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New video!

26 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in Film, Star Wars

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anikan, beauty of prequel trilogy, brilliant, darth maul, educational, essay, film criticism, film essay, genius, george lucas, jar jar binx, jedi, Jemima Bucknell, love, padme, palpatine, phantom, prequel trilogy, star, Star Wars, the star wars prequels are great part 1 the phantom menace, video, visionary, wars

The Star Wars Prequels are Great. Part 1 The Phantom Menace. 

https://vimeo.com/205732496

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The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

31 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2013, Film, Oscars

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goodfellas, henry hill, Jemima Bucknell, jonah hill, jordan belfort, Leonardo DiCaprio, martin scorsese, nick pileggi, odyssey, prosthetic, quaalude, roman, stock exchange, wall st, wolf of wall street

This post originally appeared on TheEssential.com.au January 29http://theessential.com.au/reviews/film/2014/the-wolf-of-wall-street

Wolf-of-Wall-Street

A place where a drug trip is odyssey, sex an orgy, eating: gorging, spending: splurging. No, this is not the purge of Ancient Rome (Caligula would have blushed) but the insatiable appetite of the New York stock exchange in Martin Scorsese’s glorious The Wolf of Wall Street.

Scorsese delivers, from a screenplay by Terence Winter (of The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire), a three-hour memoir of stockbroker Jordan Belfort, based on his autobiography. There’s a lot of interest in Belfort’s small helping of justice, remaining a free man where others that he stole from or handed to the FBI have been less fortunate. That being said, the criticism is not of the content of the film, which is mostly comprised of parties, sex, drug use and near-death experiences. Some are angry about what is missing, his comeuppance, the lack of a moral equilibrium. As though we’d expect it from Scorsese, who has spent much of his career endearing us to criminals. If Belfort were dead, these arguments might falter, and yet, is it not his dumb luck that makes his story so thrilling, so nauseating, and so damn fun?

Belfort has more survival stories than could form an entire season of I Shouldn’t Be Alive, and, to be honest, hearing them would be reason enough to see him speak in public. At the 90-minute mark, which is the end of the first act, gearing up for the launch of Stratton Oakmont’s first initial public offering – a lucky chance that designer Steve Madden happened to go to school with Belfort’s business partner Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) – Belfort’s climactic speech is one of both Leo’s and Scorsese’s finest scenes. The orgiastic fury of a hyped-up room of stock brokers screaming and flailing on and under their desks, as the camera billows out of Belfort, bungeeing back, capturing the extremes and, to a degree, the eroticism of getting dirty rich. He also impresses upon his team that “there is no nobility in poverty”, but add up these three hours and you’ll find zero or even negative count of nobility in the rich.

Belfort’s first day as a stockbroker on Wall Street saw the crash of ’87. This stroke of bad luck did not follow him, but shows us early on that he, like the risk involved in the stock exchange, is subject to an unpredictable fate, determined by chance. Fate, it would appear, has favoured him. Belfort is a drug addict, womaniser, and thief whose empty pursuits of cash and power can only be sustained on a diet of day-to-day physical highs but he maintains this balance and continues to take pleasure in his addictions, and make loads of money.

Matthew McConaughey’s brief but memorable appearance in the film, as Belfort’s spiritual guide, doesn’t know if stock will go up or down. “It’s a fugazi… fairy dust”, he explains, but there is opportunity for stockbrokers to make money either way, and that it is necessary for one to console oneself with drugs and regular masturbation in order to stay grounded in a world that doesn’t trade in the physical; that trades in fairy dust.

Leo is magnificently physical. The young Belfort bursts with naive flourishes of pleasure, as though he had been watching his own films, regressing into former roles. While Di Caprio’s career has been staid by passionate, vibrant or mad characters, Belfort is just a prick, and Leo does well to keep us at a distance, and keep himself at a great physical distance from his fellow actors. Belfort can rile his team to simulate fraternity or community on the sales floor, but he cuts a line straight through them. And his showmanship does not subvert a tortured soul, or sexual dysfunction, or fetishistic habits, mental illness, or an abuse history. We don’t sympathise with him when he throws tantrums in his bedroom, and even the most dire circumstances for Belfort (save one case of attempted kidnapping) are the wildest and funniest scenes in the film. He and Jonah Hill – another fabulous prick (that’s a prosthetic by the way) – writhing on Belfort’s kitchen bench, coiled in phone cords and tripping the “cerebral palsy” phase of a Quaalude overdose is sublime.

