Movie Impressions

A set of vague impressions on the movies I have remembered watching this year:

True Grit

The Coen Brothers wield the tools of cinematic narrative with understated and quirkily felt virtuosity. This movie again demonstrates a Coen-signature rhythmic command in the integration of the narrative canvas with the life of the characters. Self-audiencehood, or "keenly anticipating detachment", is crucial to the directorial charisma which draws the viewer into the story. Here, the detachment flowers into warmth - we are made to identify finally with the emotions of the characters, the situations, and the myths of the genre. Great acting from Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld temper down the potential risk of disunity when directors whose styles are wedded to unconventionality attempt a straight on genre-remake. There is slight dissastisfaction therefore in the abrasion of storyline and vision, but the sheer skill of all involved lifts the movie into a highly convincing revisit.


Le Notti Bianche

After finishing the movie, I had to look up Visconti. I think it shows a great director at the height of his powers. I cannot recall a more powerful command of the moment in any movie. This was the most fun I had watching the movies in a long time. It is ardent, ardently made, and full of unspeakable things, like all truly great movies. I love Visconti's visual style, a sort of grey area between neorealism and Fellini-esque projection that in a surrealist way, seeks to arrest one into the lived life of the characters. It is full with balance and the impossibility of balance, full of beauty and sadness, and is a kind of emotional statement about duality itself. Brilliant acting, complemented by a soundtrack by Nino Rota, seals this as an all-time favourite. For an example of Viscontian brilliance that sends many directors back to film school, watch the mini-climax in the opera-approach scene. One feels more in that one minute climax alone than one usually does in whole 2 hour movies.


The Silence

What a strange movie! It is a kind of Bergmanesque labyrinth, impossible to approach, and it masks precisely where it reveals. Two sisters, and the son of one, are on a trip, and the story surrounds their taking up lodgings in a hotel in Germany. The landscape is vaguely prewar, but it is impossible to tell. As one expects something along the lines of Winter Light, one gets confused quickly - nevertheless, all becomes clear in recognizing that the two sisters represent two portions of Bergman's psyche - the rational and the sensual, with Bergman as perhaps the boy himself, albeit a strangely silent, impenetrable, opaque one. This movie trades in dualities, and represents the death of "the rational one". But does it? A role reversal, and that of our sympathies certainly takes place - and the death of the over-rational mother brings about an even greater coldness in the dominance of the sensual, as if the sensual existed now only through the judging distance of the camera, a camera that itself rattles away from its previous balances, the debris of its confrontations with the sensual within itself, leaving the scruffy, unrevealed boy behind.