Most of the dialogue is a kind of obvious patter, if I recall correctly. You should be able to get almost everything without subtitles. It's the only German-language movie I've ever watched untranslated, and I had no problem (my German is intermediate, but I'd normally have trouble with rapid colloquial Austrian dialect).
this one definitely threw me for a loop - it's always challenging jumping into late career work from artist with a huge body of work, but this is a pretty imposing example of late style, where the language seems to be moving towards something strange and almost private, a feeling that only intensifies as footage and references to bressane's own 1971 film memories of a blonde strangler (sadly unavailable at all online) start to dominate the final sections.
so i was completely unfamiliar with malayalam film before watching this, and i have no idea how to contextualize this, and a lot of what i'd say about it might just be ignorant! there's some culturally specific content (e.g. about castes) that would be more meaningful to a knowledgeable audience than it was to me, though that didn't prevent me from getting a lot from the film. it did recall for me a certain strain of iranian film in some ways (a strain i'd say some farhadi and panahi films belong to), just in how it develops a simple quotidian narrative premise and develops it into something layered and complex and morally ambiguous. there's a lucid quality to the film, of the image (where everything seems to be in focus at once - and there's something about the quality of light that was very pleasing to watch) but also of the development of the narrative and the character motivations, what i think of as 'the argument' (where i'm using that phrase how it's used in classical music theory, not in ordinary conversation). the one thing i didn't like much was how heavy-handed the film was with its musical accents, but otherwise this is an excellent example of how to make an engrossing film with interesting moral and political overtones from minimal narrative material. highly recommended!
i hope i picked a film which was both indicative of the weird/unique space of this particular popular film industry and didn't require too much outside context; i think if you get the fact that caste is what requires them to elope and that indian police stations are places where potentially unchecked deadly violence is a possibility you'll do ok. and i think it might not be immediately clear how far fahadh's thief character has traveled in those last shots. this was the film i was most nervous about recommending, because i think it's an unkown quantity in some ways and just for the fact that it's a little bit long, so very glad you enjoyed it.
Nice description, I'm happy you liked it. The snow certainly helps to create that vivid mood of expectant calm. Those jarring cuts are probably the influence of Breathless rippling across the 1960s. They seemed like an effective counterpoint to the sometimes-intense stillness, but I'd like to watch it a third time to look more closely.bure wrote: ↑Fri Aug 07, 2020 5:11 pmA DAY OFF
great stuff! didn't realize this was a snow movie. some of those scenes at the top of the hill were exquisite. pretty stellar main performance too. there's a lot the movie touches on in terms of how selfish and destructive of our relationships we can be when we're depressed, and how material constraints like limited access to time and money can just intensify that... the main character was kind of a dick, yet i related to what he was going through really well, and i think that's a testiment to how complexly his identity was crafted. dug the score a lot as well. only thing i didn't really like in this movie was i found some of the cuts a bit jarring, but maybe that was intentional and i just wasn't feeling the vibe. amazingly this is only the 4th korean movie i've seen from before 2000. definitely a gap i need to work on filling. thanks for the rec, umbugbene!
whoa, i didn't see this until now! i recall that when i saw manoel, which was a few years ago, the only available print was a vhs rip from tv, so at least back then, any commentary you'd seen about the film was based on a print of that quality. maybe there's something better available now, but even that version was amazing.Umbugbene wrote: ↑Sat Aug 08, 2020 2:02 am Flip, would it be too much to ask for another alternate recommendation? Every time I contemplate watching Manoel on YouTube I feel wrong about it. It's probably one of my ten most-wanted unseen movies, and to see it in a bad print might spoil the experience.
i'd rec manoel over this for sure, but if you still want another suggestion easy to find on youtube (the director uploaded it himself it seems) i'll suggest beshkempir (aktan abdykalykov, 1998) from kyrgyzstan
