers more than the other . This film is about two gangsters, -yeah the tough and cold murderers- who are "business" partners and also share an intense and twisted love for each other.The film is a shakespearan tragedy with an Argentinian touch,(tears, passion , hatred , desire, well just like Tango) visually stunning with the cinematography of Alfredo Mayo .The love they share seems to opaque the fact that they are murderers and deserve to be punished for what they have done.Incredibly being a love story there aren't scenes of sexual nature between the two lovers , but the film is highly erotic and the viewer understands the intense love and passion both main protagonists feel for each other.

Un Homme Perdu, (Danielle Arbid,France,2007,)

I watched this film sometime ago , but as I've been listening to Explosions of the sky recently , it reminded about the film as there are a few songs by them in the musical encore of the film. Yeah a photographer trying to find himself in a foreign country , after all a story of an artist finding himself.Thomas Kore travels around Lebanon, a foreign country where he doesn't speak the language and encounters a mistery man that leads him to face experiences and subsequently be the main subject for his work given to the vanishing of a man seventeen years ago, that appears to be this mystery man.The film is great , it's a simple story , not perfectly engaged in the end(in my opinion) but with pretty good shots and some type of drama that's been made to remember an audience , who we are as humans and how we can lose ourselves and lose our identity and transform into a different person.

well I also watched The Ugly Truth , but I'll talk about it later , C'mon we all enjoy a shitty romantic comedy from time to time , don't we? and that's how my week ended up .I hope I can tell you more exciting stories, although I don't think I can , as I've been a workaholic lately. I finally got the DVD of Koktebel , a film I've been wanting to see for a few days, and can't wait for the Pasolini experience.