[ad_1]
The story is simple and easy to summarize. A young woman (Jesse Buckley) may call herself Lucy, Louise, or Amy, perhaps a writer, painter, or quantum physics teacher, on the way with her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Blemens) to visit and meet her parents, despite their doubts and thoughts. about ending the relationship. After a relatively long flight; They arrive at their parents’ house. On the way back, they pass Jake’s old school. This classic narration of the story does not appear, of course, in the film, because Kaufman always aims during the narration to create an extraordinary visual experience, in which the only interpretation is for the viewer, not for the concrete or apparent on the screen . Therefore, Kaufman does not try to hide his metaphors, symbolisms or allusions. Once we stop thinking or understand why the young woman’s jacket has changed color or why Mom and Dad (Tony Collette and David Thelis) are happy sometimes, and two sick old men at other times, the movie stops giving us that great feeling of disorientation. Throughout the film, the director gives us visual “clues” about the emotional state of the characters. For example, Jake talks several times about his solution for driving in the snow: “I have chains”, but we repeatedly understand what he means. For this reason and others, the tools of cinematographic language are evolving: the aspect ratio that changes, the abrupt cut of inaccurate scenes, the camera that moves almost arbitrarily (the cinematographer is the Polish director Lukac Zal, filming director of movies like “Ida” and “War Genial” by Polish director Pavel Pavlikowski) … all of them are tools and elements that Kaufman used to create this strange world, not to mention that the characters were portrayed in a way that makes them change role easily. For example, the young woman is not only this girl who wants to end things, but also becomes an art and film critic. Parents can also become a cartoon presentation of the potential future that awaits them. the two young men.
In the long series of conversations that take place between the girl and her boyfriend in the car, on the way back and forth; Some of the themes that appeared in the film are discussed. One in particular refers to the idea of colors, and the argument is that there are no colors in the universe, but only in our brains. Shortly before that, Jake says, “We don’t move in time, time passes through us.” These are small signs that the film is increasingly distancing itself from what we understand by reality. Kaufman continues as a filmmaker, exploring the nature of existence in a fun but serious way, gradually becoming deeper, darker, and less playful. The stories are dominated by the traumatic character, as is the verbal confusion suffered by the characters, especially when the traditional time begins to incorporate everything that has happened, is happening and will happen. This thing reveals the nature of what we see, and that the world that seems to exist outside is different from the world that we create inside through our thoughts, that it may be the only real thing in all of life, and that is what gives entity to what we call reality, especially in the family home, which looks like a kind of haunted house similar to a David Lynch movie theater, where weirdness mixes with horror, superstition and simple wit.
Conversations in the car are characteristic. Conversations between two intellectual people, intelligent and capable of citing authors, directors and painters, and sharing existential ideas such as “Human beings invented hope in order to face the certainty of death”. Long discussions about cinema, literature and philosophy, about David Foster Wallace and his suicide, about Oscar Wilde and Anna Kavan, about John Casavetis and his films, especially the film “Woman under the Influence” (1974) and the actress Gina Rowland, and a long quote on film criticism written by film critic Pauline Kyle at the time. … about Guy Debor and William Wordsworth. And we cannot forget the film parody of Robert Zemex. Kaufman manipulates us all the time, multiplying the bet on imagination, manipulating time and the idea of what we see, with numbers, music, cartoons and dance, with the last letter literally extracted from Ron Howard’s speech “A Beautiful Mind “(2001), Broadway musicals, and the side story of a school cleaner. That runs parallel to the main story.
Everything bursts onto the screen at random, reminding us that there are deeper secrets than we can discover. What may seem chaotic at first ends with the strange accumulation of all these elements creating a surreal world where anything is possible. Everything happens in the movie and each element adds a new degree of pain. Soft snow at first turns into a real and dangerous blizzard. The path becomes a maze, one wants to escape from it, but cannot. In the end, it all seems pointless, says Jake. Everything becomes as if we are inside the mind, the memories and the psyche of an “old man” imagining the relationship that unites him with his family and his wife, if there is one.
Although the film is based on the novel of the same title by Lain Reed; But Kaufman wrote the entire script and gave himself the freedom to turn the novel into a movie he likes. The characters are desperate and want to escape, either from failure or from life itself. Dissatisfied. He seems to be able to find relief only in abstractions translated into images. The movie is closely related to feelings. It depends on the way we decide to express something or the way we remember our memories. And it depends mainly on our emotional state, there is nothing objective, everything is colored by our perception of what we have in front of us. The film at the end will leave us exhausted and affected, as if the emotional instability of the characters infects us like a virus. Kaufman loves contrast and loves to break with typical movie rules. The result is a tragicomedy film about a relationship that is falling apart, and a confusing and surreal tale open to multiple interpretations. The experimental streak, the visual and narrative audacity, the gloomy tone and the existential questioning of cinema that cannot be predicted or classified … are stressful and tiring things in the film.
The experimental streak, the visual and narrative boldness, the bleak tone, and the existential questioning are exhausting things in the film.
Kaufman drowns and writes, relying on the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan. Behavior of Watson and Skinner. Derrida and Foucault’s poststructuralism, and existentialist philosophers like Heidegger and Sartre. When talented directors like Spike Jones (“Being John Malkovich” (1999), “Adaptation” (2002)) and Michel Gondry (“The Eternal Radiance of the Enlightened Mind” (2004)) turn their screenplay into a film, their writing becomes on film. The narrative is forceful, confusing, elegant, sarcastic, and highly entertaining. And when he is the director of what he writes (“Synecdoche, New York (2008),“ Nomalisa ”(2015)), his writings take a dark, heavy, complex, more theatrical, daring, experimental path and less receptive to the public. Kaufman has a knack for showing how well he knows and how much he reads, without making us feel cocky. Much of the criticism is directed at other directors who appear to be making movies or writing dialogue to show the scope of their culture. But with Kaufman, somehow, and for some reason, this abundant literary and artistic culture seems natural and meaningful, because not only does he fill the film with these references to increase the talk, but because what is happening and what is being said is a spoken speech repertoire, to the point where you think about using the Pauline Kyle review as a plot is not a huge obstacle to getting a large portion of the audience understanding the script. It certainly is not.
The movie is a great mystery. Jump from scene to scene looking for clues. It is a long reflection of the difference between what happens and what could happen and the ongoing conflict between the two. It’s a long road trip interrupted by an embarrassing family dinner and a visit to an old school. It is impossible to travel to memory and even parallel dimensions in a metaphysical rather than a purely material sense. It is a love’s movie. Hate and self-flagellation. It is nostalgia and memories of a fragile being on the way to collapse. It is also, more realistically, a film about how pop culture, entertainment, and advertising in all its forms can shape not only our perception of reality, but also, above all, our memories and imaginations. It is the story of a boy obsessed with knowledge, who saves as much information as possible to always provide him with a frame of reference, a rational stone for interpreting the world.
At its best, the film’s third act says almost everything the film has ever wanted to say. And it makes the first two chapters feel like the way Kaufman clears his throat before screaming. The film is readable no matter how we feel and see it. Nothing is clear and nothing is taken for granted, and all readings are correct. Kaufman doesn’t care about the explanation, only the delivery method. “I leave people with their experiences, so I have no expectations of what they will think. I really support anyone’s explanation. “Fatigue, of course, like all Kaufman movies. But all the mysteries in the movie serve him well. In the end,” I’m thinking about finishing things “doesn’t hide much from the audience. In other words, it’s the way Kaufman presents things, we might find out, maybe not. This is what the characters go through, we may or may not understand.
* I’m thinking of finishing things on Netflix.
