The acting was on a scale between
formal and stilted, and purposefully so. Formality is both achronic and anachrostic and both help to create an old-fashioned-yet-modern ambiance. Stilted acting is an intentionally choreographed solecism, it slows time down, bringing it to a halt (in fact through most of the film there is no camera movement) and slowing time down slows the viewers' mental thought processes and brings the viewers into the ambiance. Stilted acting also has an old-fashioned feel to it, further complimenting the anachronistic ambiance.
And the main character -- watching him snap pictures, I NEVER believed he was a photographer -- not for a second. Watch a photographer to see how they take pictures.
He took pictures the same way photographers before the digital age took pictures
The script? Please
Life? Please.
The conversation at the table about pollution was the least natural conversation I can imagine
In this day and age it's impossible to
not have a conversion at the dinner table that crosses over into political/social issues, pollution included. Pollution is a dinner table issue for people who pay attention to the news.
Oh, and, did the guy say the space telescope had looked back to within 500 billion years of the Big Bang? That's like saying Toledo is 100,000 miles away. Since the Big Bang was some 14 billion years ago, that's a nonsensical statement.
There is a reason why he exaggerated the numbers, it emphasized the vast unknowability of the cosmos, how old the cosmos was compared to the age of man, the impossibility of ever truly understanding the cosmos or man's place in the cosmos or conquering death, and the timeless [exaggerated] age of the universe mirrored Isaac's timeless and "exaggerated" obsession with love and death. The discussion about the origins of the universe and its age and anti-matter intensified Isaac's distress about the brevity of human life, about how human life is a mere dust mote on the cosmic scale
Hint: there's inhaling involved.
Many European smokers do not inhale
Also, if you have a photographer and he has a big, bulky camera bag that he carries around with him, it should have more than a single camera in it (and how about maybe a tripod, or a monopod, for shooting dead bodies in bad light...?) AND if it's his only camera, it should not be something that was state of the art 40-50 years ago.
That was intentional; anachrostic and antiquated settings in the modern era that blur the timeline are the director's trademarksAt the beginning Isaac is an emotionally arrested lonely character longing to be touched, he tries to feel the poetry he's reading, Angelica triggers within him deep obsessive passion which must remain trapped and unrequited within him for obvious reasons, the work of the field labourours resembles grave-digging and that triggers in Isaac an obsession with dying/death, dig and bury and sweep over and dig and bury and sweep over and dig and bury and sweep over, in dreams he bursts into life and wakes gasping for what he can never have. As Isaac's hallucinations and mental dissociation increase, the film's ambiance becomes more pensive and meditative and filled with quietude, as if it's perpetual nighttime, a nocturne, the feeling heightened by Chopin's graceful piano strokes, a placid temporal ambiance at odds with Isaac's inner torment. Then he has an epiphany - in death he can cross the divide separating him from Angelica, he takes flight out of the house he's staying in, running down old European streets and alleys towards wish-fulfillment. It's similar to
Somewhere In Time with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour.
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g_monte
10 years ago
A very thoughtful and informative post.
And the acting...
formal and stilted, and purposefully so
Thank you. Why do some people think all film acting should replicate the way real people speak and emote? It’s aggravating to hear people brainlessly complain that movies by certain directors (Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Jean Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, to name a few) contain “bad acting”. You can even find different types of acting styles in modern American cinema (David Mamet’s
House of Games is one that comes to mind). Look at old Hollywood before naturalistic acting became commonplace. Having such a closed mindset on film acting really restricts your enjoyment of unconventional types of films and movies from different eras.
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