If I take in the hem, add some taffeta frills to the sleeves & a bow of gorgeous lemon colored silk, we end up with "a tale told by a woman, full of gorgeous cinematography and carefully posed tableus, signifying not much".
It really was one of the lovliest films I've ever seen- it put me in mind of Christoper Doyle's work with Wong Kar Wai. But the surface beauty of the finished object couldn't overcome the void at its heart.
A charitable interpretation is that Sofia's reach exeeded her grasp- that she tried to achieve some era-spanning synthesis, to find accord between now and the court of Louis Auguste and came up short. This is how I view it, because the film occasionally soars in the moments where the director stops worrying about the Big Message and cuts loose with a great Souxsie & the Banshees or Adam & the Ants tune over an almost dizzyingly lush montage of court life.
I think she should have gone further in that direction, jettisoned the linear, dialoge driven story altogether and turned Marie's story into a surrealistic blur of decadence and music.
Instead, we get those sorts of perfect, glittering jewels of scenes strung onto the necklace of the film along with cranberries, popcorn and the occasional rabbit turd.
/edit
a line from Elliot Smith's Can't Make A Sound resonates here.
the slow motion moves me
the monologue means nothing to me
No comments:
Post a Comment