The first film of 2009 wasn't such a turkey as last year's; it had a rather toned-down atmosphere.
I read somewhere that it had no dramatic tension, which is true, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Although not necessarily good either. It was a strange film, and I'm still not entirely sure what I thought of it. I suppose its elements of dullness could be seen as a positive thing, showing the dreariness of revolution, showing how dull and drawn out and boring it must've been, rather that the exciting, invigorating thing we tend to assume revolution is. Similarly, Benicio del Toro is so good you forget he's acting.
Friday, 9 January 2009
Monday, 8 December 2008
Waltz With Bashir
In a year packed with good films, this is surely one of the best. The Observer called it "amazing", and I would too except for the fact that I call lots of things amazing and it would soften its impact. So I shall say it was remarkable, I rarely use that word.
If this film marks a direct in which cinema is going, then I am entirely enthusiastic about the future. Ari Folman recognises the limits of documentary and the drawbacks of fiction and moulds a film which is both, and neither. The layers here are fantastic. Folman, a veteran of the Israel-Lebanon war of the early 80s meets a fellow veteran in a bar who is having a recurring dream about the dogs he shot during the war. Folman realises he himself has no memories of the war, he has blocked it out. The film is his search for his memories.
Sorry, I was supposed to be talking about layers. I'll spell them out. Ari Folman is the director and the protagonist. We see him as a character, as if this were a noir fiction. He doesn't quite say "it all started 20 years ago..." but the implication is there.
Talking to friends and fellow veterans it looks like a fiction, sometimes it sounds like a fiction but we have tell-tell signs of a documentary, those signposts to tell us what register the film is in - each person's name and status comes up on screen, there are talking heads, etc etc. Some of these are real conversations, real interviews, animated. Some are imagined/remembered, voiced by actors, such as Folman's trip to Holland to see his friend Carmi, a millionaire falafel seller. They share joints and talk about the war. These are scenes you'd expect in a fiction. In the credits we discover Carmi's words are voiced by an actor. Folman has a recurring image of rising from the sea and walking through Beirut. This is a dream, or a mirage, and has no place in documentary. Nor do the flashbacks. If a documentary has fictional elements they are "reconstructions"; the technique, style and even film-stock change to tell us what the caption tells us, that this is a reconstruction. None of this appears in Waltz With Bashir.
The effect is a nightmare vision of a brutal war, filled with rich, vivid vignettes - the Israeli soldier who swam home down the coast after being ambushed, a soldier dancing in a street sprayed with sniper-fire, holding an AK47 as if it were a partner (this is where the title comes from). It's personal, as one's experience of war can only be; there is no use in listing statistics, figures: it's distancing.
If you do happen to be distanced by the film, perhaps by the animation, into not quite feeling its full hit, the ending will jolt you upright, remind you what it was all about.
If this film marks a direct in which cinema is going, then I am entirely enthusiastic about the future. Ari Folman recognises the limits of documentary and the drawbacks of fiction and moulds a film which is both, and neither. The layers here are fantastic. Folman, a veteran of the Israel-Lebanon war of the early 80s meets a fellow veteran in a bar who is having a recurring dream about the dogs he shot during the war. Folman realises he himself has no memories of the war, he has blocked it out. The film is his search for his memories.
Sorry, I was supposed to be talking about layers. I'll spell them out. Ari Folman is the director and the protagonist. We see him as a character, as if this were a noir fiction. He doesn't quite say "it all started 20 years ago..." but the implication is there.
Talking to friends and fellow veterans it looks like a fiction, sometimes it sounds like a fiction but we have tell-tell signs of a documentary, those signposts to tell us what register the film is in - each person's name and status comes up on screen, there are talking heads, etc etc. Some of these are real conversations, real interviews, animated. Some are imagined/remembered, voiced by actors, such as Folman's trip to Holland to see his friend Carmi, a millionaire falafel seller. They share joints and talk about the war. These are scenes you'd expect in a fiction. In the credits we discover Carmi's words are voiced by an actor. Folman has a recurring image of rising from the sea and walking through Beirut. This is a dream, or a mirage, and has no place in documentary. Nor do the flashbacks. If a documentary has fictional elements they are "reconstructions"; the technique, style and even film-stock change to tell us what the caption tells us, that this is a reconstruction. None of this appears in Waltz With Bashir.
The effect is a nightmare vision of a brutal war, filled with rich, vivid vignettes - the Israeli soldier who swam home down the coast after being ambushed, a soldier dancing in a street sprayed with sniper-fire, holding an AK47 as if it were a partner (this is where the title comes from). It's personal, as one's experience of war can only be; there is no use in listing statistics, figures: it's distancing.
If you do happen to be distanced by the film, perhaps by the animation, into not quite feeling its full hit, the ending will jolt you upright, remind you what it was all about.
Saturday, 29 November 2008
Lemming
Very strange, but entirely gripping, and as I said somewhat enigmatically (even to me!) after it finished, "subtle in an obvious way". Very much a companion piece to Haneke's Hidden, so much so that we should really watch them as double-bills.
