Pictureland

Love, Michael Haneke style.  The title of the Austrian director's tenth feature film is as perverse as it is profoundly appropriate.  In Amour we see abundant example of love at it's most compassionate, at its most brave, at its most...loving.  But we also see amour played out in one of the most grinding, heartbreaking ways imaginable.  That really is love, some might say.  That's life.  It is, at least, the only sort of love story that Michael Haneke would seem able or willing to tell. There's little surprise in Amour where all of this is going.  No more than where any of our lives are ultimately bound.  After a silent interval of crisp, white opening credits against a black background - no surprise there, either, from Mr. Haneke - the silence is broken by the crashing open of a Parisian apartment's entry doors.  Before we see what is waiting in the sealed bedroom of the apartment, the covering of noses by a few of the attending pol...

Among more obvious cinematic parallels to be found in Claire Denis' White Material , I find myself coming back to, of all things, A Serious Man . Some might say that all Cohen brothers movies are strange in their way, but A Serious Man was strange in a very atypical way for Joel and Ethan Cohen.   Having never addressed Judaism or general issues of Jewish culture in America, it was as if everything they felt, whatever baggage might have been lurking about their Jewishness came tumbling out of their screenplay for the film, all of which concluded with that final shot of the approaching funnel cloud, one both unsettling and seemingly out of place in their body of work.   White Material takes place in an unnamed African country.  The film was shot in Cameroon, the setting for  Denis' first film, Chocolat , as well one of the countries in which she lived as a child while her father's job  as a French civil servant took their family to several countries on ...