Love

I can’t think of another film which felt so thoroughly like two films in one — you could cut it right down the center and have two discrete films — and that would deserve such a huge rating gap between them. I don’t know that it was intentional nor is it to the film’s credit that it feels so disjointed, but let’s see:

Initially, this film is about an old woman on her deathbed and her daughter-in-law who cares for her, keeps up the appearance of being wealthy, and makes up stories about her son’s successful movie career in America to explain his absence. Actually he is in jail for a political crime, and she will not see him again before she dies. I was thinking during this half that Makk’s films are ostensibly character studies, but like Another Way he never really lets the viewer get to know his subjects nor provides any reason to care for them. In this case, because most of the action takes place in the cramped bedroom of the older woman, almost stagelike in its small scale, the wall between me and these two women did prevent me from appreciating the film. Given the physical constraints, it should have been all character. Then, so much of the film consisted of almost subliminally rapid fast edits of people and objects, meant to serve as flashes of memory and imagination. The technique flatly did not work for me — it felt simplistic, false and empty. Outside their context, the images were quite beautiful, though, so I was prepared to give the film a positive, though far from glowing, mark.

Wow, everything changed when the focus of the story switched entirely to the son/husband, now released from prison and trying to find his way back home. In a wider landscape of dark prison cells, shadowy cars and phone booths, and a bustling city, Makk drops the mannered editing for a moment and really allows the man’s emotions to come to the fore: a sensitive and quiet performance now married to evocative visuals. The viewer gets to know this character, and he doesn’t have to say much about himself to get one there: this is evidently a man who has been cut off from society, is blinking and bewildered, still prefers a dark corner and silence after extended confinement. In a beautiful extended sequence, his only desire in life is to return home to his wife, and oh, what a perfect, mesmerizing scene it is when he arrives…

I’m left loving the ending, and the ultimate rating is mostly informed by that final high note. Perhaps on a second viewing I’d find the things that niggled at me in the first half tempered and justified by other things I loved in the second half. In any case, everything was well worth waiting for for some real mastery toward the end!