Quantum of Solace
God, my masters really is taking its toll on my film-watching!
This was alright, not as good as Casino Royale.
This was alright, not as good as Casino Royale.
Friday, 17 October 2008
Saturday, 4 October 2008
Letter From An Unknown Woman
Part of the reason Brokeback Mountain worked so well was its encapsulation of a perfect - yet limited; doomed - period of time. The first act, the first summer on Brokeback is so exciting, so intoxicating for Jack and Ennis that they are forever doomed to try to recapture it. We as an audience feel it as viscerally as the characters themselves.
Letter From An Unknown Woman, I think, would like to tug on our heart-strings in the same manner. It certainly has the story for it. In Vienna in 1900 a teenager, Lisa, falls in love - from a distance - with her new neighbour, a dashing concert pianist called Stefan Brandt. She swoons to the sounds of his piano coming through the walls, holds doors open for him, watches as he brings home, early in the morning, a succession of beautiful society women. But then her mother decides to marry and moves the family to Linz. But Lisa runs away, back to Vienna, finds a job and every evening stands at the street corner, looking up at Stefan's window. One evening he notices her and a whirlwind romance ensues. There is something about her that fascinates him, something mysterious. But soon he discovers he has to go to Milan for two weeks, and in those two weeks - here the film jumps rather and becomes a bit muddled - Lisa realises she is pregnant. In her voiceover - the titular letter, delivered to Stefan the night before he faces a duel - she says she never told him because she wanted to be the "one woman who never asked you for anything". So their lives part, she raises her son, marries a respectable army fellow, but while he apparently forgets her, she never does he.
A decade later, at the opera, he spots her and something - he doesn't know what - stirs in him. She notices him and runs out; they bump into each other in the foyer. "There's something about you," he says, "I can't put my finger on it." The next day, she goes to his house, taking white roses, intended to remind him of their first evening together, when he bought her a single white rose. But he doesn't remember her, and as he goes to his cupboard for champagne, she runs out. We fade back into the present, Stefan finishes the letter, full of remorse for those years of missed opportunities. He looks up at his mute butler. "You remembered her," he says. The butler nods:
As you can see, it's there on a plate. And as I wrote that, I had a few second thoughts, that maybe it just took time to effect me. But. It should've been the most tragic love story. And in some ways it is. But with these sorts of stories everything needs to be pitch perfect, you need to come to the end with that sense of loss etched on you so much you take it away from the cinema with you; that it sticks to you for days. This film didn't do that. And I'm SUCH a sucker for tragic love stories. I am buying Stefan Zweig's original novella as I write this as I want the feeling the film should've given me! I don't know whether it was the acting, direction, the adaptation. Something in it didn't quite click - it is so, so, so close, but not quite. I suppose that's quite apt.
Letter From An Unknown Woman, I think, would like to tug on our heart-strings in the same manner. It certainly has the story for it. In Vienna in 1900 a teenager, Lisa, falls in love - from a distance - with her new neighbour, a dashing concert pianist called Stefan Brandt. She swoons to the sounds of his piano coming through the walls, holds doors open for him, watches as he brings home, early in the morning, a succession of beautiful society women. But then her mother decides to marry and moves the family to Linz. But Lisa runs away, back to Vienna, finds a job and every evening stands at the street corner, looking up at Stefan's window. One evening he notices her and a whirlwind romance ensues. There is something about her that fascinates him, something mysterious. But soon he discovers he has to go to Milan for two weeks, and in those two weeks - here the film jumps rather and becomes a bit muddled - Lisa realises she is pregnant. In her voiceover - the titular letter, delivered to Stefan the night before he faces a duel - she says she never told him because she wanted to be the "one woman who never asked you for anything". So their lives part, she raises her son, marries a respectable army fellow, but while he apparently forgets her, she never does he.
A decade later, at the opera, he spots her and something - he doesn't know what - stirs in him. She notices him and runs out; they bump into each other in the foyer. "There's something about you," he says, "I can't put my finger on it." The next day, she goes to his house, taking white roses, intended to remind him of their first evening together, when he bought her a single white rose. But he doesn't remember her, and as he goes to his cupboard for champagne, she runs out. We fade back into the present, Stefan finishes the letter, full of remorse for those years of missed opportunities. He looks up at his mute butler. "You remembered her," he says. The butler nods:
As you can see, it's there on a plate. And as I wrote that, I had a few second thoughts, that maybe it just took time to effect me. But. It should've been the most tragic love story. And in some ways it is. But with these sorts of stories everything needs to be pitch perfect, you need to come to the end with that sense of loss etched on you so much you take it away from the cinema with you; that it sticks to you for days. This film didn't do that. And I'm SUCH a sucker for tragic love stories. I am buying Stefan Zweig's original novella as I write this as I want the feeling the film should've given me! I don't know whether it was the acting, direction, the adaptation. Something in it didn't quite click - it is so, so, so close, but not quite. I suppose that's quite apt.
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