Spoilers herein.
Paul Schrader is not someone to be taken lightly -- he's done some very effective work over decades.
Sometimes you wonder whether it will be worth digging when a movie seems so shallow. In this case, digging pays off if you have the DVD, for his commentary is one of the most illuminating I have heard. I watched this three times: once straight on, once with the commentary, and then again. The last time was to try and sort out exactly what went wrong.
The obvious answer is that Mol is neither the actress nor the sexual being that the part demands. And Fiennes is a cold fish. True this is. But why would such an experienced filmmaker not see this? The real answer is more interesting I think: levels of irony and self-reference are the primary currency among Hollywood writers, and he just outgrew his audience.
What I mean is that almost no one makes a film today that is straight, in the sense of real. Okay, but the solution used to be to make a film that is a fantasy -- a fantasy one step removed from reality. Those abstractions are one step away: everything as an idealization of something the viewer might experience firsthand in their out-of-theater life aka real life. But those days are long gone.
Now, we get films that are about other films and the abstractions are multilayered and often folded. Thus, you get films that don't reference dynamics of real life, but dynamics of a prior film fantasy. The more sophisticated of these carry some commentary: satire, reversals, ironic twists or deflations. Or in the case of love stories, those fantasies, abstractions and commentaries are used as the definition itself of sex, even love.
Schrader's career has shown him to be always ahead of the crowd in the number of abstractions and their novelty. Here he goes way beyond zebra, and in a short section of the commentary tells us why.
He intended to make an abstraction of an old `beauty' film that was so beautiful and true (to the original) that it would go beyond camp to hip. This is what the man said, and I believe him. That he missed means he was either too far out in front of us, or that he's in front of us on a different road. I think the former is true, because people like him direct our appetite for popular abstraction.
Paul Schrader is not someone to be taken lightly -- he's done some very effective work over decades.
Sometimes you wonder whether it will be worth digging when a movie seems so shallow. In this case, digging pays off if you have the DVD, for his commentary is one of the most illuminating I have heard. I watched this three times: once straight on, once with the commentary, and then again. The last time was to try and sort out exactly what went wrong.
The obvious answer is that Mol is neither the actress nor the sexual being that the part demands. And Fiennes is a cold fish. True this is. But why would such an experienced filmmaker not see this? The real answer is more interesting I think: levels of irony and self-reference are the primary currency among Hollywood writers, and he just outgrew his audience.
What I mean is that almost no one makes a film today that is straight, in the sense of real. Okay, but the solution used to be to make a film that is a fantasy -- a fantasy one step removed from reality. Those abstractions are one step away: everything as an idealization of something the viewer might experience firsthand in their out-of-theater life aka real life. But those days are long gone.
Now, we get films that are about other films and the abstractions are multilayered and often folded. Thus, you get films that don't reference dynamics of real life, but dynamics of a prior film fantasy. The more sophisticated of these carry some commentary: satire, reversals, ironic twists or deflations. Or in the case of love stories, those fantasies, abstractions and commentaries are used as the definition itself of sex, even love.
Schrader's career has shown him to be always ahead of the crowd in the number of abstractions and their novelty. Here he goes way beyond zebra, and in a short section of the commentary tells us why.
He intended to make an abstraction of an old `beauty' film that was so beautiful and true (to the original) that it would go beyond camp to hip. This is what the man said, and I believe him. That he missed means he was either too far out in front of us, or that he's in front of us on a different road. I think the former is true, because people like him direct our appetite for popular abstraction.