La Vie d'Adele (Blue Is The Warmest Colour) Review

 

In The Mood For Love, Venus, Chico & Rita & Let The Right One In.  

Each of those films are examples that aren't cut from the kind of cloth that 'Blue Is The Warmest Colour' comes from.  At its base is an arc of the journey from spiritual fatalism and young love as a sequitur for emotional trauma.  

Melodrama is not a new idea, clearly, but neither has it been a flagbearer for a type of cinema verité that allows the viewer to go beyond the tragic and dwell amongst some unfortunate realism.

'BITWC' tells a simple narrative of a young girl (high school age) who meets a woman several years older and experiences for the first time a connection which films are always trying to sell to us.  What the best films in this type of genre are able to do is to display the ecstatic giving, physical bind and most boldly of all the consequences of first love that go beyond initial tragedy.

The film, clocking in at almost 3 hours in length, painstakingly depicts individual moments as moving portraits balancing on the weight of a cloud that over time fill themselves with the burden of self doubt and jealousy.  From the outset each scene glides from close up to wide angle shots and its one of the strengths of the project that the actors thrive under such scrutiny.  The minutiae of such contrasting and elegant frames allows for a one-in-a-million performance by Adele Exarchopoulos who conveys, in soft monotones, a beauty and riveting mysteriousness to the role of a young lady experiencing a new layer to her being.  It has to be noted that the relationship between Adele and Emma (a delicately poignant Lea Seydoux) is for this viewer at least the most stunningly realized pair of performances maybe since the turn of the century.

I have to refer to the sex scenes in this film.  Around the time of Cannes, a bubbling controversy belched from under the red carpet of the opening attempting to attest to the deemed overly gratuitous nature of the relationship depicted on screen.  Undoubtedly this will put off many viewers from the outset and that would be understandable.  However, my reading into these few scenes (one of which runs at least 5 minutes) is that the physicality becomes a tour de force between two individuals between whom boundless intimacy has been building in a life-altering way.  Perhaps the length of those scenes could have been shortened but the energy of those early passages between the two and their sheer joie-de-vivre make them as vital as what comes before and after.

Ultimately, what I will come away with from this astounding portrayal of love and loss is the rawness that director Abdellatif Kechiche is able to squeeze out from this most bittersweet of rinds.  You will be able to predict the journey but once its over you will have been exhilarated and emotionally satisfied in equal manner dreaming of where the characters lives take them next...

Rating 9.5/10 (A/A+)

Gravity Travesty (Majesty) - Review

In space no one can hear you.  A quotable phrase, no doubt.  A cliche, but as true as day turning to night.

Another truism is that of the relationship between the critic and the reader.  As a reviewer it's easy to get tangled in to the web of my own ideas and importance.  Clearly there's a historian angle that provides a certain leverage to what I do, what we do.  If my knowledge was (theoretically) encyclopedic would I find it a lot easier to rank films in the IMDB Top 50 of my mind? 

Harder to place is HOW DOES ALL THIS MAKE YOU FEEL.

Of course what anyone wants out of reading this review can be divided into two camps.  An over-effusive praise marathon or an entertaining jaw-buster.  But really what I write, and more likely what your favourite journal/ magazine/ website scribe writes, is there to validate what YOU the reader expects of us.  If you love a film, you want to hear that others do too.  Likewise if you hate it.

I digress.

The problem with a film like Gravity even before the first frame takes centre stage is one of expectations.  When a modern piece of art builds up a head of steam, loved or loathed, the internet takes reins and builds up a fortress around it.  It's what sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes help to make the noise stick.
In that regard Alfonso Cuaron' latest is unbreakable.  Its fanbase is ever swelling, the oscar buzz deafening (although a few months early). 

And much of it is understandable.   The film is presented in three formats.  2D, 3D and IMAX 3D.  It is not hyperbolic to call it one of the most visually outstanding pictures you're ever likely to see, especially on a technical level.  DoP, Emmanuel Lubezki lights each shot so beautifully (also a feature of his work with Terrence Malick) and brightly that the 3D of this film is perhaps the most vital since Hugo and maybe even back to Avatar.  Cuaron deserves immense credit also for miraculous craftsmanship of an opening 15-20 min shot which looks to me at least to be seamless.

The Avatar comparisons don't stop there.  I remember coming out of that particular 3D experience for the first time being pretty bowled over by it.  Especially so on an IMAX screen.  It's a giddy feeling to swept away by beauty on a heightened plane, gliding above the tropopause of all the mere mortals beneath it. 

So why is there a 7/10 at the bottom of the review?

Well for all the visual majesty, the pen has been left at home.

This is not Y Tu Mama Tambien or in fact Children of Men.  The issue here is that Cuaron leaves emotional markers as goal posts visible on the horizon and then takes you around full circle to the same landscape.  Its as if all conflicts and dilemnas that were set up in the film's first third were laid down solely to force the audience into a response based upon an underdevolped mother-daughter loss/rebirth narrative.

Another issue here is Clooney.  There has been an entire spectrum of responses to his performance.  To me its essentially Clooney on 'Up In The Air/ Ocean's 11' form which would be fine if he wasn't stuck in impending doom however many miles away from Earth.  His happy-go-lucky suavity started of as a useful counterbalance to Sandra Bullock's pensive monotones however as the film hit it's meat-spot I felt it became a distraction which began to remove me from the building tension.  Bullock herself does well with what little she has been given to work,  but again her rally to her daughter before the final descent, the actor's moment, was somewhat ruined by an auto-pilot script (as opposed to Hank's final moments in Captain Phillips which i'll come to soon enough).

Don't get me wrong, Gravity is intended as popcorn entertainment (this isn't Tarkovsky-lite) and is always enjoyable and at times quite literally breathtaking.  Maybe on multiple viewings the issues will iron themselves out for me.  However I can't help shake the feeling that the immensity of the EVENT, of the 3D, of the technical splendour would dissipate on multiple viewings, when the visuals have become embedded within my memory and all is left is story.

Will it hold up?  At the moment what i'm left with is a Great leap for visual-kind, but not quite the Great film I hoped it would be.
  
Rating: 7/10 (B-/B)