Thelma

Bird Processor

Thelma
Norway/France/Denmark/Sweden 2017
Directed by Joachim Trier
Thunderbird Releasing Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Very marginal spoilers.

This is the first film I’ve seen by Joachim Trier and one I desperately wanted to catch at the 2017 London Film Festival (probably the best year they’ve had for that festival in quite some time). Alas, the scheduling combined with my personal budget for tickets meant that I had to forego seeing this one and, barring a proper cinema release over here in the UK, I’m finally having to catch up to it on Blu Ray.

Thelma is a great little movie which is, in some ways, bound to promote comparisons to the early cinema of David Cronenberg but actually, apart from the themes involved and a certain penchant for using muted colours and whites a lot in the palette, there isn’t all that much similarity there, truth be told.

The film tells the story of the titular character and when we first meet her, in one of a few flashbacks over the movie that fill in gaps about the character which she herself is either oblivious to or has been suppressing until each flashback comes, she is a little girl of maybe six years old. The film starts off with her and her father (played by Henrik Rafaelsen) walking on some snowy terrain and we at first approach them in almost an extreme long shot. The father takes the girl into the forest to help him to hunt deer, or so it seems but, as she stands slightly to the side and in front of her father as he lines his sights up on the deer, she is completely unaware that her father has turned the rifle to aim it directly at her head. After a while he gives up on his idea of shooting his child and the deer is startled and scampers away, making Thelma turn to her father but still completely oblivious as to what he almost just did. This introduction to her father and his, as it turns out, deeply religious relationship with his daughter, immediately alerts the audience to the fact that there’s something very wrong, or at least different, with Thelma.

Cut to 12 or so years later and Thelma (played brilliantly by Eili Harboe) has just moved out from living with her parents and is studying biology at University. We have all the usual teen angst of trying to fit in and it becomes aware that she develops an attraction to one of the other girls there, Anja (played by Kaya Wilkins). The relationship between these two is what drives the rest of the movie as we begin to find out that Thelma has fits which are explained away as psychogenic, non-epileptic seizures but which are really, as it becomes clear to the audience right from the outset, psychokinetic outbursts which are extremely dangerous (for basically anyone close to Thelma). This usually manifests itself as either a full on seizure or some kind of dream world immersion which usually ends with Thelma vomiting... in one flashback she is shown vomiting out a snake and in another, memorable moment, she is shown vomiting out a blackbird which she has accidentally brought back with her from another dimension (as you do).

And it’s a truly beautiful looking film with some wonderful performances by the central characters that really sell the fact that these are just regular people reacting to the pressures of every day life around them.

I said the film starts off in extreme long shot and that’s something Trier seems to keep up a lot throughout the movie, especially in establishing shots. He likes to look at people and places slowly, from afar, before he gradually zooms in on them and brings us into their situation. Sometimes it’s a very slow, almost imperceptible zoom that he uses and other times, the characters will walk off the sides of the screen but he will still be zooming in on the background previously inhabited by those characters... which gives the film and almost fly on the wall, voyeuristic feel to it. Especially when he sometimes eschews the long, slow, smooth character movements for the occasional hand held shot buried within the edit. It’s nice stuff and he really manipulates the mood of his scenes and what the actors help create in a masterful manner. There’s also a great moment when the leisurely shot tranquil whites and pale colours and the subdued score suddenly change at a party scene with full on Mario Bava style saturation and much heavier music... which shows that the director isn’t completely locked into one way of doing things but I really need to watch something else he’s done to see if there’s any visual correlation between what he’s doing here and his modus operandi in other movies.

As the film goes on, it becomes painfully apparent that Thelma is reacting as much to the strict Christian, religious upbringing that her family has inflicted on her through the years as anything else going on in her life and also that, about certain things, her mum and dad have been lying to her. This becomes painfully apparent in three scenes where she a) finds out something hidden from her about her medical history, b) finds out that her long dead grandmother is actually still alive and being kept heavily medicated by the family and c) when her parents drug her tea. What she... and the audience, discover after that happens explains, in some ways, what has been going on and gives the character enough ammunition to either accept herself as she is and leave future experience behind or to take matters into her own hands and... well, I don’t want to spoil things and I’ve been very guarded about the way things play out in the movie but, let’s just say that Thelma is a big girl and more than capable of taking things 'into her own hands'.

Thelma has, in some ways, been marketed as some kind of horror/art movie but, in all honesty, I’m not sure that’s an accurate description of the film. What it really is, I think, is a truly beautifully shot, science fiction mystery thriller with a kind of leisurely, European sensibility to it. Horror fans will certainly, I think, find a lot to like in this one but I also think non-genre fans and, basically just all embracing cinephiles will also enjoy this one for what it is. It almost feels like what might have happened if Krzysztof Kieslowski had decided to write and shoot an X-Men movie and... yeah... that’s the best analogy I’ve got for this one, actually. Really glad I finally got to see this beautiful movie and looking forward to watching it again sometime in the near future.

