When I wrote about the first part of this trilogy, I mentioned how each film corresponds with a colour of the French national flag but didn’t talk about how each colour also corresponds with one of the values of the French national motto. In the case of Bleu, I found its interpretation of liberty in a personal sense to be interesting but not especially insightful. In the case of Blanc, it is impossible to see it as anything other than an explicit attempt at the restoration of equality.
Our oft-mentioned but unnamed cinephile friend claimed that this film left him flummoxed. For that alone, even if The Double weren’t already on our watch list, I would have put it there. Of course, after I’d watched it, it was my turn to be bewildered. But as my wife explained, this is a film that does most of its work on a symbolic level. While there are plenty of ambiguities over who’s real and what happened, trying to work out some sort of literal truth is a fool’s errand. What matters is understanding its themes and they mean.
Quite a few articles for this month and a day earlier too! I just wanted to get this done before getting back to writing about movies.
Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy is on the recommended list of a Coursera course that my wife is taking on the making of short films, so expect to see me write about all three of them in short order. This post covers the first of them which stars Juliette Binoche and is by most accounts the most accomplished of the three.
My wife and I watched Mad Men for several seasons and were enthralled for a while with its sumptuous portrayal of 1960s America. But we stopped when it became clear that it was turning into just another soap opera with characters that are constantly spinning in place because any actual development would damage the existing dynamic and make them dramatically uninteresting. Looking back, the only character to have any meaningful arc was Peggy Olson and since everyone else, especially Don Draper, is pretty much an asshole, the only character audiences can sympathize with.
One thing’s for sure about this Chinese film, its English title is appalling. Whoever coined it must either have been unaware of the Biblical connotations of this term or believed that it could be meaningfully appropriated for the historical events which are the subject of this film. Either way, it is a mistake made especially egregious because a straightforward Feast at Hong Gate would have been both simpler and better. Fortunately, this is pretty much the worst thing I have to say about this movie because everything else is utterly fantastic.
This starts out promisingly enough. Bradley Cooper plays Pat Solatano, a man who is just about to be released from an involuntary stay in a mental health facility. When he starts tearing a doctor’s office apart to stop a song that he keeps hearing in his head, he goes from being an eccentric weirdo to someone you want to stay as far away from as possible. Then you learn that he nearly beat a man for death for having an affair with his wife, insists on not taking his medication, obsessively keeps trying to meet with his wife in spite of a restraining order and generally makes life hell for the parents he stays with. Sure, you think, it looks like his relationship with his wife is fucked, but at least Silver Linings Playbook is shaping out to be a decent film that takes mental illnesses seriously.