Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 07/16/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, July 16, 2020

Z for Zachariah (Craig Zobel, 2015)

Margot Robbie, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Chris Pine in Z for Zachariah

Cast: Margot Robbie, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Chris Pine. Screenplay: Nissar Modi, based on a novel by Robert C. O'Brien. Cinematography: Tim Orr. Production design: Matthew Munn. Film editing: Jane Rizzo. Music: Heather McIntosh.

Z for Zachariah is based on a young adult novel, but it's a movie for grownups who know how to savor its treatment of race, religion, sex, secrets, and lies, and moreover who aren't troubled by its failure to provide solutions to all the problems it crams into a microcosm. When I say "based on" I mean that literally: I haven't read the novel on which it's based, but the Wikipedia summary suggests that screenwriter Nissar Modi took only the premise of that book -- surviving a nuclear holocaust in a kind of new Eden -- and crafted something very different, adding a third character and changing the race of one. I have the feeling that if the film had been made by an "art house" director like Kelly Reichardt, for example, or a French director like Olivier Assayas, and with actors that cause no stir at the box office, unlike the beautiful and starry Margot Robbie, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Chris Pine, it would have made more of a sensation among critics than the middling 79% "fresh" rating it gets at Rotten Tomatoes. Because it's a mostly low-key drama simmering with sexual and racial tension. Its ending leaves closure up to the viewer, as the best films do. And despite the cast seeming a little too rich for the film's blood -- they do look a little too well-groomed and well-fed for survivors of the apocalypse, as several critics noted -- the performances are top-notch.