Blind

Blindy Peekers

Blind
Norway/Netherlands 2014
Directed by Eskil Vogt
Axiom Films Blu Ray Zone B 

Eskil Vogt’s first feature film, Blind, is not one I’d actually heard of before attending last year’s London Film And Comic Con. There was a big area at the show representing Computer Exchange and while my friend and I were looking through the selection of cheap, second hand Blu Rays, he gave a triumphant shout and thrust this movie into my hand. “What’s this?” I said. My friend then replied words to the effect that he’d not actually seen it but it was critically acclaimed and that I should buy it because it has a blind woman walking around naked in it. I asked him if he was sure of the fact of there being a lot of gratuitous nakedity in the movie and he looked me dead in the eye and told me he was pretty sure. Since I realised I couldn’t turn a film down when it had obviously received such critical acclaim, I decided I would pay the princely asking price of £4 and see for myself the quality of the artistic intentions of the director.

Well, as it happens, while there is some brief nudity in this movie, there isn’t a whole lot. As it happens, though, this movie is a huge artistic triumph and was instantly compelling... so I’m not too fussed about the lack of sheer, blind sexiness in the movie, truth be told.

Blind starts off strong with a voice over narrative, which stays with us through the whole movie, presumably of the lead actress Ellen Dorrit Petersen as Ingrid, who used to be able to see but, because of a degenerative illness, is now blind... I think. Actually, that may be the truth or there may be another origin to this character’s blindness but... the movie’s narrative style is such that it both reveals and conceals in equal measure, as I’ll get to in a minute.

We start off hearing her voice over black, as she sees the world. Then we are introduced to some beautifully textured, outstanding camerawork as she describes a park forest, a stray cucumber, a dog and then we realise we are seeing the way she is visualising the world. We then have the opening titles and it’s accompanied by a quite minimal, piano led, musical score by Henk Hofstede which reminded me, somewhat, of the music of Wim Mertens... specifically some of his piano music used in Peter Greenaway’s Belly Of An Architect. I say minimal not just because of the musical similarities to Mertens in this piece but because there is hardly any music throughout the movie and, in the odd scenes where it is brought in for dramatic impact, it’s usually a variant of this piece.

We are then introduced to a second character called Einar, played by Marius Kolbenstvedt, who is obsessed with pornography. However, this guy's back story, in which we are shown lots of pornography of a specific nature which I would have thought would not have been allowed on a British Blu Ray by our somewhat cranky BBFC (being polite about them), is also narrated by Ingrid. She’s somehow describing his life like she described her own and shows his character watching her through her window from his flat opposite and mimicking her movements as he becomes obsessed by her... or is it her?

It took me a while to realise that there was a second blind character called Elin, played by Vera Vitali, because they are not always shown in close up and the hair colour and facial structure are near to each other... and for good reason, without me going into spoilers. Was I watching a flashback or was it something else?

I first noticed something was going slightly awry when we’re introduced to the main character’s young son and then, a shot or two later, it’s her young daughter. Then, as the film progresses, the director starts interpenetrating storylines which you thought were current or coexisting realities, by stealth. Now there’s a reason for this but I won’t reveal certain things about the actions of one of the characters here... but this is, on the whole, a valid and, certainly interesting, way of exploring the characters and situations in this film. The brilliant part, which really threw me until I stopped letting the two shorthand styles distract me, is that it’s happening at the same time that he’s also using visual representations of the difference between what the lead blind character is seeing in her head and the reality of her situation. So something might happen and then the director will just hit reset because it happened in a character’s head.

For example, in an early scene she wonders if the ceilings in her apartment are actually as big as her husband, Morten (played by Henrik Rafaelsen), has told her they are. Later on, we see a shot of her stretching her hands to the ceiling and, in the close up of her arm and hand, we see her fingers reaching just below the ceiling. When we cut to the long shot, however, we can see that her hand is actually many feet away from the ceiling and it’s this kind of brilliant stuff that the director does that keeps the film interesting... that is, asides from the absolutely amazing acting on show from all the people who populate the main cast of this movie. Especially Peterson and Vitali who make amazing blind people.

And, like I said, the worlds within the sometimes puzzling but ultimately justified narrative structure also add another layer to the film. There’s a scene, for instance, where Einar and Morten are having coffee in a cafe. As we see a shot of Einar, we realise a bus is moving in the background of the window. We then cut to a shot of the other man and the whole background in the window is moving. We cut back and see more buses and then cut tot he other guy again and the background outside is static. As Morten goes to put his coffee down on the table he suddenly realises the table is no longer there because part of their conversation is taking place in a moving train carriage and part of it isn’t and it’s all mixed up in their heads... enough so that it sometimes even takes the characters by surprise, it would seem.

And this kind of stuff is, for the most part, so subtly done that it all blends into a single, challenging but definitely decipherable narrative which holds your interest. It even gets to the point, and I’m trying not to give too much away here, where even one of the character’s lines is discarded halfway through her sentence and then replaced with another. As the light begins to dawn on you about halfway through the movie what you are watching, so the interpenetrations and bleed-throughs between different narrative spaces become more frequent. And even with ‘guest music’ appearance of Sonic Youth’s Kool Thing, which I last heard in Hal Hartley’s movie Simple Men, it wasn’t enough of a distraction that I was so engrossed by the narrative habitat created by the writer/director that I barely had time to register it and tap my feet.

As you can probably guess, I had an absolute blast with Blind and it turned out to be one of my friend’s best purchase recommendations. In fact, I am now going to have to lend it to him so he can see what he recommended. As far as I’m concerned, if you are into the art of cinema then you probably can’t help but love this movie so, if you haven’t seen it already, you should maybe rush out and grab a copy soonest. Blind is certainly a film with, ironically, a lot more vision than a lot of movies churned out these days.