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Reviews
Trust (1990)
Top 100 of All Time
Hal Hartley's film TRUST is one of the top 100 achievements in the history of cinema. Hal, if you ever visit this site and see this statement I hope it makes you feel good. A d-girl in LA (development person in Hollywood) at a party once showed me a bookshelf at her home that contained her 10 or 15 favorite screenplays of all time... KANE, CHINATOWN, ... and one of my old screenplays (!)(she didn't know I was the author) and yeah... that makes you feel pretty damn good.
So why does TRUST work so well? Maybe it's alchemy... getting sorta the right combination in the right quantities of abstraction, hyper-realism, irony, and distance. Hartley plays with archetypes and yet makes them singular. (That ain't easy.) It's like reading Theodore Dreyer filtered by Bertolt Brecht, or running into a Long Island Godard, but the fun version of Godard before he became too p-ssed off at the world.
Hartley will stage a scene that you've seen a thousand times before, almost as genre commentary or put-on, then morph it into something you have NEVER seen before. Come to think of it, although Hartley is often thought of as the American Godard, at times he could almost be the American Bunuel (sorry Mr. Lynch).
It would be easy to hate some of the characters in Hartley's TRUST, but Hartley doesn't. He may hate the situations, the contexts, the environments... but he certainly has no hatred for the people.
It's a great love story and a quasi-homage to PIERROT LE FOU.
It contains multitudes. It is a great film.
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)
Modernist Masterpiece
This mega-movie is an expressionist, modernist masterpiece that combines the best of Wellesian cinema (expressionistic) with Godardian cinema (modernist). The (Godardian) voice-over snatches of random news items and medical health items (referenced in the prior 'review') are simply being faithful to Dobler's novel, which is a somewhat Germanic version of Joyce's Ulysses. But instead of the Joycian modernist take on the travels of Odysseus, Dobler's novel presented us with a modernist take on the Passion Play.
This film is not for simpletons. Just like a long, great novel
there will be stretches that will bore you a bit
and other stretches that are riveting and will break your heart.
Two major points:
1) Don't get too caught up with what some people see as a form of homo-eroticism between Franz Biberkopf and Reinhold. Although expressionistic, Fassbinder has presented the material with enough objectivity that different people will come away with different subtexts. Fassbinder has explained the film as a love story between Franz and Reinhold
but Fassbinder was bisexual.
Franz is a grown up naive child. One could easily see Franz's 'curiosity' about Reinhold as a longing for an absent father. Eva, the one constant in Franz's life, could represent his longing for an absent/replacement mother/big sister/protector. How else to explain Franz's reluctance to mate with her?
2) The two-hour epilogue contains an extended surrealistic pastiche that upsets 90% of the people who like the previous (more realistic) 13 hours.
Biberkopf's brain snaps like a twig! How better to explain the mixture of chemicals
the bad cocktail suddenly coursing through his head? It's brilliant in it's off-puttingness! Bad cocktails don't taste good! Some people don't understand how Lou Reed and Kraftwerk can be on the soundtrack when Franz (in insane delirium) is living in 1928:
People
that's what they call 'modernist'. That's what they call
'expressionist'. Were you expecting Robert Flaherty in a Fassbinder film?
Epilogue: See the film. If THE DECALOGUE is the great cinematic short story collection
BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ is the great cinematic novel.