In Goodfellas, Scorsese omitted the epilogue of criminal Henry Hill from Nick Pileggi’s Wiseguy. Hill, at the expense of universities and other organisations, would fly all over the US as a public speaker, still making decent money and living under protection of the federal law. The final sentence in Wiseguy describes Henry Hill as “the ultimate gangster” but this accolade was not conveyed in the final scene of Goodfellas.

Belfort isn’t a mid-level gangster, nor does his story represent the 1% of the American self-made ruling class. What he does represent is the indefatigable appetite of free-market capitalism, a system that cannot be heaved or moved by any moral codes, and which has so few legal codes to regulate it. His immunity is his triumph, which is a combination of luck, accident, the same fairy dust/fugazi that McConaughey’s fingers twinkle into nothingness. Making money – for any person – is still going to be a matter of chance, but Belfort’s is a market of chance and he now makes his life work keeping the faith in fortune’s phantoms. By nearly all accounts, he should be dead. If there is a moral lesson, it is simply that we are not learning any moral lessons; we’d still “choose rich every fucking time”.

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Film Review: Pain and Gain

15 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2013, Film

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bodybuilders, Coolio, Dwayne Johnson, film review, Florida, gangstas paradise, Jemima Bucknell, Mark Wahlberg, Michael Bay, Pain And Gain, style

pain and gain
It’s 1994. Bodybuilder and personal trainer, Daniel Lugo, takes a rundown gymnasium and turns it into a resort with tight, tanned strippers at poolside and oiled-up buff guns pumping iron, all shining and shimmering in Miami’s rippling eternal day. Lugo, despite his flair for physical makeovers, wishes to extend his eye to painting his entire world as a reflection of his personal, physical success but he doesn’t have the dough that his clients do, and his “thoughts” – if you can call them that – are incapable of penetrating the cosmetic. Danny, though he doesn’t know it, is a moron.

After convincing fellow trainer Adrian (Anthony Mackie) that he should have a life worthy of his body, the two encounter a third accomplice, ex-con/weight lifter/born-again Paul (Dwayne Johnson), and devise a plan to kidnap Lugo’s wealthy client, Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), and extort his property and wealth by torturing him until he signs it over. Though the enormous Doyle is reluctant, partly convinced that what Lugo suggests is perhaps not a good idea, he is pacified by Danny’s “I’m a doer” attitude, and inspired, by the immortal (and wonderfully potent/transparent) words:

“I’ve watched a lot of movies, Paul, I know what I’m doing.”

It is no particular flex for Wahlberg to play dumb. This role was practically written with his credits in mind. In Lugo he combines the naïve, underclass Derk Diggler of Boogie Nights with the wily, however manic Tommy Corn of I Heart Huckabees but it is actually his own invention – and not so much his cinematic history of affectionate folly, that most suits him to Daniel Lugo – that of 90s rapper-come-Calvin-Klein-model (or was it the other way around?), Marky Mark. Wahlberg did himself live what Daniel Lugo would consider the high life in the mid-90s before P.T. Anderson extended an opportunity. And there is a wink to those white briefs that’s hard to miss.

Bay is all style, and often to the point that his films are un-viewable, and like Danny, his intentions (if any) rarely penetrate the cosmetic surface of his craft. However, here, the style not only informs that content, the two are completely, artfully inspired by one another. Such a marriage was likewise achieved in another recent Floridian film, Soderbergh’s Magic Mike.

The use of Coolio’s ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ is profound. The tragedy of the song’s lyrics works beautifully with the fate of the film’s subjects and the song’s own reputation, or misrepresentation by (some) fans – based largely on its style – is so cleverly camouflaged by Bay’s 90s artifice. The entire film looks like a music video, from slow-motion strutting to camcorder Jeep cruising to fluoro-thonged booty-watching.

Though it appears to come as a surprise to some, Pain And Gain is largely a comedy – in the precise way that The Sopranos was. The dialogue is full of malapropism and wordplay, but delivered with such humourless, heartfelt persuasion by Wahlberg, that many of the lines – certainly in the theatre I viewed it in – were not met with the laughter they deserved.
Lugo, with a sense of purpose that enables him to lie his way through every stockade they meet, navigates fearlessly through a myriad of fuck-ups. The film piles the fumbles and failures of these men on so high that it’s dizzying, and then the way in which they address these hurdles – exchanging a chainsaw that was used to dismember someone at a hardware store – is excruciating and hilarious.

