Ingenjör Andrées Luftfärd (The Flight of the Eagle)

Ingenjör Andrées Luftfärd (The Flight of the Eagle) is one of Jan Troell's grand epics. Sometimes I like his mode of storytelling; this one in particular, however, left me a little cold.

It's an odd story to tell anyway, since it is very much about a doomed nationalist project of the late 19th century. But I think the thing that sort of bugs me about it is that Troell doesn't really use his film to analyze how and why these men ended up dying in the middle of a frozen wasteland. Instead we watch their demise in a sort of detached way – not detached from the men's emotional journey but certainly detached from the context of that journey. Troell is interested in the men's experience. Fine! But, he indicts no one, really, except Andrée himself, as if the project was simply one of ego. This is unfortunate, to my mind, and it makes the film a kind of lone-man-against-the-elements movie instead of a real portrait of Sweden in 1897.

The takeoff of the balloon is totally awesome, but the movie (and, of course, the 1897 expedition) both go downhill from there.

Two in Black and White

Another foreign film shot entirely in black and white? In fact, aside from Ida, I've seen two others like this recently.

Jan Ole Gerster's A Coffee in Berlin, originally released in Germany as Oh Boy, is a beautiful character study with a gorgeous central performance by actor Tom Schilling. The film is very funny with a kind of running joke about not ever being able to get a simple cup of coffee. The real topic of the film is disaffection and the difficulties of deciding what to do with one's life. The main character Niko is a confused young man, but the movie itself looks at the people in his world with growing alarm. Niko's world is populated with strange people, most of whom are incredibly unhappy.

But A Coffee in Berlin is an enormously pleasurable experience, filled with funny moments and tiny bits of wisdom. It is a clever, intriguing comedy-drama that also manages to assess "success" as it is sold to the young by those who have "achieved" it.

Jan Troell's Dom över Död Man, released in the U.S. as The Last Sentence, struck me as much less successful. I don't think I was particularly exhausted when I went to watch Troell's film or not, but I came away from it thinking that even though I like slow films, Troell's films are often much too slow for me. Troell is interested in the slow burn, but The Last Sentence is a film that, for me, never actually went anywhere. The main character is a man who is writing against the Nazis in pre-war and then in wartime Sweden.

The man has lots of enemies, of course, but Dom över Död Man is less about his railings against Hitler and his anti-Semitism than it is about his affair with the woman who owns his newspaper, the way this slowly kills his wife, and the ways that he deals with his mistress and his mistress's husband. All of this is complex and sad. And it has everything to do with getting very old and losing interest in everything in which one thought one had an interest, but it ends up not being all that, well, interesting. I was annoyed by this old man and his inability to see how much he was hurting everyone, and I was annoyed by the fact that all of this only seemed to make him suffer more. And I suppose this is the way of Swedish cinema, but I found The Last Sentence a difficult slog.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1972

I have been trying to watch Jan Troell's Utvandrarna or The Emigrants for years. This Swedish film is not on DVD, but if you're lucky you can find it in a dubbed, pan-and-scan version on VHS. That's the best anyone can do, and even this is hard to come by. I finally got to watch most of it yesterday and the end of it today. It's a long, difficult film that focuses on the troubles of living in nineteenth-century Sweden (chief among these problems: the class struggle). Troell's film is about leaving Europe, the difficulties of deciding to leave, and the long, brutal journey to the New World. What's extraordinary about Utvandrarna is the time Troell spends watching the emigrants travel. As far as I can tell, no one has made a film quite like this – most skip the travel section of such narratives and go directly toward settling in and building a home in the U.S. Not Troell: this film lives with the emigrants as they cross the Atlantic, watches them try to learn English on the boat, deal with sickness, nearly starve to death, and bury those who couldn't make it. By the end of the journey, I was completely sold on the film: it's a long, hard ride, but it is very rewarding.