Stourley Kracklite is an architect from Chicago who is curating an exhibition in Rome of his hero, the eighteenth-century French neo-classicist designer Étienne-Louis Boulée. However, the project is not going well, his wife has eyes for a younger Italian man, and there seems to be a terminal ache in his guts
I'm not a big fan of the work of the acclaimed art-school darling Greenaway, but this film is brilliant. I think this is because there are three elements which separate it from the normal World Cinema stylings. The first, and most important, is the brilliant casting of Dennehy as Kracklite. Not only is he physically perfect - a big bear of a man but also a formidable intellect - but the radical departure from his normal US cop movie persona to a European art house film brings out a rich, thoughtful performance. Kracklite is a man whose world is crumbling about him, reincarnates others in himself, is obsessed with his body and writes postcards to a dead man, but his passionate defence of the exhibition and of the purity of Boulée's work is at the core of the drama. Cult fans should also note the sultry presence of Casini, the doomed friend from Dario Argento's Suspiria. Secondly, there is terrific music by the Belgian composer Wim Mertens, combining extraordinarily beautiful woodwind and piano melodies - the title piece, Birds For The Mind, is a hauntingly perfect accompaniment to many of the exquisite images in the film. Finally, the film is simply crammed full of jaw-droppingly gorgeous shots of Rome - the title shot of the twin churches in the Piazza Del Popolo, a sumptuous opening banquet outside the Pantheon (the oldest building in Rome), the sequences at the Monumento Nazionale A Vittorio Emanuele II (the "typewriter"), the grey dawn when Kracklite visits Piazza San Pietro, a bit at the Fontana Dei Quattro Fiumi in the Piazza Navona, many others. It was shot by Sacha Vierny, and contains many smart visual cues (green figs and photocopier light for envy, Flavia's photo montages, Newton blowing away after Kracklite's final encounter with gravity, the spinning gyroscope), as well as more aesthetically pleasing symmetrical shots than perhaps even Stanley Kubrick's work. Vierny was one of France's most gifted cameramen (Hiroshima Mon Amour, Belle De Jour) whose career was given a second wind by his association with Greenaway, the two creating many remarkable images together. Even if you don't like arty flicks, turn down the sound on this one and just drink in the beauty and scope of the visuals. Movies are pictures. This is Greenaway's best film by a long chalk, although his subsequent two - Drowning By Numbers and The Cook The Thief His Wife & Her Lover - are also both worth catching.
I'm not a big fan of the work of the acclaimed art-school darling Greenaway, but this film is brilliant. I think this is because there are three elements which separate it from the normal World Cinema stylings. The first, and most important, is the brilliant casting of Dennehy as Kracklite. Not only is he physically perfect - a big bear of a man but also a formidable intellect - but the radical departure from his normal US cop movie persona to a European art house film brings out a rich, thoughtful performance. Kracklite is a man whose world is crumbling about him, reincarnates others in himself, is obsessed with his body and writes postcards to a dead man, but his passionate defence of the exhibition and of the purity of Boulée's work is at the core of the drama. Cult fans should also note the sultry presence of Casini, the doomed friend from Dario Argento's Suspiria. Secondly, there is terrific music by the Belgian composer Wim Mertens, combining extraordinarily beautiful woodwind and piano melodies - the title piece, Birds For The Mind, is a hauntingly perfect accompaniment to many of the exquisite images in the film. Finally, the film is simply crammed full of jaw-droppingly gorgeous shots of Rome - the title shot of the twin churches in the Piazza Del Popolo, a sumptuous opening banquet outside the Pantheon (the oldest building in Rome), the sequences at the Monumento Nazionale A Vittorio Emanuele II (the "typewriter"), the grey dawn when Kracklite visits Piazza San Pietro, a bit at the Fontana Dei Quattro Fiumi in the Piazza Navona, many others. It was shot by Sacha Vierny, and contains many smart visual cues (green figs and photocopier light for envy, Flavia's photo montages, Newton blowing away after Kracklite's final encounter with gravity, the spinning gyroscope), as well as more aesthetically pleasing symmetrical shots than perhaps even Stanley Kubrick's work. Vierny was one of France's most gifted cameramen (Hiroshima Mon Amour, Belle De Jour) whose career was given a second wind by his association with Greenaway, the two creating many remarkable images together. Even if you don't like arty flicks, turn down the sound on this one and just drink in the beauty and scope of the visuals. Movies are pictures. This is Greenaway's best film by a long chalk, although his subsequent two - Drowning By Numbers and The Cook The Thief His Wife & Her Lover - are also both worth catching.