Ironically, the film’s comic compliment is dislocated by the presence of comedians Rebel Wilson and Ken Jeong, who belong to an evolution of humour that not only doesn’t suit the true-to-life story or genuine convictions of the criminal trio, it doesn’t suit the 90s and unfortunately these two are, at times, distracting. However, their talents elsewhere forgive them this trespass.
Dwayne Johnson doesn’t appear to get the joke, which is the best compliment to his performance. The arrival of Ed Harris as Ed Du Bois and Michael Rispoli (essential Sopranos cast member) as king pin Frank Griga give the film its second wind after a brief cool-down following the torture scenes. Harris, the only throw back to the golden age gangster flick, is a handsome, retired private eye with a voice so rich and sweet, it will rouse an attraction in the actor that even his long-time admirers haven’t felt before. Du Bois is also the narrator, whose mysterious vocals introduce the film into a noir framework, swathing Bay’s gangster’s paradise with even more Miami heat. Pain And Gain, though a small-scale story for Bay, is cinema on steroids and it sweats style.

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SFF 2013 Film Review: Everyday

20 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2012, Film, Sydney Film Festival

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Everyday, film review, gaol, Jemima Bucknell, John Simm, Michael Winterbottom, parenthood, prison, Shirley Henderson, Sydney Film Festival

everydayThe word “everyday” – and not “every day” – suggests that perhaps this film, shot in a documentary style (with four children who are actually brothers and sisters) over a period of 2 years intends to capture an essence of, perhaps ironically, the spectacle of the ordinary day-to-day existence of its’ subjects: a single mother, Karen (Shirley Henderson), with four children who often visit their father, Ian (John Simm), in prison. The circumstances are not common, yet Winterbottom’s fictional story renders them as commonly as he can. The film’s mundaneness does churn a kind of lust for some devastating plot twist, or at least something momentous borne of the true relationship of these children, thrown into a pretence and then instructed to act like themselves, or not act at all. There appears to be enough control – whether cleaned up in post, or directed – that keeps the film, true to its design, as boring as humanly possible. And yes, this plainness, this artful reconstruction of the “everyday” is by no means ironic, it is in fact so accurate, that it’s somewhat off-putting.

Henderson, whose severity makes her an actress deeply suited to comedic or tragic extremes, brings a morbidity to Karen that alienates her from the young actors playing her children. They appear to be frightened of her. Although Winterbottom is sympathetic to her struggle – a woman who travels long distances to see her husband, works at local pub, is put-on by her husband’s neglectful mother, considers an affair with another man – Karen doesn’t seem to have any connection to the children. Her time spent with them exhausts her, and there is no moment in the film when she finds any joy in their company. She is their slave.

The scenes when Simm is visited in prison are great, if only for the two parents’ struggle to communicate honestly with each other in the presence of their children. They almost speak through them, laying blame for their son’s misbehaviour on her neglect or his influence in harsh whispers, followed by long silences. Simm’s prison time is only captured in his comings and goings from his cell. The cellmate may change, the room may change and his conditions of exit are gradually eased, permitting him to take outings with his family, on the order that he bring himself back to gaol. There is some freedom or respite in these outings, but the time is limited and both mother and father – the lovers – must return and complete their mutual sentences of imprisonment. It is a harbouring viewing experience, and rightly should be, because it bestows a sense of time that is enormous (it only runs for 106 minutes) and offers a contraceptive warning, that single-parenting, and loving a large family, is something you will have to do every single day.

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Oblivion

19 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2013, Film, Uncategorized

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2001, Andrea Riseborough, apocalypse, Christopher Nolan, Earth, Independence Day, Jack Harper, Jemima Bucknell, Joseph Kosinski, Looper, Melissa Leo, moon, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurylenko, Planet Of The Aapes, Predator, Promethues, Scavs, Star Trek, The Tent, Tom Cruise, Tron, Tron Legacy

oblivion_riseboroug_403309c

It is 2077. Jack Harper (Cruise) and his work colleague/mistress, Victoria (Riseborough), live in isolation in a communications outpost stilted kilometres above the Earth’s surface. Jack works maintenance on security drones that patrol a barren post- apocalyptic New York and stave off attacks from “Scavs”, an alien race who invaded, after destroying the moon, 60 years ago triggering a series of natural disasters and plunging civilisation under mountains of dirt and dust. Humanity is survived by a colony situated on one of Saturn’s moons in a Borg-meets-Optimus-Prime’s-head space station, known as ‘the tent’ but Jack and Victoria remain on Earth to oversee the collection resources for the survival of the species.

