Anton/AnTONY - SPOILERS

I love this film (not least – what an amazing cast all doing great work!) but then I confess I love pretty much anything by Gilliam. And as usual, he leaves a sizeable space in it for one's own imagination. In this case, I was left wondering chiefly about links between the characters of Anton and Tony.

I know the face-changing aspect of the screenplay started as an ingenius way of dealing with Heath Ledger's death, but the giving of these two male lead characters variations on the same name might have some significance that was always there, I think.

Tony's name, initially unknown (and also mentioned in full in the film: Anthony) had me thinking right from the start that he and Anton might turn out to be linked in some intrinsic way. The latter retains his own face, no matter how outlandishly he is otherwise got up, whenever he enters the Imaginarium, and this is always to rescue someone. Meanwhile Tony – a name chosen for the character's perceived similarity to Tony Blair, I am told! – has many faces and constantly enters the dreamscape looking for personal gain or a way out of his problems (though he believes in his own honourable intentions).

Eventually, the two have a showdown on the inside, where Anton is reduced, literally, to the position of a child in Tony's world. He is in fact an insistently nagging, Jiminy Cricket-like voice. He then seems to fail in this last rescue mission after a quite nasty fight (given he is in the form of child!) with Tony, who is perhaps literally wrestling with his conscience here, and winning out? Anton is seen diminishing off into the dark and the depths, and his love Valentina is subsequently lost to Mr Nick the Devil.

Consider that all throughout, Tony's mantra is a slickly delivered, 'Don't shoot the messenger!' – whereas when we first meet Anton, he is in the role of (as he makes clear) Mercury, messenger of the gods – and his role in the narrative is not Tony's – to deliver bad news – but essentially good.

My initial thought that somehow Tony would turn out implicitly to be a 'dream side' of Anton, released into the real world, proved to be entirely wrong. However, when Tony dies in the Imaginarium, we later find that both Valentina and Anton escaped and had a happy life in the real world... while her dad, broken, crawled on through his own purgatory for some years and emerged with nothing once again, only to see their happiness and be given yet another chance at redemption.

I think there is some mirroring (ahem!) of the two men, in that the dark soul had to perish for the pure man to escape and achieve his ambition of love and happiness. But it's entirely my own interpretation. Who Percy really is, how come he is also seemingly immortal and always seems to know what's going on in the game between Parnassus and Mr Nick (though this is never addressed), I leave to another poster...



... because I reappear with tedious inevitability