DarkProfile Reviews

Disputed Passage (1939)

Father, Son and the Holy Spirit

[8/10 · 6 May 2023]

Father represents the OLD: The art of the miracle (medical treatment/well-being/health) is practiced in the temples (hospitals) and the masses should visit the temple to receive the miracle.

The Holy Spirit puts the idea in the Son's head that the miracle should not be confined to the temples and be taken to the masses.

The Son is drawn to a MISSION in a remote location by the Holy Spirit where he receives his spiritual/religious/shamanic initiation by sharing his GIFT with the masses.

The Holy Spirit was a mystery to me in its role until recently when I had a revelation that one of the sure-shot sign of its role is to guide the Son into doing what he would never had thought of doing himself AND TO MAKE HIM DO IT ALL BY HIMSELF. You see, A GHOST: only the son can see it and receive guidance from it, but the son is doing all the work himself. Like Tyler Durden in Fight Club.

Here, the role of The Holy Spirit is played by Audrey. Watch this film and do a thought experiment: what if Audrey is Tyler Durden? The revelation doesn't change the story at all. Because all the charitable work is shown to be done by The Son. She just puts the idea in his head... that's all.

And in the end, it's his head where she impresses her presence and revives him AFTER the father acknowledges her role.

A brilliant story!

Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

The Projection Screen

[8/10 · 6 May 2023]

A jealous husband kills his wife on suspicion of infidelity and commits suicide. He's in a purgatory kind of environment where the judgement of his deed needs to take place. Unlike the common notion of some omniscient God judging one's deed, I think it's more like that one is asked to PROVE what one believes to be the "true" story.

So, one becomes a filmmaker by reconstructing the "believed" narrative by sifting through one's memory, re-contextualizing crucial moments and impressions in analogous settings, stepping in the shoes of major characters and gathering the courage to see things from their perspectives (there's a shoe-changing scene in the movie, seen through a mirror), etc. There are a couple of scenes where two characters enact a play in front of a dummy background. That's what is happening. The main character in many scenes is standing in the foreground of a projection screen playing his narrative.

However, the PROOF never comes because the impulsive act was based on suspicion -- one or the other crucial detail negates the entire hypothesis. And, one decides to reconstruct the film anew from a forking path... and the years continue ad infinitum at Marienbad. He has already eliminated five suspects in the previous iterations, and in the current iteration, the target is the Card-Dealer.

Until A HIGHER AWARENESS comes. GNOSIS after DEATH. The last image: the protagonist has managed to unblock some light in his dark INLAND EMPIRE.

Both are similar stories, and I love both, but my slight preference tilts toward Evridiki BA 2O37 (1975) because of the narrative being more intimate and less formal. And some of the tricks of depicting a subjective and unreliable consciousness there are inspired cinematic genius, and even imitated by David Lynch.

Gun Crazy (1950)

A glass paperweight

[6/10 · 20 June 2022]

How is this a noir? The plot mechanics are driven by the characters themselves rather than some external force. No irony of fate, just tragic characters without much depth. Is Shakespeare noir? And where are the hard-boiled dialogue?

Takes out two scenes from the film: first, the carnival duel in the start; second, the misty swamp ending. And the film reduces to less than the sum of its parts. Except those two scenes, and maybe the meat-plant heist, what else is noteworthy here?

The opening courtroom scene which labors into three or four flashbacks and still fails to elucidate the boy's fetish for guns is such a poor sequence. Better to keep the motives as mystery rather than over-explaining them.

Too many errors in details and continuity, but that's forgiving for a low-budget B-movie.

There's a brilliant kinetic idea here that lends itself so beautifully to camera, and has spawned numerous copies, but unfortunately, the rest is just scaffolding.

Freddy Got Fingered (2001)

Citizen Kane of 21st Century

[9/10 · 22 June 2021]

The great thing about this film is that its form is congruent to its message. Most of the films preach being unique and taking risks, but their plot is safe and formulaic.

The voice of the film may sound offensive, vulgar and ridiculous to many, but that is precisely because it pushes the boundary of humor with its insane originality.

The "original voice" of the film is a perfect extension of Tom Green's message that an artist needs to develop an "original voice" to break into the consciousness of a society. It breaks free from conventions and re-appropriates them. That's what an artist should aspire. That is Tom Green's message. And he doesn't tell, he shows.

The fact that Green put his entire reputation on line to get this project green-lighted and then lose it all after the disastrous public-attention makes this film one of the most personal and mad visions in recent times.

The world is so toxic with its political-correctness as of now that I don't see any critic risking their career over this in near future.

But it is in my list of the best films of 21st century. And I don't mean in a it's-so-bad-that-it's-good kind of way. My adoration and respect for this film is genuine.

