When I Say "Rotter," You Say "Dam!"

Based on the action on Letterboxd, it seems I'm the only person who isn't doing Sundance by remote. So far, Rotterdam has been a meager substitute, but I'll take what I can get. And of course, I'm always up for any spare links (though I figure they've got everything on a dedicated streaming site). Anyway....

Gritt (Itonje Søimer Guttormsen, 2021)

A pleasant surprise, in that Guttormsen has taken care to craft a narrative in which we are never certain exactly how to feel about our protagonist. If I were blurbing Gritt, I might call it a combination of Östlung's The Square and Ade's The Forest For the Trees. But that probably makes this film sound schematic, which it definitely is not. Gritt (an electric Birgitte Larsen) is a would-be performance artist who seems to exist on the periphery of various creative cliques in Oslo, but cannot establish herself as a mover and shaker. To make matters worse, she is surrounded by far more successful folks who are happy to exploit her for free labor.

The thing that really complicates Gritt is that the film never explicitly tells us whether Gritt is talentless, or merely raw and unformed. Unlike those around her, she lacks a college education, and so she isn't savvy about positioning her proposals in grant-speak, or hitting the necessary lefty / diversity points. The successful artists around Gritt seem no more or less capable than her, so Guttormsen leaves the question open. Is this a whole scene of poseurs? Or is Gritt the experimental theatre verson of Mr. Brainwash, just hovering around genuinely creative people without having coherent ideas of her own? Presented in five chapters, Gritt observes an ordinary woman with a drive to be extraordinary, as she slips further and further into hopelessness and penury. Strong stuff.

Landscapes of Resistance (Marta Popivoda, 2021)

A perfectly agreeable film that I could have continued watching, but I bailed at the 45 minute mark. That's partly because this struck me as a film that should not have been so agreeable. The primary basis of Landscapes is an extended interview with 97-year-old Sonja, a Communist Partisan fighter who is sent to Auschwitz following the German invasion of Serbia. Popivoda shows Sonja occasionally, but most of the visual track consists of fixed-frame images of the Serbian landscape that slowly, almost imperceptibly fade into one another. The effect is often lovely. I was reminded of the experimental work of Katherin McInnis and especially Vincent Grenier. And while I'm certain that the places shown have direct relevance to Sonja's story, it felt to me that there was no formal connection between image and sound. It was a bit like oil floating on water; I wanted to reach in and shake it up.