Yesterday, I watched Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s movie “Winter Sleep”. It touched me tremendously at some unnamed level. I did not fully understand why the over 3 hour movie was so striking to me, but it was.

Today I read Daniel Garrett’s take on the movie, and that gave me some clues. I will watch more from Ceylan later; I really liked this first movie of his that I watched.

In the 2000 movie “In the Mood for Love”, directed by Wong Kar-wai (who I have heard about a lot but never watched any of his movies), towards the end of the movie, there is this writing on the screen:

The writing, 那個時代已過去、屬於那個時代的一切都不存在了．, means – according to google translate: “That era has passed, and everything belonging to that era no longer exists.”

I watched this movie for the first time today. It struck me as incredibly beautiful. Why did I not see this movie before?

A passed era. We may remember glimpses of it, or we may re-enact it in our dreams, or write about it, conjuring the bygone times into reality once again, like Kar-wai did with this movie depicting the Hong Kong of the 1960s.

But there is also a lot to say about the visuals of this movie, which I see from reading also is something of a signature move by the director. To have a particular view on the visuals.

I will explore Wong Kar-wai’s movies more. There seems to be 10 movies by him:

Hong Kong is one of my favourite cities in the whole world. I visited it first time in 2000 (I had a gf from Hong Kong from 1999-2004), and the city created it’s own impact on me. More on that another time.

Tonight, I watched my first movie by Frederick Wiseman – his 2023 movie called “Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros”. Here is the movie trailer:

I watched the movie at Cinemateket here in Oslo, which is a cinema that I did not start to visit before December 2023, even though I have lived in Oslo since 2009.

At 4 hours long, I was worried that I would get bored during this movie. But no, I did not. It was mesmerizing. It was wonderful.

A quote from the New York Times review of the movie:

Wiseman’s approach is analytical and dialectical, and only seemingly straightforward. As is customary with his movies, “Menus-Plaisirs” doesn’t have music, voice-over narration, onscreen descriptive text, chapter titles or any other standard hand-holding. Wiseman instead uses images of specific physical spaces — the movie opens on the Roanne railway station and then cuts to its bustling, sumptuously stocked farmer’s market — that immediately establish a strong sense of place. In other words, he grounds you in the world of the movie and then, face by face, shot by shot, scene by scene, steadily fills in its details.

Source

This “sense of place” was important for me – to really get into the flow of the environment at this 3 Michelin stars facility, and how the different people who worked there behaved towards each other.

One of my favourite scenes in the film was the situation where one of the cooks had made an error, and the Chef then showed him in two different books the section he could read in those books to gain the information about that procedure. I loved it so much.

I will watch more Wiseman movies in the future.