Norsk filmuke i New York, Bent Hamer i London
Norsk film har stått på plakaten på Lincoln Film Society i New York de siste ukene, men vi kan vel fastslå at “A Luminous Century: Celebrating Norwegian Cinema” ikke akkurat har satt byen på hodet. Men noen har fått med seg denne interessante miksen av ny og gammel norsk film.
I New Yorks kulturliv-bibel, Village Voice, fremhever filmskribent Leslie Camhi særlig mange av kvinnerollene i norsk film, og har lagt sin elsk på Liv Ullmanns glemte debut som hovedrolleinnehaver i Edith Carlmars utmerkede Ung flukt (The Wayward Girl):
¿Twenty-year-old Liv Ullmann, in her first film role, radiates both childlike confusion and intense sensuality as Gerd, a lost young woman whose middle-class, madly-in-love boyfriend attempts to run away with her to a cottage in the wilderness. Carlmar, one of Norway’s numerous distinguished women directors, took an utterly frank yet complex approach to her characters’ sexuality, astonishing for its era.”
Camhi er også begeistret for Sara Johnsens underspilte drama Vinterkyss:
¿Annika Hallin’s nuanced starring performance and a subtle script that leaves much unspoken make this a wrenching drama about the power of grief to suspend life indefinitely.”
New York er kjent for sine mange filmfanatikere, udødeligjort i filmen Cinemania, og de har som regel et godt øye til “vanskelig” film fra fjerne himmelstrøk. Derfor er det ikke overraskende at bloggerne også har sett norsk film på Lincoln-senteret. Den mest kjente av disse bloggerne, Acquarello, omtaler Edith Carlmars film som “en liten perle” ¿ en film som:
¿”not only pushes the artistic bounds of filming sexual liberation given the morality of the times, but also captures the dichotomy of the exuberance and freedom of youth and the subconscious realization of the eventual need to conform to societal expectations that comes with growing up”
Acquarello gir også Erik Løchen honnør for Jakten ¿ ikke minst fordi den norske filmskaperen var så tidlig ute med sin modernistiske innstilling:
“Favorably recalling the experimental narrative strategies of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Erik Lochen’s remarkably light and agile, yet ingeniously constructed and elegantly realized film, The Hunt similarly plays on the author’s recurring themes of memory, atemporality, and psychological reality. Prefiguring Alain Resnais’ collaborative film with Robbe-Grillet, Last Year at Marienbad (the film was made in the same year as Resnais’ collaborative film with another nouvelle roman author, Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour), the film opens with a shot of a covered body on a gurney being loaded into the coroner’s van accompanied by an off-screen narrator’s explanation of what appears to have been a shooting accident during a hunting trip”.
“Filmmakers on film” er en fast spalte i den britiske kvalitetsavisen Daily Telegraph og denne uken var det Bent Hamers tur til å beskrive sin favorittfilm. Hamer gir tydelig uttrykk for at han egentlig ikke kan fordra å diskutere sine favoritter, noe han er blitt bedt om mange ganger. Men kanskje er det journalistens forbilledlige evne til å veksle mellom Factotum, som forrige uke hadde premiere i Storbritannia, og Hamers egne utlegninger om sin favoritt, som har overtalt ham til å diskutere det likevel. Uansett, så er det en uvanlig morsom Hamer som her forteller om Whisky ¿ en film fra Uruguay fra 2004 som har gjort inntrykk på den norske regissøren.
¿Nothing seems to prick Hamers imagination like the thought of a man hopelessly engulfed in his own solitude, and Whisky’s Jacobo, surely one of the most miserable individuals ever to appear on screen, fits the bill perfectly. The action is minimal. On paper, the narrative may sound absurdly skeletal, but on film, says Hamer, it grows into something rather greater than the sum of its parts.”
Det høres ut som¿en Bent Hamer-film.
Hamer forteller også hvorfor han først var skeptisk til å caste Matt Dillon i hovedrollen i Factotum, og hvordan han løste enkelte “stjernenykker”:
“When someone first suggested Dillon for Chinaski I said no way,” he says. “But then I started thinking about the old Matt of long ago, before he started appearing in romantic comedies, and I thought, ‘It might just work. In the end I was so impressed with Matt. But I had to struggle to make him keep those eyebrows down. He also has a huge flirting potential that needed taming, but that’s OK – as a Norwegian, I know how to depress my actors.”