Il Grido (1957)

Story of a voyage, of a non-return or an impossibility of mourning. Through the landscape, the houses flooding and the gas stations, the beginning of the question of desire in itself (what would become a major note in Antonioni's films). Ghostly framed in a social concern, this question of a male desire that keeps traveling, substituting and piercing its targets in vain attempts to recapture, to comprehend what is it that made it stop for the first time (one night in a museum, a night that we wish we could see and that perhaps Antonioni will let us perceive in his later films). Work, child and expropriation as a pretext, perhaps the best summary being the scene with the men of the asylum standing by the road, among the dry trees. To what does desire return? To a tower, and then an insignificant scream, before certain fall.

4 stars.

The Scar (1976)

What is the social, what is the common, what does it mean the possibility of having a "common responsibility"? As cars invade the forest, mapping through the woods the place where the trees will fall and the fumes will erect, the question of a whole town (and of a nation, of a continent) becomes the metonymy of one consciousness, one person who cannot comprehend and circumscribe it, but who at least acknowledges certain limit. A film about a society, a factory, the state, that through its soundtrack of uncanny machinery (more similar to a syncopated heart than to a piston) points to the echo beneath the construction, under the ideal and the notion of a town, a country, a society and maybe more precisely of two people together. Beneath all this a certain guilt that still cannot be publicly acknowledged, that perhaps can only be--quietly--suggested, because it is always a personal matter.

4 stars.

Daybreakers (2009)

"Blood is money." That would be certain conclusion of more than a century of vampire stories. But perhaps this could not have appeared clearly until that red money too became the poor virtual sign of Capitalism. Let us turn the metaphor, vampires are like capitalists now; the drive towards accumulation and consumption is without desire, and it is completely immortal (although the lack of it will transform you into a dry monster). "Life is a bitch, and then you don't die." Daybreakers performs a simple reversal, where humans are the minority and hegemony is given to the consumers of pure significant. An economic film like a few, and besides you have Willem Dafoe with a crossbow.

4 stars.

The Prefab People (1982)

How in the world of Béla Tarr the familiarity not only becomes unfamiliar, but rather how it shows how any notion of the family, the home, is already uncanny in its nature. As if the question of reality or real-film did not matter, or as if the political was just a cruel joke on an already destroyed attempt at a home. The beauty lying in those long shots, in the sensation of waiting, anxiously, that all finish. What all? The scream, the silence, the innocuous moving in one place. A must for any entity that appeared in the eighties.

3 stars.

F for Fake (1973)

As from an old picture album you emerge, still hearing in your ears a voice that accompanied you during your childhood, together with the figure and the face that, while nameless in your wake life, you could identify every time. And yet the film warned you years before about the problems of your own and of every signature, as well as it prepared you for any consideration of a career based on traits and traces. In it, through the beat of certain jazz, you rediscover now the end of the century, as well as the period that gave you and all the theories you love birth. A man with a coat and a hat, walking through the fog of Paris, sitting there where you sat and playing tricks, and sometimes even throwing a coup de dés at you.

4 stars.

The Saddest Music in the World (2003)

A contest to find the saddest music in the world, where every time one wins a match, one slides into a pool of beer—perhaps just to make the Americans and their prohibition go insane. Inside a historic-mythical world (a XXth century mythology) set in Winnipeg, where the blurring of the colors just exacerbates the vividness of experience, the music comes as cause and medium, and finally as the only thing that rests after the end of all shows. Nothing perhaps like the origins of cinema could allow such a blend of laugh and tears—happily married in their stereotype, making an even bigger cliché where one can dissolve more, and more, as the music keeps going. What music?

“I hear music when I touch your hand...”

4 stars

Kamikaze Girls (2004)

You squint your eyes and let every color become light. You think of a Bildungsroman with the Clockwork Orange crew, except that this time everything is overly sweet, and even the violence of the music is, syrup like, enjoyed as just another moment in the joyous struggle against the world. There is something immanently perverse here, but perhaps the perversion is here played on us with four hands, delivering us at the end to a pure game of wiggling and laughing—where everyone—as a good player or conspirator—is invited. It is really just about telling stories, of one girl, two girls, some mafia, some small town—and a playful display of images that are the story itself, just like pastel-colored words.

4 stars.