arthouse

The international title appears to be “Peacock”. The second half of the title means: “Am I real?”.

Matthias works for a company called “My Company”. People hire him when they need a ‘+1’ at the concert, an imaginary son or even to try to learn to argue. And so we see Matthias in continuously different roles, a bit like in “Holy Motors“, but not that strange.

Matthias has a very modern, perfectly organised house, where he lives with his girlfriend Sophia. Sophia is increasingly annoyed by the fact that Matthias is not only an actor for work, but also more and more in his private life.

And so we have a slightly ‘off’ drama that slowly grows into being more of a drama as Matthias is loosing his grip on his life.

We also encounter a familiar face, by the way, Theresa Frostad Eggesbø, who is the daughter in the “Ragnarok” series.

Another oldie that can be streamed on the website of the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Two ghosts are tired of being ghosts and they learn that when they first travel to Santiago de Compostella and then to Finistera that they might be able to gain a physical body again.

As you can expect, what follows is a slow, minimalist, absurdistic ‘road’ movie in which we follow the two ghosts. One scene has music of Suicide.

“Pan T.” (‘Mr. T.’) is a very nice Polish film up on Netflix. In 1953 Warszawa (Warsaw), hence, in communist times, we follow a writer, highly regarded by his colleagues. He proves to live in some sort of writers-hotel. Everybody asks for his advice. Some address him as subversive.

The government has strict rules what can be said and written. On the other hand, it supports writers, journalists, etc. who play by their rules. Thus the trick is to write so that the officials approve, but that the readers can detect criticism to the system.

In this highly controlled environment things are hard for indepedent thinkers. Mr. T. is under observation and balances the thin line of keeping to his principles and trying to make a living.

In moody black and white, a bit of a noir type, slow movie with some odd humour, not too much of a story unfolds, but “Plan T.” makes an interesting watch.

Not exactly the first arthouse film that I saw, but boy, this really was two and a half hours of: “quit or continue?” I did sit out the entire film, but it was not easy.

The first character introduced is Carl, a male model, during an audition. In the next chapter we meet Carl’s girlfriend Yaya, who is an “influencer”. This whole chapter revolves around a tedious discussion about money.

Then follows a long chapter during which Carl and Yaya are on a cruise for the preposterously rich. The only highlight in the film is the amusing middle part in which the ship sails into a storm during a fancy diner. Eventually the ship does not survive and a handful of characters end up on a beach.

Most dialogues in the film are boring, many even childishly dumb. I suppose this is on purpose, to show the shallowness of modern life, especially that of the rich, but instead of being amusing, it is pretty damn annoying. There are way too little good scenes to allow me to rate the film anything higher than…