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

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023)

Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott in All of Us Strangers

Cast: Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, Claire Foy. Screenplay: Andrew Haigh, based on a novel by Taichi Yamada. Cinematography: Jamie Ramsay. Production design: Sarah Finlay. Film editing: Jonathan Alberts. Music: Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch. 

Movies are not poems. Cinema is based on externalities, on the documentary impulse to record and preserve that which is happening outside of ourselves. Poetry is interior, a response to the impulse to record and preserve the emotional and intellectual experiences produced within us by the outside world. Making movies tends to be communal, writing poems to be private. And yet the two are always superimposing themselves on each other -- on the one hand we have poetry readings, and on the other the viewing of movies in our living rooms and bedrooms. And from the beginning, moviemakers have striven for the poetic, just as poets have always tried to record the seen and heard as pathways to the emotion and the idea. Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers is the product of the attempt to find something like an objective correlative for a variety of emotions -- loneliness, desire, regret -- and ideas -- the centrality of family relationships, the nature of sexuality, the persistence of the past. Haigh finds it in a ghost story, a well-worn trope for literature and film, and tantalizes us into questioning how much of the experience depicted in the film is external and how much is interior -- whether Adam (Andrew Scott) actually encounters the ghosts or is projecting his psychological disorder onto the world. One critic wrote that she approached the ending of the film hoping that we would find out that what we have been watching is actually a story Adam has written. But that would have been on the order of the banal "it was all a dream" conclusion that has been foisted on us too often. Haigh wisely leaves us with questions -- maybe too many for the film's own good. His aim is to unsettle us, in the way the loose ends of a poem, the lines and images that don't quite settle into explicit statements, linger with us. It helps that the movie is perfectly cast, with actors who can translate longing and loss into visible experience. If you've ever been cautioned about a movie to not take it too literally, this is one of those times.

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