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[Note: This review was submitted by N.W Douglas, an undergraduate film student at Simon Fraser University. He's fired up about a film he recently discovered, and his enthusiasm has certainly put the title on my list of films to see in 2009. I'll add more reviews as I come across them. - Jeffrey]

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a guest review by N.W. Douglas

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In the vein of Robert Bresson, Klaus Härö’s Letters To Father Jacob is simple and staggering.

Leila (Kaarina Hazard), an incarcerated criminal, receives an unexpected early pardon from her life sentence. She goes to work for Father Jacob (Heikki Nousiainen), a blind elderly priest tending an abandoned church. Instead of housework, he wants her to read letters to him.

That is the set-up.

The rest consists of carefully observed interactions between these two characters. Father Jacob (Heikki Nousiainen) lives for his correspondence, and for his place as an intercessor for any who would care to write him. Leila is hard-nosed about matters of faith, of course, and tempted by the shady opportunities of serving a frail, sightless man who doesn’t care much for his tin of life savings.

It’s a familiar template – those who are cold are made warm by spending time with one of those problems like Maria – but director/co-writer Klaus Härö mostly avoids easy sentimentality. Father Jacob himself has his doubts, and one of the film’s most affecting scenes features him coming to terms with those notions in a surprising, and humbling way. As Father Jacob, Nousiainen is constantly in a dance between bursting joy and deep sorrow, and he walks that tightrope without ever falling completely to one side, or into some sort of generic bittersweet caricature.

In this sort of story, we know in a broad sense what will happen; the pleasure of the film comes in its journey towards that end. This is a journey that evokes Bresson through its attention to detail. The viewer is invited to bask in the quiet atmosphere of a rural pastor’s world: close-ups of whistling kettles, thickly sliced bread, trickling tea. The creak of an ancient home’s floorboards. Outside, the patter of rain, and inside, the melody provided by a leaky roof. Cinematographer Tuomo Hutri paints his frames with generally low-key soft light, capturing the characters’ inner struggles within the range of his shadows.

For the blockbuster-fatigued viewer, there are moments of quiet rest in which to revel.

One shot focuses on Father Jacob sitting down in his garden, backed by a forest and afternoon sun, enjoying the simple blessings around him. Heikki Nousiainen’s face slowly ripples with quiet joy. Watching this, so did mine.

Letters To Father Jacob is an ideal example of the transcendental style described by Paul Schrader, mainly in its way of moving along quietly to a destination of tremendous, unexpected release. The film left me in a state of dazed contemplation and simple awareness of God’s presence. Like Father Jacob, always casting his eyes heavenward, I found my soul looking upwards in thanks for the experience of a film that becomes more than a projected story; it becomes a chance to communicate with my Creator.

This is the best kind of film: one that uses the power of cinema to usher a viewer into the presence of God. The audience becomes a congregation; together we bear witness to a human sibling’s pains and doubts, and we see the humble, life-affirming power of forgiveness. As a rock star once sang, “Grace finds beauty in everything.” But let’s not forget the beauty of grace itself. I don’t think anyone in that hushed theatre will soon forget.

[N.W. Douglas is an undergraduate film student at Simon Fraser University. His blog is "Cinema Truth": http://filmatical.wordpress.com.]

And here they are at last: My ten favorite movies of 2009. (more…)

84 people have already registered for The Glen Workshop.

That’s what Image journal’s publisher Greg Wolfe reported yesterday, when registration finally opened for the public.

So don’t wait! Workshops are filling up fast.

Here’s the tough part. You have to choose. Which workshop or seminar do you want to attend?

• A songwriting workshop with Over the Rhine,
• a drawing workshop with the great Barry Moser,
• a writing workshop with the author of Girl Meets God and Mudhouse Sabbath, Lauren Winner,
• a poetry workshop with the inspiring Marilyn Nelson,
• or a week-long marathon of watching and discussing great international cinema with… well… me,
• or any of these other appealing workshops and seminars…

(more…)

Image has posted Part Two of my year-end reflection on the movies of 2009. Today: #20 – #11.

