anders-sornes

The acting is a masterpiece of chambre play magic. The cinematic engine put to work with what it does best, to image the cognitive process, to allow us to experience rather than watch from the outside the disintegration of the self, until its constituents left like rubble on the floor, early childhood, melancholic or show man, characters alternatingly appearing out of thin air in the spiralling mental rewind. And the saddened realization of all the missing time, all the gaps, the five years obviously lost between anne being martied and going to paris without a minute passing, the years of not seeing lucy felt as months and eventually the time gap from being an infant with a mother to being an old man with a daughter perceived as simultaneous. The film medium is strikingly well suited to depict this breakdown of time, chronology and causality, because it is the editing language by which we read film, hence his lack of mental grip over these becomes our frustration and our lack of comprehension, and yet still we can cinematically also read what he is left with - an association montage, scenes linked by resemblance only.

Expectations were high, but this did not quite do it for me. As is said in the film itself (pardon my memory) - The ideas are all in there, but the characters are woody and I don't believe in it. By all means, Glenn Close and Johnathan Pryce have some moments of staggering performances, as one could have expected, but it unfortunately does not help, the story is overdone, over-expressed and badly told in my humble opinion. Especially the couple portrayed in their youth is very unconvincing, cartoonish and it is seems very unlikely that these are younger versions of the characters portrayed by Jonathan and Glenn, they differ too much in terms of physical resemblance, body language, tics, quirks and general personality. And the script is over-telling the story: Why do we have to both be told by Christian Slater what the truth is, and at the same time being repeatedly shown it by flash back of cartoon characters that tell us in words as well as show us? And the story itself could have been more powerful had it been less blatant and had it also been revealed to us more gradually and subtly. The idea is good and the subject is extremely interesting, it just did not get the treatment it deserves. It leaves a thought: Unlike nobel prizes in physics or medicine or indeed unlike scientific authorship in general, isn't it a rather strange phenomenon how books throughout history almost exclusively have had a single author?

It is a battle of mind vs body - and unfortunately the mind is clearly the most primitive one. The mind is obsessed with social status, fear of expulsion, superficiality and transient environmental influences. But the body is to be suppressed by the ´superior´ mind in control, it must be denied, controlled and blocked out; conscious decisions must be defined to defy it. For the body is not rational, is it? It is not consciously supervised - and since its decisions are not supervised, it should be disregarded; It is only a product of one hundred thousands years of rationality and probably relies on more sophisticated calculations and more complex manifolds of inputs than the conscious mind could ever process, but it needs to be discarded and diminished because it is not reviewed, contemplated, or controlled. This is the modern stance. But how does it feel?