heliotropetwo

This is my third time through, the first having been at its US theatrical release in the early 1980's and the second on video cassette in 1994. The new DVD set confirms my feeling this is the best work of performance in German since Wagner's Ring.

I am put in a trance by the mise-en-scene, the obsessive repetition of themes and variations in music, narrative, visual detail, camera angle, color coordination.

This elegy to the Age of Reason, the illusion of progress, the delusions of civilization, to my way of seeing, killed its creator and left us with a paradox: How can a work so pessimistic of our primacy as animals prove so conclusively the very primacy it refutes?

Try watching this one without the first and last scenes. It's like they didn't give Kostner that part of the script until he finished the rest of the movie. The result is fine if you have no memory, but if you should dare to think about what you've seen, you find one huge and unacceptable flaw: The character you see acted is not the one the movie wants you to take with you when you go.

It isn't so much that the big surprise isn't fun, it's that there's too much good acting before this huge surprise happens to let you accept the humongous surprise as anything but an effort to con the audience into thinking they've seen a smart movie. Alas, it isn't a smart movie, it's a pretty good movie with a stupid device.

I'm reminded of the efforts to save a movie by inserting a narrator. Here it seems to me they've tried to goose up a pretty good movie by using a big surprise. It's a cheat.

I ran to see this at its initial release, because I'd read most of Dostoevski's work and could not resist a film with such high credentials. My second viewing confirms the film as a masterful lie like truth. It must have been this way, even if it wasn't. The scenes of the novel reflect those of the writing, but palely, as the collaborators construct an engaging and deeply felt film out of the writing of a pretty darn good work of fiction, which Dostoevski created out of his own experience and insight.

Makk and the screenwriters have followed the wise course of giving the best actors, most naturalistic style and deepest characters to the frame tale: The saga of the life-ravaged writer's race to finish his novel or lose his future. The writer's story, of obsessed gamblers at a casino in Germany, is stylistically distanced in performance as well as character depth and cinematography.

As the novelist's deadline approaches and the novel's characters meet their fates, the two merge in a delicately hallucinatory interaction which is carried into a deeply satisfying and complex conclusion.