In order to protect their mission in the event of capture by the Scavs (a race that dress like the alien in Predator, AKA ‘Predator’) he and Victoria underwent a mandatory memory wipe that erased their knowledge of anything beyond the past five years. Jack is haunted by dreams – or are they memories? – of a romantic rendezvous atop the Empire State Building with a different beautiful woman (Olga Kureylenko) and this fantasy gives heed to other flights of fancy that Victoria strongly discourages.

Rather than choosing a single influence, as he did with Tron Legacy, Kosinski uses a collage of sci-fi cinema. There are references to 2001, Moon, Prometheus, Tron Legacy, Independence Day, The Matrix, Looper, Wall-E, Predator, Equilibrium, Planet Of The Apes plus (as is the case with most large-scale productions these days) a pinch of Nolan, tossed in like a stigma of saffron to a risotto, giving it a refined taste. The Nolanisation of action epics is becoming a kind of cerebral implant in the collective blockbuster consciousness, with its “HUOOONG! HUOOONG!” sound effects and purposeful yet contemplative leading men. The difference, and Kosinski’s failure, is that Nolan creates self-contained universes that are not cheapened by the pop-culture to which they pay tribute. Jack’s lakeside retreat – a small haven he has made for himself through implausible means – is comically technophobic. Blasting “Ramble On” on an ancient turntable had nowhere near the impact that a cassette of Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride” did while launching James Cromwell into warp drive for the first time in Star Trek: First Contact.

Oblivion begs that viewers submit to its logic, but, ironically permits Jack to do the exact opposite for the furtherance of the plot. Its visuals and score are arresting (particularly in an IMAX cinema) but what might have been a political (security state story), environmental (Earth’s exhausted resources story) or humanitarian (refugees are people too) allegory is abandoned and New York is buried with all but baseball and sightseeing as the customs of its legacy.

The most complex player is Andrea Riseborough’s Victoria. As communications officer and romantic interest, Victoria doubly bears the brunt of Jack’s radical decisions whilst liaising exclusively with their commander, Sally (played with a matronly Texan accent by Melissa Leo) and combating feelings of jealousy toward Julia (Olga Kurylenko), whose true relationship to Jack is never called into question, and not even by Julia herself, as the reality of an apocalypse should strike her harder than every other character in the film. Riseborough is captivating and sexy, shining through her painstakingly administrative attire, but Julia’s resilience leaves very little for Kurylenko to work with, she is just a paper-thin fantasy. Cruise is good in apocalyptic/future fiction when under the watch of someone like Spielberg but is a little detached in this, which unfortunately works in favour of the plot, turning like a clothesline and tossing its pegless load to the wind.

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Django Unchained

19 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2012, 2013, Film

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allegory, Broomhilda, Candie Land, Christoph Waltz, cotton, Django Unchained, Film Fervour, FilmFervour, German, gunslinger, hercules, Hercules Unchained, Holocaust, Inglourious Basterds, James Remar, Jamie Foxx, Jemima Bucknell, Kerry Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio, mandingo, Mississippi, mythology, plantation, pulp fiction, Quentin Tarantino, racism, Samual L. Jackson, Schultz, slavery, southern, Western

django

What will strike some viewers and elude others in Django Unchained is the casting of James Remar in 2 separate roles; one, Butch Pooch, who features briefly in the beginning, with a full beard and cowboy hat, and a second, Ace Speck, in a top hat, and a white moustache much later in the film. It could just be a western thing. Leone, still the reigning King of the Spag’ West, used Van Cleef and Volonte as different antagonists to Eastwood’s nameless wanderer. In HBO’s Deadwood, actor Garrett Dillahunt, who played Jack McCall returned in season 2 as Francis Wolcott. More recently, Paul Thomas Anderson cast Paul Dano as Eli, and his own brother Paul in There Will Be Blood, and although it was suggested to be a last minute decision by the director due to a drop-out, it opened up enough investigation about attaining similarities in characters, or how the same characteristics – that of greed, for example – are then likewise embodied in two separate actors, whose beliefs are different, but fate, the same. Paul Thomas Anderson’s casting choices may have no meaning beyond convenience, but the choice to double cast Remar is a deliberate and fascinating one by Tarantino, which encourages you to consider all the reincarnations that Django Unchained brings into play.

