The Loneliness of the Frequent Flier – Film Review
Up in the Air (Dir. Jason Reitman: USA, 2009)
For Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), flying is the most masturbatory of activities. This is why the film is quite emphatically not called ‘Come Fly with Me’.
Traveling is what Ryan Bingham does. 300+ days a year. Alone.
As the plot unfolds, we learn about Bingham’s patented philosophy for travelling light.
And we see how that philosophy is gradually called into question by the people he allows to get close to him.
This is a touching story of change through human contact and a little honest reflection. Look out for the scene in which Clooney praises St Louis airport!
Filed under Film | Comment (0)Passivity and violence – Film Review
Il Conformista (Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy/France/Federal Republic of Germany, 1970)
Chameleon-like, Marcello Clerici (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) bends, shifts, and changes to comply with the will of whoever he is with at the time: whether it be his fiancée, his mother, members of the Fascist movement, or even – through a flashback – the man who once tried to seduce him when he was a boy…
Unable to resolve the tensions created by his weakness, Clerici resorts to violence. Or rather, he relies on the violence of other people whom he passively watches as they act on his behalf. Thus he shoots the would-be pederast in his flashback, asks a fellow Fascist activist to deal with the problem of his mother’s lover, and watches as his old philosophy teacher Professor Quadri (the man whom Clerici himself had been sent to eliminate) is ambushed and shot, along with Anna Quadri, for whom Clerici had begun to develop feelings.
We find ourselves confronted with a passive hero, whose only solution is to his own problems is to call upon the violence of others. See Shakespeare’s Hamlet or the novel Endlich Stille for similarly violent passive heroes, and 1979 for one whose violence is turned inwards. on himself
Bertolucci’s screenplay is based on the 1951 novel The Conformist by Alberto Moravia. The film was shown at BFI Southbank on 13 February 2010.
Filed under Europe, Film, German | Comment (0)Thoreau and company – Film Review
There is something tempting about the purity of a hermit’s life. But I suspect that there is a difference between embracing the solitude and running away from other people.
If silence and isolation stimulate the whole person, it will be a generative experience; opening them to God, themself, and their neighbour (there are always neighbours, even in the wilderness).
If, on the other hand, one flees the company other people in order to rely solely on one’s own resources, one might find the wilderness to be a barren place.
I propose that the solitude of Jesus, and Thomas Merton, and the desert fathers and mothers, and also of Thoreau, is of the first variety.
The solitude of ‘Into the Wild’ and ‘The Sound of Insects: Record of a Mummy’ may draw its inspiration from Thoreau and company, but in both of these films the main character falls into the trap of solipsism.
Filed under Film | Comment (0)Léon Morin, Prêtre (France, 1961) – Film Review
How would a room full of ordinands respond to this film about a Catholic priest in Vichy France during the Second World War?
Their principal response related to ‘boundaries’. As one of the few remaining men in the village, this handsome young priest (played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) attracts a lot of female attention and desire. There is something of a gender split at play too, with most of the female ordinands blaming the priest for leading on our heroine Barny (played by Emmanuelle Riva), and most of the men blaming her for projecting her desire onto the “innocent” priest.
There is a general feeling that the story works well on the human level. Léon Morin responds to Barny’s questions and criticisms of the Church with patience and humour. He has a lot of surprising one-liners and a straightforward confidence. When he claims to be a simple person, we believe him.
Aesthetically the film is also a success. And funny. Recommended by ordinands!
Filed under Film | Comment (0)Exploitamus – Film Review
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Dir.: David Yates, 2009)
This disappointing film is another reminder that the books are better than the movies; and the ideas are better than the books themselves!
Nearly all the actors have aged visibly since the last Harry Potter film in 2007, and worse still, they seem to be going through the motions somewhat. Helena Bonham Carter manages to be a disturbing presence, Jim Broadbent was his usual bumbling self, while Maggie Smith and Michael Gambon just seemed tired. Hero Fiennes-Tiffin failed to convince as a young Tom Riddle, in spite of the fact that he shares his uncle’s looks.
But what really interests me in this story are two theological aspects: (1) the symbolic power of words and (2) the assumptions that J. K. Rowling makes about the body and the soul.
Traditonal Western European ideas about magic are built on certain neo-platonic assumptions about the power of words that have much enough in common with medieval and early-modern theology to be considered its flip-side.
Furthermore, at several key points in the story, the film uses symbols and symbolic acts, for example when Hogwarts students and staff raise lighted wands together at the end of the film.
‘Horcruxes’ as vessels for the soul, the possibility of ‘splitting’ or ‘damaging’ the soul; these ideas rest on assumptions about the spiritual consequences of material actions. As such, they fall within the boundaries of popular ‘Christian’ morality. Yet they are profoundly dualistic. To be explored further…
Filed under English, Film | Comment (1)Death and Loneliness – Film Review
The Sound of Insects – Record of a Mummy (2009, Essay) by Peter Liechti, Switzerland
This review makes reference to Agnes Varnum’s response to this film.
A man in his 40s goes into the woods to die. He does not say why, only how: by self-enforced starvation.
We never see this man, simply the world as he sees it: pine needles falling on the thick plastic sheet of his tent, the view from a train, glimpses (memories?) of lonely people in the city, a singer or televangelist. But we hear about the physical and mental effects of this man’s slow death, through a diary that he keeps.
This account of starvation is marked by an obsession with the self and the minutiae of one man’s experience. There is scarcely space in it for other people, except as objects for his desire. Apparently he has no regrets, and he does not bother himself with the question whether anyone will miss him, although we know that he has had girlfriends in the past.
The phenomena described are physical (pain, pleasure, weakness) and mental (willpower, desire, hallucinations). The man’s imagination is marked by half-remembered elements of Buddhism, Christianity, and popular superstition; but this material is poorly understood and is present not because it gives him hope, but rather to provide him with a language in which to talk about death. Unfortunately, he does not offer any meaningful insights. Factual statements about the things he notices are followed by simplistic ‘insights’ in the form of questions (à la Candace Bushnell, Sex and the City).
So why does he record his thoughts? Is it too facile to assume that he wants to leave a trace? It would seem this man needs to believe that someone will one day read what he has written. He wants to be understood, to have his experience and point of view valued by another person. I have a sense that his problem is not so much loneliness, as a desire to be valued.
In her review of this film, Agnes Varnum sees courage in the man’s actions, as if his goal had been altruistic: to offer us ‘a glimpse into dying’. In addition, she interprets his choice to kill himself as an authentic act of free will. For her, he is strong. The dignity (or otherwise) of suicide is another debate to be had. Suffice it to say that Varnum’s emotions tell a different story. The film is ‘harrowing’ and she watches it with ‘a mix of fear and ease’. For me, to see the slow process of dying through the eyes of the suicide was fascinating, while his self-obsession was sickening and tiresome.
Varnum concludes that this man’s death, like that of Alexander McCandless, proves that ‘the soul and the body are indeed two separate entities’. I do not know how she arrives at this idea, except by the same kind of confused borrowing from world religions that the character in these films engage in. If anything, the parallel decay of mind and body reflect the connectedness of the whole person. ‘Body’ and ‘soul’ are simply words that we use to describe the experience of human life and death; an experience that we still do not fully comprehend.
Filed under Film, Spirituality | Comment (0)