In a future Brazil, a decision was taken that the elderly have finished being useful to society and can be packed off to 'the colony', an obscure synthetic afterlife to which the film tells little. Teresa, just hitting her late 70's and looking forward to a couple more years with her daughter is caught off guard as the qualifying age is dropped from 80 to 75. No longer allowed to buy anything of substance without providing papers and getting content from her daughter, her attempts to flee rely on those willing to risk prosecution in giving her safe passage.
Winning the Silver Bear grand jury prize at Berlin this year, and with similar themes to Calle Málaga, of the dehumanizing effect that the expectations of a younger generation on the elder; a disregarding of the possibility that the wrinkled exterior could hide a still beating heart full of expectation, anger and passion in the twilight years, The Blue Trail gives a voice to frustrations in the senior viewer, and a pause for thought in the rest of us. 7.5/10
The Love That Remains (Ice/Den/Swe/Fra) (wiki)
And so to the final film. The Love that Remains was thought well enough of to have it playing simultaneously in three of the available screens. A family living in a remote part of Iceland was once happy, but something has split Maggi, who works on an industrial fishing boat, and Anna, an artist struggling to find someone to buy her work. What caused the rift is left as an exercise for the viewer, but sometimes these things just happen. Maggi is clearly not over it, and Anna just wants to move on. Not helping matters, is that Maggi regularly joins the family for meals and outdoor pursuits in the Icelandic countryside, so his heart, not to mention his groin, is constantly reminded of the life they used to have. Anna, however is more annoyed that he thinks of his own woes and not how much work it is to run a house with three unruly kids and one less adult.
The director favours using symbolism over narrative to tell the story, and while this is quite benign at first, it becomes increasingly erratic as the film goes on, and unfortunately, it suffers as a result. Characters seem dead, then living, on boats, then at home. I'm certain there is a cohesive structure to what the director is trying to get across, and sometimes as with Blue Heron, this can work really well, and other times the film fails to provide the signposts for the viewer to navigate their way to a satisfying understanding. For me at least, this film belongs in the latter camp.
This made the final third difficult to pick apart, and assuming you can manage that in your head, I suspect you won't feel like it was worth the effort. None of the characters particularly feel likeable, and things happen too randomly to allow the viewer to develop any sympathy towards them. As the credits went up, I felt an uncomfortable silence in the audience - a perceptible difference that demarcates a group of people processing witness to work of art, from one where people were asking themselves, 'why did I come all the way here to see this?'
I enjoyed some of it; the framing shots highlighted the beautiful Icelandic vistas, along with the family dog, Panda, who made every scene his own, and the genuinely laugh-out-loud fever dream experienced by Maggi after killing a rooster almost made it worth the trip, but unfortunately, not quite. 5/10
No comments:
Post a Comment