Inglourious Basterds revisited the darkest chapter of German history, which was also one of the greater military victories of the United States. In Django Unchained, we arrive at the pre-civil war holocaust of American history, set in the southern states. Tarantino’s analogous shaping of character and circumstance do as much to reference himself politically, as a multitude of other films stylistically. Where Waltz played the “jew hunter” in Basterds, here he is a German bounty hunter named King Schultz, who seeks the slave Django (Jamie Foxx) to identify three brothers who are wanted for murder and train robbery. Schultz gives Django his first beer, his first horse and first gun and the pair set out to hunt, and then to rescue Django’s wife who is the property of the sadistic, yet hospitable cotton tycoon, Calvin Candie (Leonardo Di Caprio).

Tarantino draws several parallels between his own filmmaking and the elaborate charade that they put on in order to rescue Django’s wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), informed by a heroic German legend with a princess of the same name and several suggestions of Greek mythology. It is almost a self-parody and the likeness of production and product, history and myth are constantly reinforced, in a perpetuated dualism. Tarantino knows well that, while he may seed a chain of events in Django, his own right to provide the African-American population with a western hero is a kind of suicidal gesture for a white guy. He himself appears in a cameo role as a slaver, but otherwise uses Schultz as his surrogate. This is evident from the recasting of Waltz, and Schultz’ own musing of Django’s legend, his reservations about Django (and, by association, Jamie Foxx) portraying a slaver (in their charade, and by association, in the film) and the all the performative risks correlated with material so sensitive, it could explode. Schultz is Django’s director; he concocts the scheme, and infers the necessity of a guise in order to infiltrate an empire where women are tortured and raped and men fight to the death for entertainment – the symbolic and actual extremes of human slavery. Both Tarantino, with the film, and Schultz, within the film, are aware that they are entering an arena. They are very sensitive to their spectators, and take pride and pleasure in their showmanship.

Schultz’ silver-tongue and gay attire, are signatures of his commitment to performance, propriety and the Southern values that appear to be absent in all whom he and Django come across. Though Candie’s attire resembles something that Capt. Rhett Butler may have been spied in, he very clearly lacks the sophistication that the American aristocracy aspire to in the presence of an actual European. Candie is, however, similar to the jew-hunter character that Waltz charmed and repelled us with in Inglourious Basterds, a parallel that is made profound when a particular exchange is prompted between the two of them toward the end of the film, which appears to carry with it an overwhelming mythological significance; all characters are faced with their past and futures, embodied in that which they have historically found or newly find abhorrent. An American history of violence and German future of violence are glimpsed in a kind of putrid twist of fate.

Tarantino’s own history of violence, which includes rape (Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill vol 1), torture and mutilation (Reservoir Dogs, Inglourious Basterds), is something difficult to ignore and lends Django to accusations of racial and political profligacy. The film does contain some particularly distressing scenes of human cruelty, the kind that were only strongly implied in Basterds, not shown – but the charge doesn’t stick. He has always assumed full responsibility for his characters’ prejudices: recall his portrayal of Jimmy, “did you notice a sign on the front of my house that said ‘dead nigger storage’?” in Pulp Fiction.

Samuel L. Jackson’s “house nigger”, ostensibly the most despicable character in the film, wears all the extremes of Tarantino’s history of criticism about how he portrays race. Jackson like Waltz, but more considerably so, is a component of and collaborative allusion to Tarantino’s existing work. The three of them form a response to an ongoing critical conversation about his flippancy with race issues that started back with Pulp Fiction. The film is a fantasy of vengeance against history, criticism, and political propriety itself, which by all rights should be questioned, challenged, and reconsidered and which we know can be tremendously violent. Using mythology to realise the dark ages of human history does not necessary trivialise the plight of the persecuted. It is political satire and allegory that is achieved in Django Unchained and Tarantino, in all his incarnations, knows well enough that this business of being “politically correct” is just a manner by which we veil racism with a poorly fashioned white hood.

