🌸Mike🌸’s review published on Letterboxd:
What a completely overwhelming experience. Not just the best movie of the year, not just the best movie of the decade, but quite simply, and without hesitation, one of the best movies, I think, that I've ever seen.
As a writer, I can't help but simply think HOW a movie like this is possible. How does a movie like this exist - be THIS perfect? It manages to blend cosmic ideas of nihilism, buddhism, taoism - seemingly fictious ideas of multiverses, consciousness jumping, RACCOON CHEFS - and, most importantly, generation trauma, relationships, love, parents - into one cohesive movie. There are no strings here - look away for a moment to see how they are doing it and you'll miss the point entirely.
Like all the best movies (Tarkovsky and Bergman would confirm), it is a movie about what it means to be human, to be alive at this very moment in this very place with these very special people. We can spend our entire lives looking forward, looking backward, thinking of what could have been or what might be - but we'll lose what is happening right now. And right now, we are just living. Experiencing this tiny blip of a moment called existence. It's so fleeting, after all.
Under this major theme, comes another important theme of familial generation trauma. Parents not being able to let go of their children, children not being able to shake the weight of their parents. Which one comes first? As a character in the film says, "It's a never-ending circle". The pressures of being perfect, of living up to your parent's expectations - that kind of baggage is back-breaking. It may cause you to find release in nothingness, to pull away. To throw everything into a giant black hole and retreat.
The film also touches on what it means to love someone - through all the bad times and the good. What it means to take that leap with someone, not knowing where the road is leading. But, to circle back to my original thoughts, that what it means to be human. To live in the moment. To trust that we don't know anything - we don't know where the road leads, nor should we want to. But if we find a few people along the way, that we can hold close to us, that accepts our faults and cherishes them as much as our virtues, then we might just be okay.
I feel like I could go ON and ON about what this film meant to me. It taught me to be okay with not really knowing what I'm doing right now. That there is time to figure everything out. To take comfort in the mundane. To live in the moment. To cherish every day with the people that I love. To be kind - JUST BE KIND to everyone around you. This world would be so much better if everyone would just be kind. I sobbed throughout the last 30 minutes of this movie. It was just so beautiful.
Movies like this are so rare. A movie that really takes your breath away - from the writing, the directing, the editing, the performances, the score - it's all pitch perfect. I feel, after watching this, the way people must have felt when they saw "2001" or "The Godfather" for the first time, ya know? Just very aware that you've seen a movie that will be cherished and heralded as one of the greatest films of all time for many, many years.
