P. P. Rider is even better than his first two films which I felt were already masterfully executed. The pace is brisker. The shots tighter and more ballet like, cycling across multiple crammed compositions in almost every single scene, with several sequences you must see to believe. Yet it's always hitting storytelling or emotional beats.
I love the sheer irreverence here, and how he crosses humanism with formalism, while letting it function through performance as a theater. Every interest he has on screen reads for us. You almost don't want to imagine cinema any other way. That is the mark of a director who reinvents the language.
The film is such a romp. I loved the fireworks out the window in the samurai sword bit, and how the director does not even try to keep the projection fixed. This kind of creative anarchy shows a total lack of pretentiousness. The boy band number--really by that point it is just an exercise of how far he and the performers can take a scene. Because unbroken scenes become feats. Those funny police men. And then this idea of this monster of a bully completely humiliated across its entire running time is a kind of hilarious revenge for us.
I have been on a French New Wave kick before these and this is like Truffaut times five. This just takes all that energy, playfulness and style way farther, and how impossible it does this through the very opposite style of the fantastical, through a gritty realism.
If there is a criticism it is that the Kurosawa-like mania of the piece may take away from the peaks of his earlier slowburns, and the soul of them. I came away from his first two films far more moved. But gradually I see an artist in Somai who is a master, restlessly trying to upstage himself and constantly coming up big.
