I had the fortune to be among the people who have previewed this movie at the Venice Film Festival, yesterday. I am very mixed about this film. I am not questioning the "message" or the reasoning expressed by the director or by the choir of critics who are chanting hosannas to the piece. It was about time for movies critical of the Iraqi war.
My objections are based on technical considerations and on what I am afraid its contents will trigger as a reaction in people who either can't, do not want to understand, or may push an agenda that would gladly cite fragments of this movie out of their context and use them to incite even more hate and mayhem. Unfortunately, this movie is a trove for such potentially inflammatory twisted communications, which I am almost certain will start circulating on networks with exactly the opposite intentions as the ones expressed by Mr. De Palma.
My immediate reaction is one of disgust and of disappointment. I would have expected a much more surgical treatment of the issue of what is erased from our videos - redacted, that is. Instead, I was confronted with materials that, in the age of internet, I could have looked for, like the footage of a beheading, but I chose not to.
I am one of the people who believes s/he does not have to witness a rape live to understand its tragedy. Or the explosion of a hand-made land mine. Or any other gory nefarious act that human minds can conceive or enact. On the contrary, I am one of those people who regret being exposed to such violence without prior explicit consent. I felt brought down to the level of the mad dogs squad of killer rapists. And that is not what I had expected to face in a festival whose official title is about cinematographic Art.
I felt like a voyeur. I deeply resented it. Especially because one of the messages in the movie is that whoever watched became an accomplice.
I felt that certain depictions were clearly stereotyped. It was all too clear who the two main culprits were going to be. It was all too clear that the private who was filming the horrors of war was not up to the dream he was pursuing: entering film school. The production tried hard to instill a sense of amateurishness in the images allegedly coming from his HD camera, but they went too far in making his footage be of dismal directorial quality, while keeping it in the cinema-quality level of the cameras that actually did the job.
I felt I had to be put in front of a polished, pumped up, spectacularized, hollywoodian re-enactment of violence I have chosen not to watch in the first place. The feeling that a HD beheading was acceptable to watch on a 50 ft screen, while I carefully avoided it for the rest of my life, troubled me more than the fair share of emotional involvement I am ready to have in front of the silver screen. And it felt like a very bad deal.
It all went -in my humble opinion - to the detriment of the story, undermining the standpoint of the filmmaker. Some critics in Italy hailed to this as an outstanding achievement. I felt like the only - involuntary - outstanding achievement of the movie is that it tore down the invisible barriers between cinema, video and the net. Now the thin line has been blurred, and, from a technical point of view, that can only be regarded as a major step forward. It is a pity that it came from a movie that provides for no solace, no higher hope, no sense of justice. How will anyone in the world who considers him or herself a victim of the current state of the world look at a very culpable accomplice to rape and murder to return to his loving wife and friends - without punishment? I bet it will not be the same kind of thought that most of the viewers in Venice probably shared.
Last, but not least, I resented the choice - otherwise praised by Italian critics - of the music on the final stills of real effects of violence on Iraqi people. The aria "e lucevan le stelle" is one of hope, of redemption in front of imminent death, of a love that can transcend even death's despair. Probably something that Mr. De Palma lost in translation.
My objections are based on technical considerations and on what I am afraid its contents will trigger as a reaction in people who either can't, do not want to understand, or may push an agenda that would gladly cite fragments of this movie out of their context and use them to incite even more hate and mayhem. Unfortunately, this movie is a trove for such potentially inflammatory twisted communications, which I am almost certain will start circulating on networks with exactly the opposite intentions as the ones expressed by Mr. De Palma.
My immediate reaction is one of disgust and of disappointment. I would have expected a much more surgical treatment of the issue of what is erased from our videos - redacted, that is. Instead, I was confronted with materials that, in the age of internet, I could have looked for, like the footage of a beheading, but I chose not to.
I am one of the people who believes s/he does not have to witness a rape live to understand its tragedy. Or the explosion of a hand-made land mine. Or any other gory nefarious act that human minds can conceive or enact. On the contrary, I am one of those people who regret being exposed to such violence without prior explicit consent. I felt brought down to the level of the mad dogs squad of killer rapists. And that is not what I had expected to face in a festival whose official title is about cinematographic Art.
I felt like a voyeur. I deeply resented it. Especially because one of the messages in the movie is that whoever watched became an accomplice.
I felt that certain depictions were clearly stereotyped. It was all too clear who the two main culprits were going to be. It was all too clear that the private who was filming the horrors of war was not up to the dream he was pursuing: entering film school. The production tried hard to instill a sense of amateurishness in the images allegedly coming from his HD camera, but they went too far in making his footage be of dismal directorial quality, while keeping it in the cinema-quality level of the cameras that actually did the job.
I felt I had to be put in front of a polished, pumped up, spectacularized, hollywoodian re-enactment of violence I have chosen not to watch in the first place. The feeling that a HD beheading was acceptable to watch on a 50 ft screen, while I carefully avoided it for the rest of my life, troubled me more than the fair share of emotional involvement I am ready to have in front of the silver screen. And it felt like a very bad deal.
It all went -in my humble opinion - to the detriment of the story, undermining the standpoint of the filmmaker. Some critics in Italy hailed to this as an outstanding achievement. I felt like the only - involuntary - outstanding achievement of the movie is that it tore down the invisible barriers between cinema, video and the net. Now the thin line has been blurred, and, from a technical point of view, that can only be regarded as a major step forward. It is a pity that it came from a movie that provides for no solace, no higher hope, no sense of justice. How will anyone in the world who considers him or herself a victim of the current state of the world look at a very culpable accomplice to rape and murder to return to his loving wife and friends - without punishment? I bet it will not be the same kind of thought that most of the viewers in Venice probably shared.
Last, but not least, I resented the choice - otherwise praised by Italian critics - of the music on the final stills of real effects of violence on Iraqi people. The aria "e lucevan le stelle" is one of hope, of redemption in front of imminent death, of a love that can transcend even death's despair. Probably something that Mr. De Palma lost in translation.