The Linklater trilogy is the obvious reference point for the film, spending time with the duo as they learn and indirectly help each other while touring the amazing architecture of Columbus, Indiana. Director, Kogonada, has made a film that is as beautiful to look at as it is heartwarming, writing a naturally conversational script that Cho and Richardson flow through perfectly. Almost every shot is impeccably framed to place it’s characters within visually arresting scenery, whether in or outdoors. The space between the two characters becomes as meaningful as the places in which we see them positioned. It’s an incredibly still and serene film to watch but one that is rich with life and character. There is a lot of re-watch value here too and it continues to linger in the mind long after it has finished.
The utter aimlessness isn’t propelled to you through great melodramatic romanticisation, it is carefully pushed towards you in small, delectable bits, assuring itself that the viewer delves deeper into the minds and lives that are at stake here rather than to force the common misconception on these characters that one must choose and must find a way out of it all, to strive for a greater future. Writer-director Kogonada opts for telling the story of a girl who sees more merit in staying in her safe and comfortable environment to help take care of her sick mother than to run out into the world to start pursuing lifelong dreams. He presents the delicate nature of choice at one of the most conflicting times of our lives without bombarding us with the emotional confusion. It’s a film so quiet and dare I say even introverted, that it almost doesn’t need to do the talking for us. In fact, it even presents its characters at certain points, having longwinded conversations yet being completely inaudible, merely being substituted by the sound of the world around them or the far-off score that carefully weaves it all together.
I love the focus on architecture, which is a topic I know next to nothing about. While I’m interested in basically all forms of art, architecture is one that I’ve never really explored, and like Jin (an audience surrogate, in some respects), I’ve never truly gotten what can be so powerful or emotional about it – I’ve always just thought of good architecture as cool or pretty. But this movie showed me why it’s powerful to people; no matter what happens, no matter how bad life gets, there’s just this building standing there, this constant, a work of art that doesn’t disintegrate or disappear. People exist inside of it, wandering in and out, and it remains the same. It’s comforting
Kogonada has crafted a wonderful ode to masterfully framed shots that highlight the subtle nuanced performances of all his subjects. The film’s Director of Photography (Elisha Christian) should most certainly be praised for his achievement that is the visual prowess in this movie. Every shot of the picture is framed with various types of the surrounding and almost omnipresent structures that’s seen to be Indiana’s pride. It also gives leeway for these buildings to express much more symbolic visual significance and emotional emphasis to the characters and the circumstances they are in. I’m so strongly affected by this film.
Stellar performances by John Cho, Haley Lu Richardson, Michelle Forbes, Parker Posey and Rory Culkin only punctuate this perfectly paced character study to the point that you don’t feel you can even blink or you’ll miss some tiny little glance or movement or pause. I was totally enrapt by this film, which is almost intentionally inaccessible to main stream audiences. The beauty of this motion picture is the picture, and you are allowed to participate as an observer, almost to a point of over stimulation.
watch the trailer below:
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This post has now been included in a broader piece on Anthrocene cinema, which is here.
Watching the previews for the summer movies, they all seem to me to belong to the genre of the Anthropocene. They all seem to be narratives about a civilization confronting limits of its own making. Some movies respond by stressing the glorious expenditure of energy, burning it up with images of fast cars, fast planes, fast women. And guns, lots of guns. Other opt for apocalypse. If the present cannot go on infinitely expanding then it can only collapse. No qualitative change can be imagined in narrative form. After us, the deluge: the Sun King’s prediction democratized. Edge of Tomorrow is an interesting variation. Yes, it’s a Tom Cruise action sci-fi concoction, but these are not without their charms. Tom’s face provides the machinic sheen against which robots and other otherwise all too techy images come to seem warm and somehow human. There’s a creepy shot of his right ear that keeps returning, again and again, with weird stretch marks, as if someone has shrouded a Mills grenade in cling-wrap. Setting Cruise aside, Edge of Tomorrow is interesting for a few reasons. The story’s mechanic is pure video game. Cruise and his co-star have the special property, bestowed on them accidentally by invading ‘aliens’, of starting the action over again, every time they die. Edge of Tomorrow lives out – and dies out – a desire for do-overs, for digital time. The time of the edit suite, as well as of the video game, where real time is not duration but measured and metered time. As if Bergson had it backwards, and pure duration were more an after-image of clock time and clock speed.
Edge of Tomorrow is about video game time, where death is not final, not an end, but rather a beginning, a do-over. Tom and his co-star do time over and over, trying to beat the aliens, clearing levels, backtracking out of dead-ends, all the way up to the boss level. But the time against which they fight is not duration, it is rather the historical time of the Anthropocene. It’s a human wave assault, by the most advanced flesh-tech of this civilization, against the very limits it has itself created.
It is not an exaggeration to call this historical time one of civilization. The aliens have conquered Europe. Russia and China are holding it at bay. The decisive battle is a re-staging of D-day, across the English channel. The movie charmingly presents the Brits as nothing more than a front for American imperial power. But in a way all of the current variants of capitalism as a civilization confront the same enemy. It is of course unseemly to talk about civilizations. That whole language has belonged since its inception to the apologists of empire. So one has to imagine, when I use the word civilization, that I say it the way Charles Fourier would – pausing to spit in the middle of such a long and encumbered term. The fantasy, then, is that the digital time of this civilization – be it capitalism still, or something worse – has within its power the ability to overcome the almost shapeless, formless, seething tentacle menace. One which curiously seems to have some sort of mimetic power. It doubles us and confounds us. It erupts from the earth or out of the sea, or appears out of nowhere in the sky. Its an almost molecular enemy. It is techy, like us, and yet not. It is perhaps the shadow image of our own forces of production, mediating between earth and air and water, and bringing fire. It is very scary except in those moments when the film makers lose their nerve and give it a face. Tom and co-star alone confront this alien with the digital power of do-over time, getting beaten again and again, restarting the game each time. The co-star is Emily Blunt. She is the perfect embodiment of the weaponized woman. We see her tanned and oiled arms as she does push-ups in a black-ops chic sleeveless number, the camera lingering just a bit over her ass. The casting is a masterstroke. Blunt plays the global archetype of the stiff-upper-lip-Brit, mixed in with a bit of thorny English rose. The femme-gun doesn’t really do feelings. Blunt’s performance is so on-point that she makes Cruise seem almost human.
I won’t give away where they confront the boss alien, but it is in a landscape under water. Weird weather as a feature of a lot of movies of the Anthropocene. It can be caused by anything at all, except the emission of green house gases from the collective labors of this civilization. This is key. The cinema of the Anthropocene is about anything but the causes of the Anthropocene. But it is very candid about its effects.
So the boss-alien is confronted in old Europe, from which this civilization’s mode of production sprang. We see old Europe under water, as indeed in a way it already is, in the future already pre-set for it. Cruise and Blunt: perfect names for our heroes, for the two affects that dominate the action. And of course they win. There may be a point to this. If we could prefigure all of the permutations of the narrative resources of this civilization, run through them all, have all our futures over and done with in advance, we might be done with this whole narrative formation. Perhaps we need to play this game till we get bored with it. Perhaps we will get bored with it soon enough to discover that its digital time does not accord with the historical time of the Anthropocene. That other time is out there, like a formless alien. |
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