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Academy Award Best Picture Nominations

12 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2013, Oscars

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1970s, Academy Awards, all oscar trailers, Amour, Argo, Beasts Of The Southern Wild, ben affleck, bradley cooper, clint eastwood, Django Unchained, Film Fervour, france, French, hurricane, india, Jemima Bucknell, jennifer lawrence, Les Miserables, life of pi, Lincoln, Michael Haneke, new orleans, oscar nominations, oscar predictions, oscars, revolution, robert de niro, Silver Linings Playbook, slavery, trailers, Zero Dark Thirty

clint eastwoodHere is a page of trailers for the films nominated for Best Picture at the upcoming 2013 Academy Awards. I thought this might be user friendly for those looking to follow the awards. Let’s go alphabetical:
AMOUR – I liked a Michael Haneke film?

ARGO – a film that steps around its politics behind a flag of vacuous characters

BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD – looks like a commercial, and kinda is

DJANGO UNCHAINED – yeah, get excited

LES MISERABLES – will win the razzie

LIFE OF PI – there’s my review https://filmfervour.com/2013/01/12/life-of-pi/

LINCOLN – no arguments here

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK – looks good, eh?

ZERO DARK THIRTY – lots of helicopters

At this date, I put my money on Lincoln, because I have no preference. Will post some predictions after I actually see Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, Silver Linings Playbook and Django Unchained.

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Life Of Pi

12 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2012, Film

≈ 3 Comments

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3d, Ang Lee, baboon, Catholicism, cgi, Eyes Wide Shut, Holy Motors, india, Jemima Bucknell, Jurassic Park, Kiarostami, Leos Carax, life of pi, ocean, raft, religion, shipwreck, spirituality, starvation, tiger, Truth, vegetarian, whale

Life-of-Pi-01

Life Of Pi begins in a zoo, with the candid images of its inhabitants climbing trees, eating, napping, flirting. Initially, each colourful creature is flesh and blood, but a large CGI elephant lumbers into frame, followed by an ape so magnificent looking, it couldn’t be real, then another digital creation – or, maybe, it is real? Were any of them? Real or not, they’re exquisite.

Pi (Irrfan Khan) recalls his survival story to a journalist (Rafe Spall) looking to write it. He begins with his childhood, his unusual namesake and how he to came to believe in God(s). For Pi, spirituality and ritual are exponential and secure in this belief, he is able to live within the customs of multiple faiths at once, becoming a Hindu-Muslim-Catholic, uninterested in a singular religious “truth”.

His family decide to migrate their zoo from India to the United States via ocean liner. A storm hits, and the ship is sunk. After a traumatic sequence of events unfolds between Pi and the other survivors on a life raft, he awakens to a sea so still that it mirrors the sky. The horizon is indiscernible were it not for the upright position of the raft in the water, and he is met with a ferocious Bengal tiger. The tiger’s name is Richard Parker, a human name given him by mistake. Although we can see that this is a post-production creation, there hasn’t been such a realised carnivore since Spielberg’s velociraptor in Jurassic Park. Audiences will be divided between the drama, and the spectacle of just how close digital animation has come to creating life.

Where 3D technology has done little to enhance anything outside of Avatar, it is part and parcel to Pi’s intrinsic ideas about perception and reality. It is used to astonishing effect in a deeply spiritual scene where Pi looks into the mouth of the universe, where the water and sky blend into a tunnel of imagery that rushes and blooms onscreen.

The journalist is a troublesome but necessary component to Pi’s story that undoes Pi’s analogy with a single, delineating sentence. He speaks for the audience, which is unfair, but reinforces to us that the film has such a sumptuous symbolic trajectory that it does it little justice to yield a single truth from it. The result is something like Jonathon Glazer’s Birth. Pi’s fear conjures an existence within which he can survive, as Kidman’s grief gives birth to the ghost of her lost love. Where the ocean represents pre-existence, the sky opens up to the afterlife, and where Kidman stands devastated in the surf, Pi’s life begins again on the shore.

Life Of Pi is a picturesque production of cinematic rhetoric. Recent work from Kiarostami and Leos Carax’ Holy Motors explore much of the same meditations on truth and cinema. It also uses a principle of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut: that the truth lies in the telling. Though its alchemy won’t turn atheists to Catholics, it speaks volumes on the human experience using the same mirror tricks that have historically furnished the cinema in its simulacrum­ purpose, the imitation of life.

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