Herz aus Glas (Heart Of Glass)

The film was written by Herzog, based partly on a story by Herbert  Achternbusch.  The setting is an 18th century Bavarian town with a glassblowing factory which produces a brilliant red ruby glass. When the master glass blower dies, the secret to producing the ruby glass is lost.  The factory owner is obsessed with the ruby glass and believes it to have magical properties.  Several of the characters appear to be "mad" , either  mentally or emotionally.  One Young woman  is shown in various situations indicating that she is not of sound mind,  stripping her clothes off  and turning in a daze ,in a state of  mental unconsciousness.  The owner's father , an elderly man who is shown wearing clothing befitting an aristocrat,  yet he babbles and laughs uncontrollably , all the while refusing to walk. The overall perspective  of Heart of Glass reflects Herzog's grim vision of hopelessness.  Man's efforts to understand  the universe and build a humane civilisation are doomed to failure in the face of  his own depravity and the incomprehensibly vastness of great nature . Our so-called civilisation has tried to tame nature , but it is based on reductionist mechanism and increasingly drives us further away from any chance of harmony within it.

Vaastu Purush

The film begins in present-day Mumbai where a middle aged doctor Bhaskar Deshpande comes to know that he has received an award for his work among the city's slum-dwellers.  He decides to return his native village and build a hospital at the place of the ruins of his home , just to appease his family's guardian spirit.  Vaastu Purush means Guardian of The House.  After returning to village ,  he starts remembering about his childhood.   Though he was born in a feudal family but now the earnings of the family are meagre.  His mother wants her son to become a doctor and serve the poor.  VaastuPurush  is about memory, about loss  and remembrance , about the interplay between times past,  the present and possibly the unborn feature.  Vaastu Purush can also be seen as one illiterate woman's determination to ensure that her son breaks away from the degenerate feudal background of his once affluent family and becomes a doctor to help cure the needy.  The performances were good by all but the one performance which stands out is by Mahesh Elkunchwar who played the grown-up Dr Bhaskar.

Only God Forgives

A brilliant, macabre and ultraviolent anti-revenge film by Refn. The film has deep character development, little dialogue, extreme violence mixed with soft music.  Julian (Ryan Gosling)  is an American living in Bangkok , Thailand  who runs a boxing club , which is actually  a front for a massive drug smuggling operation.  Respected in the underworld  ,deep inside, he feels empty.    Lieutenant Chang , known as the "Angel of Vengeance"  kills Julian's brother for raping a woman.   Julian's mother Crystal  (Kristin Scott Thomas)  arrives in Bangkok and demands Julian to find the killer and  kill him.    Chang is shown as God's representative on earth.   Julian seems to be mesmerized by the near -mythical "Angel of Vengeance" .  It is Chang who glides through the film with mysterious precision and ambiguity .  Pansringarm doesn't have dialogues but is terrific as a violent cop who respects the sanctity of justice  but defies the law and even ethics to maintain justice.  Also the film is about oedipal issues of Gosling's character ,whose mother is played to excellence by Kristin Scott Thomas.  She even calls Gosling's beautiful girlfriend a "cum dumpster".  Refn's direction , Larry Smith's cinematography and Beth Mickle's production design are all superb.  Refn approaches violence like sexuality and considers a film as a build up to a climax.  Considering the impressive balance of violence ,sex and ideology in his films ,he is a very good director.

En la ciudad de Sylvia

Almost devoid of  dialogue , the film tells about an artist who returns to a city in search of a woman he met six years earlier.   For three days ,  he sits at the cafe outside the Conservatoire sketching the people around him.   Eventually he finds a girl who looks like her and stalks her through the city.  Finally he works up the nerve to say hello  ; she claims not to be the one he seeks ; they part ways.   But in the hands of the director
Luis Guerin , this is enough to construct a frequently hypnotic,  if sometimes irritating,  meditation on the act of looking.  It's a profile of a city paradise , where we hear only sounds of footsteps and overheard, muffled conversations , but we are presented with a picture of extreme beauty and wonderment.  The film mainly explores the themes like desire ,beauty and silent interaction of society.  As an ostensibly subjective film ,it also includes  many mysterious scenes where the identity of the observer is ambiguous.  The director has captured  the obsessive and mysterious compulsiveness of yearning and the ways in which it can take over our consciousness.

To vlemma tou Odyssea

The film explores the idea of how people must go through their personal Odyssey to reach their destination with an unbelievable poetic quality.  The basic tale is that a nameless exiled Greek-American filmmaker named A (played by Harvey Keitel ) returns to the Balkans after thirty-five years , and is seeking to find  three lost reels of footage from the earliest known extant Greek film , made by the Manakis brothers in 1905.   His quest takes him across changing countries , bounders and war torn cities.  The Romanian actress ,Maia Morgenstern, plays the parts of the four women.  These women can easily be identified with the women  Homer's Ulysses came across  during his voyage.  They also represent all the women whom "A" had loved and lost in past.  The search for the reels of film works as a metaphor for  a search for the common history of  the Balkan countries.  His odyssey , from Ptolemais through Albania ,Bulgaria and Romania , to Belgrade and Sarajevo, allows for a reflection on changing borders , national identity, and the relationship of film to historical and political reality.   Keitel speaks mostly in English, while most of the other characters speak in Greek and other native languages. Keitel gives a good performance in this film about a man's search for missing film reels. But the best performance of the film comes from Maia Morgenstern . She is brilliant. 

Giorgos Arvanitis, Angelopoulos's long time collaborator ,is responsible for  the stunning cinematography.  Many of the scenes are long shots ,that are also long takes , lasting several minutes, Angelopoulos's great signature. The direction is great -beautiful scenery ,  wonderful mesmeric tracking shots and long takes make for a great visual experience.  However working in several  languages takes it's toll and much of the English narration is weak and clumsy.

Die Wand

A woman inexplicably finds herself cut off from all human contacts when an invisible , unyielding wall suddenly surrounds the countryside.  In an eerie sequence , we later learn that people on the other side of the wall have been frozen in time -meaning that the woman is not only trapped alone , but also quite possibly the last person left alive on earth.  Martina Gedeck's performance , which must have been physically demanding in the extreme, is phenomenal - only occasionally does she directly express outward emotion , but in her interaction with animals and the landscape,  she creates a powerful impression of her character's coming to merge with the great outdoors.  She's left with a dog named Lynx (the director's own hound) , a cow and a couple of cats who prove themselves to be of not much practical use at all.  Gradually, she learns how to survive there , moving past loneliness and fear to a sense of communion with her animals and surroundings. The film , based on a novel by the Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer , doesn't tell us much about the woman , only that she is vacationing in the Austrian mountains when the wall cuts her off.  How our protagonist survives and changes , grows closer to Lynx , and battles several key obstacles ,make up most of the action.