Hi Bor, which film should we not miss this week?
‘May I first say how nice it is that the cinemas are finally opening again? No more six feet away, no longer with only twenty people in a room – that’s not the way you want to experience a movie. We can sit next to each other again, smell your neighbor’s popcorn.
‘It is very important that we all go to the cinema en masse, because there are still many great films showing. I’ll mention one here: The Worst Person in the Worlda Norwegian film with the original title Verdens freshest guys, by Joachim Trier. Colleague Pauline Kleijer spoke of an instant film classic, I completely agree with her. In the film we follow four years in the life of millennial Julie from Oslo, a beautiful role by actress Renate Reinsve. You could call it a rom-bowl, but without all those faded clichés and a lot darker in nature.’
Is noted. Which movie caught your eye this week?
‘The Finnish train film Hytti No 6, another one from Scandinavia, that can’t be a coincidence. This film won the Grand Prix in Cannes and is about a Finnish archeology student who travels by sleeping train from Moscow to Murmansk. In her compartment, she finds the rudest, most filthy miner imaginable, a vodka-drinking Russian who, if you’re not careful, also wants to crawl into your bed if you’re not careful. A nightmare, after all, she was hoping for interesting, intellectual encounters and then you meet this man.
†Hytti No 6 is very well filmed. You get a claustrophobic feeling, watching two people involuntarily sitting just a little too close together in a cramped, cramped space. Pay special attention to the authentic locations that pass by: the film is set in the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, but seems to still have one foot in the eighties because old, abandoned train stations have remained unchanged. So you don’t have to build it.
‘Besides the fact that the film is beautifully made and very well acted, it is also simply recommended to anyone who has ever taken a longer train journey – and therefore knows what it can be like to hit the worst traveling companion imaginable.’
You also wanted to talk about climbing film The Alpinist†
‘Yes, another climbing film, I add, after, for example, the previously released Free Solo, which won an Oscar. In it we see climber Alex Honnold who climbs hundreds of meters high granite boulders without belays. That film was such a worldwide success, of course there are parties who think: can’t we make another film like this?
‘And that is The Alpinist that goes one notch further. Canadian mountaineer Marc-André Leclerc does not climb granite blocks, but icy and snowy rock peaks. Honnold also comes back in the movie and says: what I did was crazy, but what he’s doing is completely insane. The attraction also lies in the way in which you can film nowadays, the fact that there are better and smaller cameras and you can use drones. That produces impressive images.
‘There is, however, a danger of romanticization lurking. These climbers are often drop-outs, boys who could not settle in society and seek refuge in something as extreme as mountain climbing. Don’t forget that people regularly read off those mountains too.’
Finally, you were in Berlin this week for the film festival there. Do you have a favourite?
‘Yes, my favorite is Rimini from Ulrich Seidli† In it we see an Austrian schlager singer who rents out as a gigolo for some extra income to the many elderly people who stay in wintery Rimini in Italy, a bit of faded glory.
‘The film shows the bankruptcy of the old European continent, where people don’t know what to do with themselves. Seidl films everything, including the African refugees who find themselves on the street like shadows. It is quite hard, not everyone can withstand it. But that’s what Seidl does: he targets the margins in society.’