I have marked this with a spoiler warning. But I will add an additional warning that you really should not read this if you want the full effect of this film.
I've seen "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring," by this same filmmaker and found it tediously sweet with none of the advertised transcendental insight.
And I knew coming into this, that it was inspired by "Chungking Express," both in its hasty assembly and in the story itself. I expected it to be a watered down version of that, and it was indeed. But its shifted into imagination. And its (believe it or not) more cinematic at root.
Its more directly rooted in the romance movie, but wholly now. And in the kung fu movie but equally new.
And more surprises: it is so amazingly effective that I found myself helplessly bawling at the end. It succeeds in showing a growing love that is both pure and that does what "Spring..." does not: it transcends.
It transcends the normal romance model. The form is fairly rigid. For all the humanness we have as people, and all the variety in lives and real relationships, we have a startlingly small number of target stories when it comes to love, and by this I mean the romance, the engagement, the charm of shared, scented bliss.
One reason it was so effective for me is that it sneaks up on you. The story is something like "Badlands," and is very much in the Malick tradition. We expect the fragility of perfect merging of souls to be revealed as a fantasy of opportunism, with charm including cinematically narrative charms along the way. We expect disaster. And it does come, slowly ratcheting up. Of it appears to come, each time being deflected a bit from the norm, with the destructive power being deflected.
And then after you have been watching for 7/8s of the thing, it shifts ever so gently into a slightly different magical world. Its all so natural, that the logic that it does is plain: this is where love lives, with the magic of the romance natural, as a permeating field. This really does sneak up on you, and the ending is so lovely, so expressive of love that you won't be able to get out of your seat. Its even engineered so that the only words from our lovers in the entire film are those three ordinary ones made magical at the end by their rarity.
I wish to recommend this to you. Everyone needs to be reminded what love is and we often come to film for registration. This is something you need to see with your partner if you suspect you have found your soulmate.
As a student of film, I especially appreciate how in the film our hero tinkers with machines he finds in our "houses." And how after working for an hour and a half on visual beauty (the woman is a model, whose photo we see all over), after all that, the trick of love is invisibility.
"In the Mood for Love" was my best film about love, but it was hooked into dreams, not life. This is.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
I've seen "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring," by this same filmmaker and found it tediously sweet with none of the advertised transcendental insight.
And I knew coming into this, that it was inspired by "Chungking Express," both in its hasty assembly and in the story itself. I expected it to be a watered down version of that, and it was indeed. But its shifted into imagination. And its (believe it or not) more cinematic at root.
Its more directly rooted in the romance movie, but wholly now. And in the kung fu movie but equally new.
And more surprises: it is so amazingly effective that I found myself helplessly bawling at the end. It succeeds in showing a growing love that is both pure and that does what "Spring..." does not: it transcends.
It transcends the normal romance model. The form is fairly rigid. For all the humanness we have as people, and all the variety in lives and real relationships, we have a startlingly small number of target stories when it comes to love, and by this I mean the romance, the engagement, the charm of shared, scented bliss.
One reason it was so effective for me is that it sneaks up on you. The story is something like "Badlands," and is very much in the Malick tradition. We expect the fragility of perfect merging of souls to be revealed as a fantasy of opportunism, with charm including cinematically narrative charms along the way. We expect disaster. And it does come, slowly ratcheting up. Of it appears to come, each time being deflected a bit from the norm, with the destructive power being deflected.
And then after you have been watching for 7/8s of the thing, it shifts ever so gently into a slightly different magical world. Its all so natural, that the logic that it does is plain: this is where love lives, with the magic of the romance natural, as a permeating field. This really does sneak up on you, and the ending is so lovely, so expressive of love that you won't be able to get out of your seat. Its even engineered so that the only words from our lovers in the entire film are those three ordinary ones made magical at the end by their rarity.
I wish to recommend this to you. Everyone needs to be reminded what love is and we often come to film for registration. This is something you need to see with your partner if you suspect you have found your soulmate.
As a student of film, I especially appreciate how in the film our hero tinkers with machines he finds in our "houses." And how after working for an hour and a half on visual beauty (the woman is a model, whose photo we see all over), after all that, the trick of love is invisibility.
"In the Mood for Love" was my best film about love, but it was hooked into dreams, not life. This is.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.