![]() ![]() At the time I had gone through a long streak of awful "alternative" movies, the last one having been Atom Egoyan's "The Adjuster" I was totally depressed and fed up with cinema in general since all the movies around seemed to be either generic Hollywood block busters or equally generic "intellectual" time wasters - "The Adjuster" being a perfect example of the latter category. When I first saw Ariel, at the beginning of the Nineties, maybe three years after it was first released, it blew me away. And so it does, to the point that a 69 minute movie appears to last much longer, without outstaying its welcome. Indeed Ariel is a movie mostly told in a visual manner, built upon scene by scene, in a steady and hypnotic succession not concerned with reaching emotionally draining highs and lows as much as with building an unbreakable rhythm of its own. There are few lines and they appear to be utilized as a stylistic manner, short and delivered with deadpan unaffection, more than exposition. His mastering of the craft so much perfected that dialogue becomes largely irrelevant. Composition, shot selection, framing and lighting, everything clicks together to form a cinematic language that threatens to burst at the seams with meaningful restraint. ![]() Everything Kaurismaki worked towards in his career up to Ariel is brought to a glorious, brilliant blooming here. ![]() It is not about negation, though it may seem so at first. His characters appear hard, untearful and unselfpitying, their sentiments hermetically sealed behind glacial walls of Finnish unfeeling, yet behind the expressionless mask burn desire and pathos, the truly human stuff. There's something that seems deeply contradictory to the very nature of Kaurismaki's stuff - cinema which at the same time invites the viewer to pay closer attention while shunning him with his trademark apathy and deadpan humour. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |