Sweet and poetry madness and punk: Scandinavian cinema in the spotlight on Filmo<

Scandinavian cinema counts among its representatives some of the greatest filmmakers in activity. This is an opportunity to pay tribute to them, with Filmo.

Willingly caricatured as an airtight cinema, not really funny, even authorizing to the extreme, just good to stimulate the cerebral hemispheres of Parisian spectators in descent of quinoa. Except that on the contrary, Denmark, Sweden and Norway remain great creative breeding grounds, dotted with singular, original, unexpected creations.

Filmo devotes a rich selection to it, let's talk about some of the films available on the streaming platform. For once, we will not go back to the best known, such as the amazing The Silent Warrior - Valhalla Rising by Nicolas Winding Refn or the splashing provocations of Lars von Trier, numerous and available. The same goes for the impressive Thomas Vinterberg, of whom several films, including the cult Festen, have joined the platform.

However, the opportunity was too good not to offer you a look at more original, but also rarer productions, which you will sometimes only find on Filmo.

The famous magic of cinema

SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR

It is no exaggeration to present Roy Andersson's film as one of the most beautiful and strange in the history of cinema. Fruit of twenty years of preparation, then of a shooting spread over four years (all the same) Songs of the second floor is a fascinating sequence of sketches. With their systematic use of the wide-angle, the permanent choice of the sequence shot, as if of a great plastic coherence, one would quickly believe that we are dealing with a pictorial experimentation ultimately far removed from cinematographic narration.

But not at all, Andersson injects here the phenomenal experience accumulated over the hundreds of clips he has directed, and generates an unprecedented cinematographic space, in which he brings out an art of movement, rhythm and truly stunning poetry. Is Swedish society, like many of its characters, gray and depressed? Or does the director like to make up his contemporaries to better question their anxieties, the possible shortcomings of a world that only asks to sink into its own neuroses? We will probably never quite know, but this melancholy spectacle of a gallery of characters inevitably leaving the common rails remains an absolutely unique spectacle.

Lil Pump on his success: "Nobody has done what I've done at da age of 18."https://t.co/10h6CarBVE https://t.co/PGWVK79AWa

— Complex Tue May 14 22:07:10 +0000 2019

MONGOLOID GUITAR

With Snow Therapy then The Square, Ruben Östlund scattered Cannes like a puzzle, imposed a tone that was both sarcastic and radical, allowing him, under the guise of an aggressive comedy of manners, to address the wrongs, spinelessness and petty betrayals of well-to-do individuals. But before leaving with the Palme d'Or, this good Ruben had been practicing his art for some time. Long invisible in France, his first films were unearthed by Filmo, which allows us today to revisit an exciting start to his career.

What if everyone was a little confused? This is the question we can ask ourselves while watching Guitar Mongoloïd, an astonishing choral film, and its gallery of delirious portraits. Four remained explode bicycles, until meeting a duo of consequent motorcyclists. A young boy as gifted for the guitar as a warthog for rhythmic gymnastics tries his hand at punk, under the fascinated gaze of a somewhat complacent adult, and then there will also be this sequence of Russian roulette, astonishing in suspense and of weirdness. Like all the films that followed it, this first exercise is troubled, astonishing, capable of moments of suspended grace and grueling tension.

Dog punk will become big

OSLO, AUGUST 31

Many spectators have recently discovered the fascinating Joachim Trier thanks to the solar Julie (in 12 chapters), which won an award a few months ago at Cannes. But the artist was not at his first attempt, and we owed him at least a very great success entitled Oslo, August 31. The film was quite a challenge since it is an adaptation of Le Feu Follet by Drieu La Rochelle. A poetic and complex text, narrating the last day, in the streets of Versailles, of a young man resolved to commit suicide. Trier moves the action to Oslo and miraculously manages to transcend its program as hard as it is trying, to offer us a singularly luminous story.

Because the director wants to pay homage to the capital of Norway, he strives to magnify the scenery his hero is going through, as if the entire city, about to become his tomb, was crossed by a light sacred. Chronicle of melancholy and depression that seeks everything except to overwhelm the viewer, the story takes the pulse of a young man who has decided to end it all, in a gesture of great tenderness, of a delicate humanity. and ultimately overwhelming. Never judging his protagonists, the director prefers to offer a sensitive portrait, with the air of ointment. Rare and precious.

A little Xanax, and it starts again!

ULTIMATUM (THE KING'S CHOICE)

Another exclusive to the Filmo platform, here is The King's Choice, which retraces a few hours that decided the fate of Norway. As the Nazis began to annex the country, the Reich's troops had the ambition to reach an agreement with the Norwegian monarch, which would make them the legal and legitimate repositories of authority. To enable his country to prepare to resist, but also his people to flee the German invader, the King had to urgently decide on the attitude to adopt and the doctrine to defend.

A war film, a study of a sacrifice as much as a frantic pursuit film, the film directed by Erik Poppe avoids most of the pitfalls of historical re-enactment in costume, just as it does not overplay the figure of civilization tottering in the face of to the filthy beast, preferring to qualify and question its protagonists as to the nature of their choices, without falling into the talkative pensum. And for good reason, the director is also the author of one of the shocks of recent years, Utoya, July 22, an immersion in the horror of a particularly violent attack. We are therefore all the more interested in the rest of his career.

Casino Royale's Mr White has risen to prominence

And to find all the films in this selection on Filmo, it's here!

This is an article published as part of a partnership. But what is a Large Screen partnership?