In the Mood for Love.

In the Mood for Love never won, neither was nominated for an Oscar. Why is it here then in the Oscars month? Because not only it won many other prizes in many other respectable film festival around the world, but also because it is one of the most beautiful films ever made. I couldn't wait to talk about it and share its wonderfulness with the world.

In the Mood for Love is a Chinese film by Kar Wai Wong. It depicts the story of a man and a woman, neighbours, that discover that their spouses are having an affair. They are drawn together because they are both lonely and miserable. And trying to decipher what happen to their wife and husband they start to get closer and closer together.

The story is really not as important as you may think. The original idea was different than the result. The plot was more clear, more direct, more physical, if you know what I mean. But the director decided to create the mood of the film and the film itself as it is today through improvisation and discussion with the actors.

The result is beautiful. I've never seen a film that tells so much while revealing so little. That tells you a whole story with a look, with a shade, with the realisation that we are never know what happened, what is happening, that we will never meet all the characters, that many things will be hidden from us.

The respective spouses are always hidden for the audience. The only thing that is offered instead is the performances of the main characters of what they thing happened, of how the others fell in love, which is actually how they fall in love. But it is all a reflection of the creation of the film. The layers are endless. The questions innumerables and the answers scarce. However, that is what makes this film so attractive, so absorbing in its slow pace. The interpretation of the audience is necessary constantly, to make the film meaningful.

However, the most beautiful moments of the film are those in which the music takes the place of the action and steals the protagonism. There are two songs that form a theme withing the film: Yumeji's theme is the first one. It is tragic and painful and it is imperfect, which makes it perfect. Every time you hear, you know that a moment of extreme delicacy, poetry, and pain is going to appear before the audience. The other one is Aquellos Ojos Verdes. It is much happier and playful. However, it is equally deep and mesmerizing. I will never again hear these songs without a feel of recognizion. A sudden thud of electricity.

All in all. This film is more than just a film. It is everything. And I would like very much to see 2046, Kar Wai Wong next film. If only it was on Netflix.

Cashback.

So, this business with writing about oscarized films is more difficult than I thought. It's like trying to watch non-British films, suddenly, only British films seem attractive to me. I guess that it has to do with human nature. We always want what we can't have. However, it all worked with Cashback. I watch a kind of oscarized film and hey! it is also British.

So, this film was never really nominated for an Oscar. However, this film is the feature long version of a short film that was nominated to best short film for the Academy Awards. So, it is within the category.

Cashback tells the story of this young artist that breaks up with his girlfriend and suddenly becomes an insomniac. He decides to use those extra hours to work in a supermarket, to get some cashback. The short film deals exclusively with his time in the supermarket. He learns that, in order to make time go faster, he actually has to stop time. He captures the beauty of the women in the supermarket in his drawings. He actually stops time and undresses the shoppers in order to draw them. I wasn't sure about this film because it sounds so vulgar and careless. However, it is a beautiful moment. Women are treated like precious objects, like the summit of beauty. The boy sees beauty where nobody else can, in the awfully lit aisles of a supermarket during the night. He especially sees beauty in the girl portrayed by Emilia Fox. Beautiful Emilia Fox. Delicate Emilia Fox.

This film is delicate but very funny. The gallery of characters is perfectly arranged. There is enough fun and reality and chemistry between them to make a film that is worth 5 stars. Don't let the poster mislead you. This is worth it.

Exit Through the Gift Shop.

So, as we are in February, and February is the Oscar's (oh, excuse me, the Academy Awards') month, I thought that I could just post here my comments on films that are nominated to the Osc... Academy Awards. That was the original idea. However, since I am only posting Netflix films, that is going to be difficult. (I believe only this one and Dogtooth, the Greek one are in Netflix) so I'll talk about Oscarred films in general. Kind of loosely. My endevour is proving difficult, though. I tried to watch A Fish Called Wanda the other day and I fled the computer bored as an oyster.

Anyway, Exit Through the Gift Shop is a documentary by Banksy. I am not a big documentary girl, as some of you may know. But I can handle them. I watch them and enjoy them when they're good and made by the BBC. Oh, BBC, how I love thee! Flavia, keep focus. Ok, so, yes, Banksy. He's this street artist, very daring and imaginative and very good. Probably he is also a hoax. Probably not. No one really knows. But everyone loves him.

I'm sorry if I am a bit untidy in my writing today, but after an hour watching this MBW man, Banksy's subject and character and maybe hoax, but probably not, you just can't be the same. He is all over the place. He is big in what he does but small in how he does it. He is running from one place to the other. Like a French rat. Like that little rat in Ratatouille.

The documentary is about high art and street art and performance and about this man with too many ideas. It's like watching F for Fake again. Art and lies. And the creation of characters. And twisting the audience and the characters themselves. It was fun. 4 stars. Excuse me, I have to go and eat a banana now.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

I had never seen a film by Terry Gilliam before, and I was so pleasantly surprised. Not that I thought that he wasn't any good, but to encounter this little jewell, and I unaware of it! Excuse my prose in praising this film, but today it was Snow Day in Normal and I have spent the day watching BBC productions. I will try to be more specific. Alas!

