postcefalu

Lav Diaz follows after his enormous (in all senses) "Heremias" with this even more complex and longer "Dead in the land of encantos". The first ten minutes contains all the keys to the whole piece. It's the devastation of a place that everyone says it was very beautiful but not especially for its real charms but because it was their land and it was pure and wild. On the contrary, the beauty still alive: the bodies of young women, the poetry, the light, the sound of the rain drops hitting the palm trees and also the mud and the destroyed houses after the catastrophe. Diaz takes his time to think about how can they face the disaster and in the meantime brings an elegiac ode to the unstoppable river of life.

Paul Newman's directional central piece (his fourth, after almost eight years of silence) is, by far, the best American film of the decade. Not only for its very controlled, moving, unusual tone and rhythm, nor for the exceptional actors and actresses, but mainly for the treatment of such a theme like this, the easiest to fall into a stupid tear jerker. "The shadow box" is like Naruse Mikio's "Midareru", the definitive proof that a great director (and Paul Newman is one of the best of his time) can make wonders with any argument, even with the most boring ones, the less "important", even if the plot is tedious and the ending predictable. A gem

This is Jean Claude Brisseau's most beautiful film. Perhaps not the best, but for sure the one who contains more beauty. The character of Celine, quite mysterious, with a past that we barely know and a present of sadness, distress and suicidal tendencies will become the purest of Brisseau's career, the maximum aspiration of a director such interested in magic as a part of our lives, as something that is there, in every corner and that can save (or corrupt) our entire existence. Lisa Heredia, as the nurse, pragmatic and quite, represents the other point of view if we are not able to watch the film in his right sense. It's her and his capacity to believe what makes possible the impossible. Marvellous musical interludes from Georges Delerue and a superb cinematography by the not well known but great Romain Winding.