I’ve heard the name of this movie like forever, so I think it made a splash on the scene back then? But I’ve never seen it.
It’s like a hyper-active version of Jim Jarmusch? Or perhaps… a hand-held Robert Altman? It’s very appealing, in any case.
I’m guessing the dialogue is partially improvised? And none of these are professional actors…
It’s a kind of mystery movie — they’re trying to find out what happened to Chan.
I think this is what they’d call “promising”? That is, I think the premise is really interesting, and the approach is fun, but then it sort of peters out and loses interest as it goes along.
I’m continuing my 80s Arthouse Film Festival with this movie — which I haven’t seen before (or indeed any Leos Carax movies, I think). But I got a Carax box set because Denis Lavant is in this, and Claire Denis cast him in Beau Travail because of these movies, so I wanted to have a look.
Hey! That’s very solution orientated.
She’s a woman of culture.
Um… I dunno. This is the sort of film that seems like something I’d really like, but I’m not really feeling it. The performances are super stilted and stylised — but not in a Robert Bresson way, but more like in a fumbley way?
And the plot (FSVO plot) isn’t exactly gripping either.
The film wants to say something about movie history and reality, I think? There’s a lot of people observing other people and stuff. But it seems kinda half baked to me.
It is the debut feature by Leos Carax, a film he directed when he was only 24 years old. Like most of the other films in the cinéma du look movement, in which Carax was a key member, it’s not very story-driven and instead favours strange plot tangents and a cool distance from its characters.
Cinéma du look? Nice.
But I mean… look at these shots. They look amazing. So it’s impossible to just dismiss this movie, even if it’s perhaps mostly just a goofy comedy.
By the end here, I was super impatient with the movie. So:
I’m continuing my 80s arthouse cinema festival with this movie, which I saw at the Cinematheque back in the 80s, but remember exactly nothing about.
Is this the basis of a meme?
Ah, yes, twelve drawings… Which reminds me of The Falls, which I also saw at the Cinematheque. Which is a 92-part series of interviews with people who experienced the Violent Unexplained Event. It was really cool — more than half of the already thin audience disappeared during the viewing.
I mean, it’s more than three hours long, and while it does have a kind of cumulative effect, it’s a lot.
So this is scaling it down a bit.
This is a fascinating movie, but I’m not sure whether the fascination comes from what’s actually happening or because of the cod-Shakespearean dialogue which makes things hover on the edges of comprehensibility.
And, of course, Michael Nyman’s cod-Philip Glass soundtrack doesn’t hurt.
This restored blu ray edition is a bit weird? The white bits are really #fff — they seem digital and blown out. It might have been that way on the original film, but that would have been pretty odd.
And see? There’s like VHS-like artefacts on this, and of course this hasn’t been near a video, so that’s just weird.
It’s like they’ve over-sharpened the film when transferring to digital?
In 2003 the BFI restored the film digitally and this restoration was released on DVD.
It was digitised in 2003? That was the worst possible time, because the tech around that time was just horrible.
Ah yeah. It’s extremely 80s, what with the sort of meta mystery embedded in the movie — and it’s also very unpleasant, what with all the sexual abuse the protagonist (well, perhaps not protagonist, but the main character) perpetrates with a presumed snicker from the audience.
So the Shocking Upper Class Ending falls flat, because I really wanted that guy to die, anyway. And their burning the artwork was supposed to be extra super shocking, but the artwork isn’t very good, so…
I’ve been wondering why there’s no Greenaway movies on the Best Of List, and now I kinda understand: This movie is brilliantly made, but it’s bullshit.
