Black Coal, Thin Ice is an unusual and evocative title. Unfortunately it also has nothing to do with the film’s Chinese title which translates literally as Daylight Fireworks, a phrase that is relevant in the story in at least a couple of instances but is less poetic in English. The discrepancy is notable enough that director Diao Yinan addressed it but I’m not sure that his explanation makes much sense. At least this choice suggests that he has a good sense of aesthetics, as the film itself aptly proves.
For the benefit of everyone who isn’t an expert on insects, let me just say that this film has nothing to with dukes or the region of Burgundy. Instead, the title of this film refers to a specific species of butterfly. Since this never gets said in the movie itself, I had to go and look it up. What this film is about is the sadomasochistic relationship between two women with insects, butterflies and moths in particular, being a recurrent theme.
I haven’t mentioned this before but the reason why I’ve taken to adding the date of release behind each of the movies that I write about is that the same titles are used often enough that confusion is a real issue, and that is without even going into the question of remakes. As such this Russian film that was released last year has nothing to do with the American documentary that I wrote about not too long ago despite sharing the same title though the Biblical allusion in both cases are obvious.
Double Indemnity is probably a film that needs no introduction. It is considered the paradigmatic film of the noir genre and set the stage for all others noir films to come. After watching it however, I realized that it’s highly unusual even for a noir film. The protagonist in this case is neither a police officer nor a private investigator. Instead, he is, as the audience learns from the opening narration, both the mastermind and the perpetrator of the crime that is at the center of this film.
Remember how I wrote that I didn’t much care for anthology films after watching Amores perros? Well, this is yet another anthology film except that it does things right. This is a collection of no less than eighteen short films with a total length of about two hours, each of them shot by a different director and cast, some of whom are pretty famous celebrities. What they have in common is that they’re all set in Paris and have something to do with love of one kind or another.
Wild was a pick that was added by my wife and indeed it ticks many of her boxes: it stars Reese Witherspoon, an actress that she likes, it has vaguely feminist themes and it’s about hiking in the great outdoors. As an adaption of a popular memoir and a film directed by Jean-Marc Vallée following the incredible success of Dallas Buyers Club, it was always going to be a highly prominent release. After watching this however, it seems to me that Witherspoon is its real auteur more so than the director as it was made by her production company and indeed she worked hard to obtain the filming rights even before the book was officially published.
It was only after finishing this that I learned that it is actually considered part of director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s loose trilogy of films that he made at the beginning of his career. Oddly enough, we’ve now watched all three of the films but I’m pretty sure that we did so in reverse order. This one is more like Babel than 21 Grams however in that it is an anthology of three separate stories, all of which are set in Iñárritu’s native Mexico.
