joughin

Let's start with the positive: good Art Direction.

OK, that's over.

Histrionic acting - especially Daniel Day Lewis playing late-career Sean Connery (WHY???) playing a timewarped American who barely changes in any respect from 1898 to 1927 (or is it finally 1929?... nobody else changes physically or otherwise, either, except his irritating son and the son's arbitrary girlfriend, who suddenly morph into different actors in order to get married).

Oh, the LENGTH, the LENGTH of this ordeal... and the pretentious editing. And the S-L-O-W-N-E-S-S... apart from the occasional hectic scraping of violins, like fingernails drawn manically across a blackboard.

I can't be bothered to go on. I've wasted far too much of my life on this misanthropic, nihilistic torture already.

I saw this at Rotterdam last night, and like almost everyone I talked to afterwards, couldn't understand how it was selected as opening film. The best explanation, from a festival employee, referred wearily to the mindless 'mechanics' of the process.

The new director of the 'art' festival, who himself comes from outside film, introduced it by talking about breaking down the boundaries between traditional media forms.

But his choice, here, would in fact provide a great laboratory for Film & TV Studies students to explore fundamental differences between a TV series funded by commercials that has to keep a viewer engaged over 24 hour-long slots with meandering and intersecting plot-lines held together by familiar 'characters' - and an artwork that must stand by itself as it reconfigures our perceptions and realities over 2 uninterrupted hours.

Actually, this 'film' would probably work better as a 4-hour American TV miniseries with 16 long commercial breaks (maybe that's the underlying logic). It looks like a way-overlong unedited amateur pilot for a series, and trying to 'read' it as a 90-minute (though it seemed like 3 hours) 'film' became frustrating after a couple of minutes.

To call the script and direction 'amateurish' is to be polite. The kindest take would be to imagine there was no direction at all, and that the TV actors, camera, lighting & sound and editing crew were just assembled over lunch one day, then left to themselves to churn out their usual mechanical product dominated by smallscreen closeups and dialogue.

I think that might in fact have provided a better result. But the script (by the first-time 'director') was so self-absorbed, cliché-ridden and undisciplined that it's very, very easy to see the same confused signature throughout this incoherent, flaccid, misconceived and misdirected mess (no, I didn't say that about Altman, too).

If this is the future of 'film' and film festivals, then goodbye film. As for festivals, the audience (or those who hadn't walked out) gave it a standing ovation.

6 out of 10: a 'middle way' between 10 for style and 2 for content. And maybe I should make that 5, because the triumph of style over content, surface over depth, is in a way a complete antithesis of what the film seems to think it's about.

The director could make great pop videos (for very slow music) or fantastic TV ads (for the Korean Tourist Board). But Buddhism as pop video, or beautiful adverts for the Buddha's path to release from beautiful illusions, well...

I found this basic contradiction so irritating that I couldn't watch the whole movie, but since the bit I did see was so crudely schematic, I doubt that I missed any profound message in what was doubtless a final closing of the circle.

Nietzsche praised Greek culture as deeply superficial, and contrasted this with German culture as superficially deep. This film is to me as pretty and shallow as the lake on which it's set.

'Film': a thin surface. Don't be taken in. You can drown in an elegant Korean dish.