It's all about love

I went to see this film just a week ago as it has just been given a limited release in the U.K. I didn't have high hopes for the film due to the poor reviews. However when I saw it I was pleasently surprised by the great cinematography and the quirky storyline. This is by far one of the best films I have seen so far this year. 8/10

criminally underrated

If Dogville shows the new directions taken by Director Lars von Trier since Dogme, It's All About Love shows the very different creativity of Dogme co-founder Thomas Vinterberg.

John (Joaquin Phoenix) is planning to meet his wife Elena between flights in order to have divorce papers signed. Their marriage has broken down some years ago. It is as if their 'calendars are written in different languages.' Things are not what they seem. And things don't go as planned.

It's All About Love is set in the near future but defies the sci-fi or any other genre tag. Attention is focussed on the title, what love is really about. What happens when a relationship ends? When you still ‘love' someone but no longer want to be part of each other's world? When the other person seems like almost another person to the one you knew? It's All about Love looks at parallel emotional dislocation and its extension into the physical world, a world near the brink of cosmic collapse. It contains images of stunning beauty and is also jarring and artistically innovative. It's probably also the quirkiest movie since David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.

I loved "The Celebration" and was very disappointed when I saw this at Sundance. In brief, this suffers from the same delusion as "Eyes Wide Shut": namely that implication = meaning. There is implied tension, implied sexuality and an implied conspiracy, none of which are delved into, and a barrage of imagery that is neither satisfactorily abstract nor clearly explicated. Joaquin Phoenix is too passive to be much of a lead and Claire Danes, while beautiful, lacks depth. The picture IS gorgeous, and kudos to the DP and design team.

This remains a strange notion, although it has inspired several features by now (there's one of those burlesque X Files episodes with a similar motif), but Vinterberg fetches it far, far out.

OK, inhale... Could it be that we're doing more damage to the environment, not just by keeping our heavy industries and disposing of toxic waste but, actually, through coldness, indifference and alienation from each other? Is the coldness of heart somehow projected on to the earth's gravitation field and climate, causing bizarre atmospheric anomalies, eventually bringing the next ice age upon humanity? If that is the case, there must be a critical number of couples in love, who are somehow radiating there emotions, and thus, keeping the global climate in balance. Should it fall below the critical value, the nature will retaliate, turning us all into icicles!?

Could this be the reason, the Marchevsky's (Danes, Phoenix) become so important for the plot? Maybe, they're this critical couple, whose emotions happen to determine the course of possible cataclysmic events, also making them a target of some vague conspiracy. If Elena fails to get back with John, her clonettes are trained to fill in for her, whether as a loving wife or an ice skating champion. Basically, the script has so many loose ends that you could go on speculating forever, which is ok, if the director's actual intention was to provoke speculation.

Also, while I was watching it, the monotonous pace and a chilling atmosphere made me half asleep, except for a few unexpected lines in my native language uttered by one of the clonettes.

To sum up - intriguing idea, beautiful art direction/photography, decent acting, disastrous script. So, if you happen to be a speculator, environmentalist, climatologist, or particularly keen on the idea of 'reversed meteoropathy' (there's probably a more suitable term for this), It's All About Love should be interesting for you. Otherwise, be patient and wait for the next attempt by this undoubtedly talented director.

A "roman negre" is a French novel written by a famous author such as Octave Mirbeau who wants -- perhaps because it's too personal, or else because it's not self-important enough to satisfy the rabid litterateurs -- to say something that he wouldn't say under his own name. And believe me, it's more than possible that von Trier didn't want his own cognomen on a script that includes the line "Here with more on the flying Ugandan phenomenon..."

Twice.

Thomas Vinterberg, from what I've seen of him, is joined at the hip to Von Trier as his prettier, younger apprentice. He won his spurs by trudging through a Dogme project on the oh-so-serious theme of incest that critics loved, only to be blown out of the water by his mentor with his own devious Dogme contribution, The Idiots. And he has recently directed his third film, Dear Wendy, whose screenplay is actually credited to von Trier alone -- can you imagine a more thankless job?

But after seeing It's All About Love in the theater last year, and again on Sundance Channel last night, it's equally clear that, influenced though he might be by his own personal Dr. Frankenstein, Vinterberg's second film is ultimately the only one that is entirely HIS. No matter how much the deus ex machina ( deus ex machine gun? ) character of Morrison reminds you of the similar hit-man/God figure from Dogville, despite the prevalence of a gnostic philosophy that von Trier only recently picked up for his "American trilogy," and even despite lines like "I don't want to be a dog" uttered ironically by people who have at that very moment thrown away their souls and become exploitative, desperate, vicious monsters a la the citizens of Nicole Kidman's least favorite mining community, what It's All About Love proves is that there are places Vinterberg can go that von Trier can't, namely, into the enchanted realm of the CARAXIAN -- the beautifully naive and youthfully idealistic, despite the prevalent doom and despair. Like Sean Penn says at the end, it really is all about love, even if that love now is just a memory.

People don't seem to get this movie, don't seem to get much of anything anymore, and every single baffled, acidic review on this page makes me jealous, because it proves that Vinterberg's "report on the state of the world" is extremely vital. This is a movie, my friends, that "not getting" means you're dead and blind, so it's quite imperative that you watch again. There are many ways to prepare yourself. Perhaps the easiest would be to watch its sister films of 2004, Winterbottom's Code 46 and Kar-Wai's 2046 ( the similar titles are no coincidence ), as well as some more mainstream gnostic films about the costs of our profound spiritual crisis like Enduring Love, Dogville, The Hulk, or Spielberg's twin contributions, The Terminal and A.I. Or, if you really want to suck all the pith out of the thing, you could could immerse yourself in Monteverdi and Purcell operas, plays by Shakespeare and Maeterlinck and perhaps some stories by Villiers de l'Isle Adam. Meanwhile, the more lazy among you you could treat yourself to the Cliff's Notes version, in this case, the grotesque unreeling saga of Tom Cruise and his robot bride, which this movie foreshadows in a way that is thoroughly creepy ( indeed, IAAL suggests that these relationships lived for the sake of the public eye with its attendant cash value will be the template for all future human interaction. )

Sadly, all that preparation will be futile if you don't want, with all your heart, for your nightmare to end. Without some curiosity about your relation to your creator, some skepticism regarding technology and science, and the will to overcome the fear of death that eventually drives most people into the perverse soul-destroying transactions this movie illustrates with such timeless romantic flair, It's All About Love will be gobbledygook to you. And so will your life, by the way.