Is there a more vital subject than youth being ushered in the larger world? Whether it's Wong Kar Wai's take or Harmony Korine, I am rapt to receive them. Earlier still it was Rivette. A lot of film noir plays on the same impulse of discovery.
Being able to see with the urgent eyes of youth, it's more important in my book than the most lofty moral lesson. It's something I wish on all of us.
And tying this to image, the realization of constructed imagination, elevates this to something I want to pay serious attention to. Celine and Julie Go Boating, Chungking Express, Spring Breakers, each one toys with spontaneous discovery outside of fiction, performance that takes you outside performance. Each one ties that to staged image, fiction about escaping bounds of it.
So I am the target audience for this or should be.
And the main narrative device is lovely. A young woman arrives in a remote island, commissioned to paint the portrait of an elusive daughter who refuses to be painted. Sitting to be painted means the painting is going to be sent to a suitor waiting for her abroad.
There are a couple of decent performances, sure, and the setting with cliffs overlooking the wild sea is a wonderful stage. The air is one of expectant apprehension. Stolen glances. We just know sparks of passion are going to fly.
But watching this, I expect the air to catch on fire, the air around the edges of imagination. I expect passion to be the urge for deep communion and that to spring from air, not wholly known in advance. Isn't this after all a film about doing away with the accepted idea of how something ought to be? Indeed, how a portrait should be painted, which in the world of the film it's how love springs, or how life in the years ahead of youthful discovery is going to be. And this remains neat, tidy, arranged.
We know she can't stay on this island forever, that there is a next life for her. It's true for all of us. Is the Milanese suitor going to be the love of a lifetime? Would her painter friend be, if they were allowed? The tragedy here is that she may have found love but it can't be allowed.
Here of course it's not least because they're both women. But I would have you imagine the same film only the young painter is male. The same otherwise brief, ineffable love. He loses her. He paints her as he imagines her to be in that next life. He then watches her from afar as she cries inconsolably at the opera. Is she crying for lost happiness, as we're seeing her through the eyes of her past flame, or is it the opera? The shift now becomes a bit more clearly about obsessively holding onto story rather than just socially thwarted passion.
Being able to see with the urgent eyes of youth, it's more important in my book than the most lofty moral lesson. It's something I wish on all of us.
And tying this to image, the realization of constructed imagination, elevates this to something I want to pay serious attention to. Celine and Julie Go Boating, Chungking Express, Spring Breakers, each one toys with spontaneous discovery outside of fiction, performance that takes you outside performance. Each one ties that to staged image, fiction about escaping bounds of it.
So I am the target audience for this or should be.
And the main narrative device is lovely. A young woman arrives in a remote island, commissioned to paint the portrait of an elusive daughter who refuses to be painted. Sitting to be painted means the painting is going to be sent to a suitor waiting for her abroad.
There are a couple of decent performances, sure, and the setting with cliffs overlooking the wild sea is a wonderful stage. The air is one of expectant apprehension. Stolen glances. We just know sparks of passion are going to fly.
But watching this, I expect the air to catch on fire, the air around the edges of imagination. I expect passion to be the urge for deep communion and that to spring from air, not wholly known in advance. Isn't this after all a film about doing away with the accepted idea of how something ought to be? Indeed, how a portrait should be painted, which in the world of the film it's how love springs, or how life in the years ahead of youthful discovery is going to be. And this remains neat, tidy, arranged.
We know she can't stay on this island forever, that there is a next life for her. It's true for all of us. Is the Milanese suitor going to be the love of a lifetime? Would her painter friend be, if they were allowed? The tragedy here is that she may have found love but it can't be allowed.
Here of course it's not least because they're both women. But I would have you imagine the same film only the young painter is male. The same otherwise brief, ineffable love. He loses her. He paints her as he imagines her to be in that next life. He then watches her from afar as she cries inconsolably at the opera. Is she crying for lost happiness, as we're seeing her through the eyes of her past flame, or is it the opera? The shift now becomes a bit more clearly about obsessively holding onto story rather than just socially thwarted passion.