afair

A diptych proclaiming its sources as Goethe and Dostoevsky, two writers, here at least, divided by colour and monochrome respectively. The film opens with a wonderful medium close up of a young woman/girl, eating a double cheeseburger. The shot is held for the entirety of the process, the young girl is sanctified by the neon world in which she is standing. This shot had me, after seeing a lot of very ordinary films that week, in rapture. The clarity of the cinematography and the audacity to engage me in what is a very long film (197 minutes), in fact its length may in fact be its genius. The first half in glorious colour, examining the nature of thwarted desire, the second half in magnificent monochrome dealing with thwarted desire. A film packed with beautiful images and intriguing juxtapositions offers the viewer a re-view of Christian iconography as striking as renaissance painting, the delight as we follow characters both enigmatic and engaging is eventually turned into a duet of spectator and spectacle with a soundtrack dancing around the pas de deux. From the family romance as critique of melodrama (Sirk, anyone?) to the restless journey to the end of the night, the film demands attention.

A film about big ideas that fails at almost every level. A cornball analysis of bourgeois ambition, a barely achieved critique of neo-liberalism. The jokes fall flat and the leitmotif of a group of actors attempting to revive Hamlet is risible. Worst of all is the final sequence; a group of post-Marxists discussing in the most hackneyed manner the emergence of money culture while Berlusconi, both the man and his ethos, take over. Oh! and the coda... the group of idealists carry on regardless. Oh dear. This is the type of film that pretends to seriousness because its central characters are thinkers. The problem is I can't tell if this is a satire about the pretensions of the metropolitan chattering classes or if it really finds these people interesting.

First, in the words of the old joke, when asked the way to the hospital the old man replies, "don't start from here." McCarthy's undoubted masterpiece, Blood Meridian' is still waiting to be made, given that ol' Sam Peckinpah has left us may I plead for the great American director at work today, P.T. Anderson, to give it a go. Anyone tackling such difficult source material has my sympathy. McCarthy's work is what R. Barthes called writerly as opposed to readerly. That is, his work makes demands on the reader, a reader's pleasure is derived from the sheer chutzpah of McCarthy's prose. Reading his novels is a sheer joy but also a task gargantuan, for example 'Blood Meridian' seems to demand that we should read 'Moby Dick' as a kind of parallel text. Well,I sympathise with anyone taking on 'The Road', this novel is a winding ribbon of words that seems visual but on refection is in fact a discourse on the condition of humans more suited to philosophical rumination than Hollywood animation. I was, subsequently disappointed with the film but feel unable to really criticise either the actors or the people behind the camera. My only specific carp would be the inability of the film makers to produce an adequate sound-scape. If the sense of destiny was to be articulated it was in what people hear not what they see which would have enhanced the cinematic quality of the film, the howling indifference of isolation might have been made concrete by a Michael Mann, let's say. I never really got the sense of desolation that is invoked by McCarthy's prose.The two central characters, admirably played by the central actors, work hard to carry the idea of a futile travelling forward but the film, which begins with a flashback,doesn't seem to have the courage to explain the existential dilemma of being alone in a threatening environment.The film fails to enhance the broken poetics of the novel's vision, at times falling into cliché. The one moment that is dramatically forceful is the encounter between the two travellers and the nearly blind man, here we get close to the mournful sense of loss and the certainty of death, here we see the iceberg tip of what is the profundity of the adults sense of time and the child's innocence.I realise a film is not a novel but even so one might look toward the ethos of the source work. I am sure that all who care about cinema will go and see this film, but be prepared to feel let down.