Time of Violence (1988)

An intense, ambitious, no-holds-barred epic

[9/10 · 4 June 2021]

This epic is at least a few notches above Lawrence of Arabia in its sheer scale, dramatic storytelling, intense characters, no-holds-barred agenda, the melancholic musical score, and the grand photography of the mountain region and its people. I felt while watching the film that this is what a Hollywood epic aspires to be, but somehow the impotent producers cut it down to a sanitized form. There is a clear authorial line as to what is good and what is evil, but still every character here battles his light and darkness. It's like reading a great Russian classic from Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.

I was particularly impressed by the actor who plays the antagonist - the jannisary, who was snatched as a young boy from the community, brainwashed into a fanatical killer, and sent back to convert his community into Islam. What intensity, what brooding, what depth of melancholy! The kind of guy whose mere presence would cower you down into submission and obsess your imagination with hundreds of powerful stories about his past.

The Seventh Seal (1957)

A professional surgeon operating on a created body

[6/10 · 4 June 2021]

I watched this Bergman first time in my college campus during a movie club screening. Hardly left any impression on me at that time, but I accounted the failure to my philistine taste and undeveloped maturity. Years later, I watched Persona and it made complete sense to me on a deep level. But again, I may have overcompensated for my earlier guilt. But I really liked the existential musings and the abstract images open to interpretation in Persona. Rather than creating characters and illuminating juicy ideas through their lives, one abstracts juicy ideas first and then plays them on an intellectual chessboard through cipher characters. So hip are the symbols and the abstractions, that the game looked great in cocktail discussions and pickup lines. But a beating heart was always missing.

And then, I discovered Olmi. Oh my, I realized that one can study hard to analyze and understand the human anatomy, learn to perform surgery, and publish medical tomes for the benefit of mankind. But can one create life out of such abstraction and analysis? No! To create life, Olmi showed that if one is peasant enough to "cultivate" Nature into his humble studio, faithful enough to "sacrifice" his comfortable concepts for an uncertain hope of a miracle, child enough to "see" the blooming colors and patterns of contradictory hues, and artist enough to "reconcile" the emerging contradictions into a unifying whole, then not only juicy ideas would organically grow out of the complex whole, but it will be alive in the image of Nature, i.e., on multiple dimensions, just like how a tree is alive to a bee, a bird, a worm, and a human.

One is a professional surgeon who operates on a created body; the other is an amateur god who creates miniature bodies.

Los viajes del viento (2009)

Impregnation of a Soul

[8/10 · 4 June 2021]

Finally a film that plays that elusive music of soul that made one hooked to cinema in the first place.

This film maps the formative process of an artist from a spiritual perspective; the process of impregnating a forming soul with an experience so intense, complex and mystifying that the young soul will spend its entire lifetime trying to decipher its pain and meaning, and the only glimpses of its meaning will arrive through art, there is no other way.

This is a beautiful approach that emphasizes that a master's primary role is not in teaching the art or the skill to the apprentice, but to go a level deeper and impart in the apprentice the kind of experience that will automatically give birth to great art irrespective of the medium.

Contrast this film with Hollywood's treatment to the same theme, Walter Hill's Crossroads (1986), which superficially glosses over the experience part and ultimately succumbs to the glamorous but shallow pandering of the skill part.

Colombian Love (2004)

Actualization of a Soul

[6/10 · 19 May 2021]

Three men here:

The first represents the unconscious mind, he is searching for "true love", sleepwalking and bumping around with the society's definition and conventions of the term.

The second represents the subconscious mind, the first one to get married, the man of "action", who has an awareness of something being off but can't put his finger to it... until he discovers marijuana.

The third represents the conscious mind, the main lead of the story, who is hooked with his perfect match from the start. Yet there is a problem. Being a conceptual guy, he is shackled to a bad concept that he can't seem to get rid off because you can't "think" your way out of a problem. Finally, in the end, he has an experience that helps him to unlearn the bad concept and forces him into an action of freedom.

The Night My Number Came Up (1955)

Free Will, rather than Predestiny, seals our Fate

[7/10 · 30 November 2020]

A tight little British paranormal thriller centered around a dream and dealing with the themes of precognition and predestination.

Although the intent was alright and the execution was impeccable, but the thematic ideas lacked exploration and therefore today come across as dated and crude.

But the device of a precognitive dream does a few interesting things. First, like Miracle Mile, it explores not the idea itself but the impact of that idea on the mass psyche. Basically, it suggests that the power of a premonition derives, not as much from a predestined fate, but more so from the free-will of the masses. If we come to know about a future event, somehow the sum-total of our behavior paradoxically acts as a catalyst to the actuality of that event. Second, a very interesting observation that I read in another review here, that our technological evolution paradoxically puts us more at the mercy of fate. The more complexity we build, the more ghostly voids of abstraction are created, and thus the more moving parts for things to go wrong.

