Spoilers herein.
This is only my second voyage with Egoyan and already the man frustrates the hell out of me.
He has a sublime intuition. The soul of this film is about humans as memory and film as memory. He folds memory and enfolds us in the process. Remembrances as TeeVee shows and illicit videos. Lost memories as murder. Pregnancy and food preparation conflated, and then related to headless sight. Sight as culture; `fabrication' as stolen religion. All this built with such fine multisymmetry that I feel blessed being exposed to this manner of visual breathing. The very recall just makes me glad to be alive.
But then the man thinks and everything turns to raw liver. He's just not that bright and gets easily impressed with `investigating what it means to be human.' Gosh. So he takes oily sophomoric banalities and ladles them all over his beautiful crystals: simple visual symbolism; vapid truths; synthetic paradoxes; staged ironies. What really ruined this film for me was watching it a second time with Egoyan's commentary. In it (dropped in among six thousand `you know's) is an articulation of life worthy of a high schooler infatuated with the wonders of acting.
When I watched this without his `help,' I was able to ignore all the simple thematic mechanics and wonder at the subtlety of the eye and the remarkably sophisticated notion of memory and reference. The fluidity of stirred time. The consummate understanding of how to place a reference of one scene in the imagination of another in a different time and place. And that is the experience I wish on you dear reader -- so ignore the commentary.
Someone needs to channel this man's intuitive eye away from his simple mind. We just don't have enough of these people to waste, people whose soul you can sometimes see reaching into their art while they aren't looking.
He must be aware of this, as there is a strong self-referential tone. And much of the hammered mechanics that bothers me is about the contrast between hammered mechanics and natural grace (sense and sensibility).
This is only my second voyage with Egoyan and already the man frustrates the hell out of me.
He has a sublime intuition. The soul of this film is about humans as memory and film as memory. He folds memory and enfolds us in the process. Remembrances as TeeVee shows and illicit videos. Lost memories as murder. Pregnancy and food preparation conflated, and then related to headless sight. Sight as culture; `fabrication' as stolen religion. All this built with such fine multisymmetry that I feel blessed being exposed to this manner of visual breathing. The very recall just makes me glad to be alive.
But then the man thinks and everything turns to raw liver. He's just not that bright and gets easily impressed with `investigating what it means to be human.' Gosh. So he takes oily sophomoric banalities and ladles them all over his beautiful crystals: simple visual symbolism; vapid truths; synthetic paradoxes; staged ironies. What really ruined this film for me was watching it a second time with Egoyan's commentary. In it (dropped in among six thousand `you know's) is an articulation of life worthy of a high schooler infatuated with the wonders of acting.
When I watched this without his `help,' I was able to ignore all the simple thematic mechanics and wonder at the subtlety of the eye and the remarkably sophisticated notion of memory and reference. The fluidity of stirred time. The consummate understanding of how to place a reference of one scene in the imagination of another in a different time and place. And that is the experience I wish on you dear reader -- so ignore the commentary.
Someone needs to channel this man's intuitive eye away from his simple mind. We just don't have enough of these people to waste, people whose soul you can sometimes see reaching into their art while they aren't looking.
He must be aware of this, as there is a strong self-referential tone. And much of the hammered mechanics that bothers me is about the contrast between hammered mechanics and natural grace (sense and sensibility).