This film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, is confusing and evasive. It is, also, visually striking. The different worlds that are created in Doctor Parnassus' imagination look like a mix of Wonka's Factory and a very creative The Simpsons' episode, if you know which one I mean. But I wonder, which one is more believable, the imaginarium or the real world? The world in which the troupe lives and acts seems like a pastiche of something else. Many something elses. It's a world that you can't quite pin down. Oh, layers. How I love films with layers. Or coats. Depending on the metaphor you prefer.

And of course, how could I forget Heath Ledger. His last production. His last unfinished production. And still, how elegant, the fix. At times his presence seemed imposed into the film, not canonical, from another world. But the whole film feels that way, doesn't it? It feels like the viewer is intruding in something that shouldn't be revealed.

Maybe that something is the encounter with the devil. Or with Tom Waits. Or both. Who tells you Tom Waits is not really the devil? He was born to deceive Faustus. Maybe next time he should try poker. Or maybe he already did, in the Seafarer.

I Capture the Castle

So, Alexandra was taking a look at my blog and making fun of my delightful choices in films. She said that all I watch is either English or Irish or Scottish or Welsh. Well, that's obviously not true, since I have a Swedish film AND an Italian film here. But I guess, yeah, that most of my films are made in a spot of the British Isles. So, I decided to prove her wrong. I checked in my queue to find a non-English/Irish film to watch. That's how I ended up watching the delightful English film I Capture the Castle.

I know, I know. But I don't choose the films, the films choose me. That film had been in my top picks for weeks and I was just there, looking at me, begging to be watched. So I gave it an opportunity. I think it worked.

It is one of those British films. Like Atonement. You know, with the cute English girl who has a writer inside her and writes about her funny family and meddles with their lives. It is Atonement. But the girl is somehow more likeable. Also, there isn't that war ambience, that darkness covering the whole film, that structure, that post-modernism. It is simply the tale of a rite of passage of an English teenager. It is delightful, though. Nothing out of the extraordinary. But enjoyable and English, very English.

Vanity Fair

Excuse me? Come again? Excuse me? Seriously? Was Mira Nair, the same Mira Nair that made the Monsoon Wedding really serious when she made... that?

I was high up in the sky after the success with The French Lieutenant's Woman so another film based on a book about British people running up and down in horses seemed just about right. That is, Vanity Fair, the 2003 version with Reese Witherspoon. So mistaken, I'm afraid!

Well, the point is that there is no point at all. The film has no structure, no smoothness, no anything. I haven't read the book, so maybe, when you compare the film to the book all of it makes sense. But I don't think so. I have the feeling that the characters are just placed in front of the camera so the actors can look pretty in period costumes. Otherwise, why is George Osbourne given so much importance? Why the long camera shots? Why the silence when he appears? I know that Jonathan Rhys Meyers is absoulutely beautiful, and Irish, to top things up but, is that enough reason to make everything stop when his character is around? Even if the character is not that important and all that jingling around just tricks the viewer? I read a review by a viewer that said that she was so happy with that film because she loves the Tudors and Rhys Meyers looks so hot in Vanity Fair. Is really what all this is about?

I kept watching the film until the end, thinking, oh sure, that the film was just going to improve now. Now is the moment. Wait, now. But no, it just kept as confusing and out of focus until the end. Right until the end, when these Britons went into an Indian village in an elephant and I saw the Monsoon Wedding again in front of me. Of course. The whole film wasn't about getting money with all the stars, or about the hot actors, or about the pretty dresses, or about Legally Blonde (oh, how I love Reese in Legally Blonde), it was about using an elephant again. What a fun time. The Indian landscape and the dancing natives from an elephant. Thank the construct we have an umbrella.

The French Lieutenant's Woman

Hullo again, and welcome to an amazing film. Tonight: The French Lieutenant's Woman.

I had read the book, long ago, during those amazing holidays in my beloved Ireland, in which I just read books and drink tea. And, I'll tell you something, it is not only a helluva great book, it is also extremely difficult to put into images. Its plot is simple enough. There is this Victorian silly man that falls in love with the "whore" of the town. Supposedly, she had sex once before. With a Frenchman. A French sailor. And he left! I know, hardcore stuff. Well, that's not all. The book is, really, a reflection on the art of writing, the work of the author, an insight into the Victorian age, the role of the writer, of the reader. This novel is really a delusion. And the question is, how do you make a delusion into a movie and do it successfully?

Well, Karel Reisz has the answer. The film is believable from the beginning. One of the first scenes, when the viewer doesn't really know what's going on yet, and everything is kind of blurry, is, I think, key to set the mood for the whole film. The main character in the film-within-the-film, Charles, is proposing in the Greenhouse to Ernestina. Everything is perfectly staged, as it is costumary in this period and situation. In the background, walking in the garden, you can see members of the film crew. WOW.

That is exactly what the book is about, and that is exactly what the film is about. The communication between worlds (characters/narrator/reader or film/real life/viewer) that shouldn't communicate. The reflection on the work, the recursivity of the narrative and cinematic language. In one word, Post-modernism. The film even adds an extra element by playing with the actors and with the characters, having two sets of plots happening at the same time and interacting, at the same time, with the book.

That was intense. And very very good. And full of mirrors reflecting their images in the Callejón del Gato.