Birth Certificate (1961)

A multi-perspective experience of war

[9/10 · 18 May 2020]

I think the beauty of the film is that each story annotates the reality from a different experiential perspective.

Let me try to explain myself with the analogy of a football game (in no way I intend to equate war with football, just that I can't think of a better way to explain myself): 1) The first perspective is of a tourist who is at loss in comprehending the hooliganism reigning a city, without realizing that it is because of a high-stake football game between two close rivals. 2) The second perspective is of a spectator in the stadium who is experiencing emotional dissonance on seeing his side lose in the game. 3) And the final perspective is of a player of the losing side, maybe a substitute who is called in during the last ten minutes of the game.

Each perspective is more immediate than the previous one (secondary observer, primary observer and participant) and gradually takes us into the thick of the action. All perspectives combine to present a multi-dimensional view of a collapse. Brilliant.

Friday Night (2002)

Ephemeral and sensual poetry

[8/10 · 18 May 2020]

I guess that I must be living under a rock because it took me this movie to bask in the luminescence of Claire Denis (and Agnes Godard). I stumbled across Beau Travail in the beginning of my cinephile journey and her baroque images and elliptical editing style just flew past my head. Then, I saw 35 shots of rum a few years back and it did make me sit up, especially "The Nightshift" sequence, but I still felt that her magic lacked a dramatic gravity.

But this film just blew me away. This is poetry of a heightened experience so ephemeral and intense that it is remembered in fractured glances and gestures, in hazy motives and unclear desires, in actions that are incomplete ellipses, in the associations and impressions of the surroundings that stand in as a placeholder of the actual experience.

Highly recommended.

Un roi sans divertissement (1963)

A king without form

[6/10 · 18 May 2020]

The mood was captivating. The setting was magnificent. But what the hell happened in the last twenty minutes!!!

I think that it's difficult translating idea-driven literature into two-hour long films. In this case, I felt as if I was watching a half-remembered dream and hearing a half-forgotten play. Doesn't work. That's why adapting Shakespeare to films is a futile exercise because Shakespeare is about words whereas a film is about images. You can either have words, or you can have images, but you certainly can't have both.

The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978)

Creating life without abstraction

[10/10 · 18 May 2020]

My second Olmi film after Il Posto and he's the only filmmaker after Bresson and Ghatak to move me so affectedly with his spirituality.

The quality that impressed me most about this film was that he captured life so naturally without abstraction. It felt as if life was unfolding with its natural rhythm in front of my eyes. This is very difficult because every choice that an artist makes subtracts some complexity out of reality. Not here, at least not to me. Brilliant. And his power to record and transform subtle, everyday wonders into spiritual miracles almost brought me to tears.

Bolse vita (1996)

The key to heaven

[9/10 · 18 May 2020]

This film deals with "identity" - on multiple planes of convergence - personal, community, and country. The film shows the mushrooming of naïve and poor immigrants from Russia in post-89 Hungary, a bridge to reach the dreamy pastures of West. It also deals beautifully with the themes of alienation, communication (or lack of thereof), and survival. And it has a nocturnal feel to it, placing you in an overnight tavern crowded with young characters of distinct artistic temperaments (idealist, washed-out, free-wheeling, opportunists, ready-to-explode, etc), all seeking the key to heaven in their own way, all the while boozing, playing saxophones, fornicating, and trying to interpret each others' foreign tongue with the lens of their agenda.

Every Little Thing (1997)

Never mention your health to a doctor... because he could enslave you.

[10/10 · 19 April 2020]

The best film I've seen this year. The patients of an experimental countryside asylum prepare to stage their annual summer play.

This time they have chosen Witold Gombrowicz's Operetta, which is a do-it-yourself play, an "unhinged" play that is supposed to be hinged on the context provided by the participants, thus changing its form and meaning every time it is performed; a Gestalt play, so to speak.

Now, this is a great device because it not only offers the patients a canvas to organize the absurd details of the play and outline them into their own images, but it also presents them an artistic mirror, reflecting in which they become more aware of their own pathology.

I can't find enough words to express my admiration for director Nicolas Philibert, whose subtle and humane eye merges the observer with the observed.

Many of the patients shown in the documentary are some of the most kindhearted, gentle and self-aware souls that you'll ever meet. None of them is weird for the sake of being weird, like the glamorous representation of an insane that you see in a mainstream film. These souls are lost, bewildered, exhausted and stuck in their patterns, just like you and me and our next-door neighbor. Only that they have given up the fight... or maybe "goaded" by the society to give up the fight (the title of the review is the only piece of advice that one patient has for the viewer).

Highly recommended.