It’s time for me to join the parade of list-makers…

(more…)

a review by Jeffrey Overstreet

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Magnolia Pictures. Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Starring Sasha Grey, Chris Santos,Peter Zizzo, Glenn Kenny. Written by Brian Koppelman and David Levien. 77 minutes. Rated R (for sexual content, nudity and language).

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No, I can’t say I found it fun to watch a real porn star (Sasha Grey) dramatize an expensive call-girl’s tedious, humiliating, self-destructive work.

But I can say I found it, um, “revealing” to watch The Girlfriend Experience — Steven Soderbergh’s meditation on the soul-killing effects of capitalism gone wrong.

As Christine, aka “Chelsea”, goes about her work, we observe her chameleonic behavior in a series of encounters and transactions with her male customers. We watch her make ethical compromises until she seems to be a heartless opportunist. But then we begin to catch glimpses of a damaged soul through cracks in that chilly facade. And the movie becomes a harrowing character sketch for the damage that the relentless competition of capitalism can do to the spirit.

I’m not talking about the actress when I say that this may be Soderbergh’s most visually enchanting film. (One of the film’s mysteries, for this viewer anyway, is Chelsea’s appeal. She could be “the girl next door,” made up for a day at the mall, except that her jewelry and clothes are apparently quite expensive.) Chelsea’s world is all about sexy, glamorous surfaces – exteriors that distract from the ordinary, the hollow, and the corrupt – and Soderbergh’s cinematography demonstrates this exquisite colors and graceful lines that illustrate scenes of chilling lifelessness.

Grey is certainly convincing as a woman bored beyond belief by her customers and yet willing to perform whatever function—sexual, therapeutic, or (most importantly) maternal—they desire. And she does it all to achieve… what, exactly? Some kind of success, some kind of fame, some kind of control.

Christine has a boyfriend who wants her companionship and who seems to be fine with the nature of her work. He may even really like her in some way; there’s a gentleness in his way with her, at first, that is almost persuasive. Neverthless, he’s furniture for Chelsea… something to lounge on. She’s very ready to consider other options. This is a shopper’s market after all.

As Chelsea listens—or better, “listens”—to her clients, we’re as bored by the things they tell her as we are slowly horrified by how desperate these apparently wealthy and resourceful men have become for real intimacy. She exists, it is clear, to amplify the very egos that have incapacitated and distorted each customer’s conscience and capacity for love.

But Chelsea isn’t the only character of interest. We also meet a personal trainer, whose “intimate” relationships with his weight-lifting customers exists on a frightfully similar plane, with similarly dishonest and tenuous vocabulary. And so the movie begins to suggest just how every line of work, however sophisticated, can devolve into a form of prostitution.

Accentuating the unnatural emptiness of this world, the scenes in Soderbergh’s film challenge us to consider their chronology. The “narrative arc” is so slight that he might have mixed up the order just to mess with us, or maybe not. It was a flaw in John Hillcoat’s The Road that the film’s scenes could be shuffled like a deck of cards without much of an impact on the audience, here it’s an enhancement of Soderbergh’s apparent thesis that the life of consumerism, episodic and transaction-oriented as it is, merely sustains life without contributing to growth of forward motion. What is Chelsea’s story, anyway?

We come to see a picture of a world in which all relationships are self-centered and exploitative. It’s as desolate as any landscape I’ve ever seen in a film. If I had to place it on a map of movies, it would reside in the neighborhood of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, in that it depicts the inevitable outcome of a culture that divorces sex from intimacy. At least post-apocalyptic movies like The Road give us human beings who know love and conscience. This pre-apocalypse film shows that, for some people, the real world has already ended, replaced by something they’ve been fooled into believing is “even better than the real thing.”

And it’s a timely movie. The reality of pending economic collapse is likely to leave these hearts in ruins, which might be the best possible outcome for all involved.