jeanmarcboulard

The film is mesmerizing as a song, from which it borrows form and time-pace, memory-filled present. An hymn to women too, which are shot as candles in a newborn landscape and given the homage they deserve during the war and more widely. Proud and strong, unclassifiable. For people who are able to receive faces, to wander about in landscapes as in cinematographic categories without bias (Is it fiction, documentary, politics, etc... ? It's just a film, probably musical before all). The general matter has something oneiric, time-freed memory and the dead, evoked throughout the film, are given by the magic of cinematography and shot landscape the tomb, after-life they won : oceanic sun-light and natural tumulus.

This deserves no more than 5 minutes to understand what it's worth. What the film wants from you.

Btw, this is no silent, neither sound, this is no film at all actually. Just a poor trailer-like film of a director who doesn't know that an actor may act and not just be a poor fashion model in a "beautiful" frame. Just see the three repeated (or more?) shots on the two women (mother and daughter in the arena) : poor playing, giggling.

Now, the use of black and white ??? I let you guess the motivations of the director. And why no dialogs ??? Guess too... This guy is just reluctant to reality which is the blood of cinema. Yes, even a fairytale should be real, and dreams and nightmares are full of (The night of the hunter, for ex.) but there's too overblown intentions here to make any real things appear.

Just plain propaganda of feelings. Just photographs following one another. If this director'd have been honest (or just a director), he'd renounce to movement too (in fact he did in the worst way possible) and would have just proposed a slide show.

The story telling suffers the same hammering (the fall of the hat with a slow motion is so heavy that we can't afterward care for the twist of fate, the fact that it was not for his death but for hers... ) Anyway, actors having not been able to play this correctly, I decided enough was enough and quit my seat. (My God, has this guy seen more than 5 silent films in his life ??? Is Spain and its cinema in such a profund crisis ?)

Promising beginning, actually. Tarkovsky's shadow but only the shadow, the sound and the organisation and filming of space can evoke some of his films far but as soon as the father arrives (as soon as there's something to tell in fact) : that's the end of our hopes !!! The whole film swim in excessive sentimentality and 'univocity' of point of view, the actor's direction (especially concerning the main character) is very bad and enough to ruin all the rest. The plot too is very loose and repetitive, and it's so heavily presented that I doubt Tarkovsky would have ever done that or simply a good scenarist. Relations between father and son or daughter are not developed... incredible !! Has it been cut ?? I saw 91 min version.