farrokh-bulsara

By not betraying her own personal style and the comic source, evident in its graphic and contrived aesthetic, this film work from Marjane Satrapi doesn't' exploit his full poetic potential, as it chokes the plot in an exercise in style which enchants the eye more than the heart, in a series of surrealistic digressions, flashbacks and flash-forwards (the futures of protagonist's children), by looking for poetic effects instead of true poetry. Nevertheless, the ending, practically silent, explains and forgives the limits and the excesses of a film built on form and on a cinematographic "cinéphile" quoter mannerism, and finally gets to the craved emotion. Ironic, melancholic and visionary mix, with more care for narration and less for stylish frippery it would have been a great hymn to life: as it is now, it did it in half. Paraphrasing the character of the music master: good technique with no heart doesn't make great music.

Little, simple and synthetic, but astonishing and great for its content, "The Unknown" is one of the zeniths of silent cinema, a bright and flooring horror mélo, grotesque and devastating, absolutely mad and unpredictable in its overturns, monstrosities and controversies. Here circus is a metaphor of world, where everything is art-made, hallucinated, petty, and the sane people are the real monsters, more than dwarfs and mutilated ones. Helped by the alienated and masochistic performance by legendary Lon Chaney, made up as a real mutilated man, Browning made a work of pure cinema, which strikes over the visual surface, in the depth of subconscious, in a state of delirium and horror which looks like dream, and it's indeed the purest, more secret and perverse side of human mind. His ability to manipulate pictures and psychologies makes this film a compendium about destructive vortex of human passions, and about the thin lines which separate the opposites: human and beastly, true and fake, sane and insane, hate and love, which mix up all together and estrange points of views in a confused turmoil, which lasts even after the mocking and tragic ending.

**** out of 5

Debut film for thirty-years old Benh Zeitlin, quite overrated if we look the number of awards and the absurd 4 nominations, is the same indie film à l'americaine: enjoyable, striking, fake poetic, shaky and neurotic, engaged in ecology and in giving a new (?) look on the world, through the eyes of a child and an isolated world, decayed but not as much as so-called civil one. Unavoidably everybody could like it, it's useless to discuss director's visual talent and not-actors' naturalistic performances, but a great movie, as it pretends to be, should also say something new. The research of a lost mother (read: Mother Nature, God, etc.), the character of authoritative father, the naïf joy of childhood, the wonders of uncontaminated nature, threatened by catastrophe and by technology, the lyrical power of music, the evocative images, it's all Terrence Malick's cup of tea, all born by "The Tree Of Life" – yes, a film that really changed cinema rules for ever, with an illuminated and moving prayer to life. And then: Kusturica and his gypsies, the refuse of civility of "The Village", austere and lonely lifestyle of Kim Ki-Duk's "The Isle"… list of references is very long. In Zeitlin's film lyrical meets dull and go along with, because in such an approximate plot, often ambiguous (who are the giant boars and what they want?), the rhythm, of course, is up and down. Surely it tells a wild America about which nobody ever talks, but basic moral in the mushy ending is that the father teaches to his child to be "king", that nature has to be dominated, that outside of their home everybody's bad, that she hasn't to cry, but to be strong, always, and stronger than others. Pure Yankee philosophy, in the most conservative film of the year, never mind "Lincoln".