Bonello vices us between Puccini and Schoenberg. There, the beautiful music, and there, the clouded expression. Early in the film Schoenberg is interrogated in its value: whether feeling can exist without sentiment, and whether his music is a beginning or an end. The conclusions are murky. But Bonello’s film is occasionally reminiscent of Schoenberg, in that it is often cluttered, it is often dissonant, and one feels ever at some remove from its emotive content. Though to be at a…
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Goodbye Julia 2023
The first part is tightly wound, a number of strands wrapped about our protagonist, who finds her murder-guilt slowly morphing into national guilt. All things seem to explode outwards, as her problem sinks in. A wonderful shot some way in situates Mona at the top of a stairwell, Akram at the bottom, and Julia between. This is the situation of the film. The many plates Mona spins on her fingertips must, at some interval, topple. This is the fact Kordofani…
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They Shall Not Grow Old 2018
Among the unruly film conservationist community – an elusive and underloved subsection of society at the best of times – there is much discontent afoot. Peter Jackson’s latest project, a commission from the Imperial War Museum to mark the centenary of the First World War’s conclusion, has been considered by some in said community to be an act of barbarity, an unjustifiable marring of historical record for the sake of empty titillation. This project, entitled They Shall Not Grow Old,…
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The Other Side of the Wind 2018
A cynic might suggest The Other Side of the Wind cannot be considered a true Orson Welles picture. After all, the man isn’t around to denigrate it, and hasn’t been for a long time. Isn’t this just a cobbling together by friends and colleagues; the long-dead resurrected, but not quite the same? But then, what Welles film is ‘true’, besides Citizen Kane? His filmography is a sort of grand tragedy, whereby a master at 25 was stifled for the remainder…
