You will learn few things about what cinema (and you) can be until you learn to train and practice your perception against the flux of images, and this means to be the still point from which everything else is viewed to be in motion, letting it be what it is as it makes its journey to reach you.
This is comic, at first sight, tragic, about modern alienation, failure, ego, compromise, desperation. People die. Lose their pension fund. Lose love. All for no real reason that we see of so just the way life strikes us most days. A gloom because it's all faced dead-on, simply the pain without story-drama that justifies. The same as his previous film except a little lighter even, with actual songs this time.
But if you are still long enough, then what?
A woman sings in a funeral about a next world without grief, loss, want. But of course the funeral itself like every other vignette here is not filmed to sadden or crush. There is a distance here from which all this gloom is filmed which is the distance in which whatever real grief, loss, want, we would normally perceive in these lives (say, in a melodrama) evaporates as if absorbed by the dingy walls.
The same woman repeats the song a little later but now casually in a bathtub, her husband is putting on a shirt in the background, a window looks out to bright day. There is a routine in what we do, yes. Elsewhere characters measure a carpet, rehearse their bass drum for parade, shake hands for a business meeting. They all look like they haven't had a good day in years, none of them a hero, all of it inglorious.
But just what of all this we see isn't a world without grief, loss, want? Characters suffer, or seem to, but do we as we watch? The whole thing was like a breeze of air lifting human pettiness and desperation and showing them to be flimsy curtains that can flutter and let air and light through rather than just hang.
Where you put in life to always have a lover or a pension fund? If any of these go, like the guitarist lover the girl searches for, they have been returned. Something lingers in the air, a beautiful dream here of a moving house. And when you are negligent of the 200 year old china that you smash trying to perform an impossible tablecloth trick because it was a boring dinner-party (a hilarious moment in the film), does anything prevent you, if it comes to that, from taking punishment with the same smile as part of only another absurd game?
Some poignant satire, but even better, the mind that would fret and despair over suffering is not here, a stoic mind is.
A marvelous image encapsulates this worldview, a brass band is rehearsing in an empty room, one of them is standing before huge windows playing his clarinet while outside a storm is heard booming and roaring. We are small, yes, and the outside is vast. But what prevents him from playing his music against the storm? If something does, he will stop then.
This is comic, at first sight, tragic, about modern alienation, failure, ego, compromise, desperation. People die. Lose their pension fund. Lose love. All for no real reason that we see of so just the way life strikes us most days. A gloom because it's all faced dead-on, simply the pain without story-drama that justifies. The same as his previous film except a little lighter even, with actual songs this time.
But if you are still long enough, then what?
A woman sings in a funeral about a next world without grief, loss, want. But of course the funeral itself like every other vignette here is not filmed to sadden or crush. There is a distance here from which all this gloom is filmed which is the distance in which whatever real grief, loss, want, we would normally perceive in these lives (say, in a melodrama) evaporates as if absorbed by the dingy walls.
The same woman repeats the song a little later but now casually in a bathtub, her husband is putting on a shirt in the background, a window looks out to bright day. There is a routine in what we do, yes. Elsewhere characters measure a carpet, rehearse their bass drum for parade, shake hands for a business meeting. They all look like they haven't had a good day in years, none of them a hero, all of it inglorious.
But just what of all this we see isn't a world without grief, loss, want? Characters suffer, or seem to, but do we as we watch? The whole thing was like a breeze of air lifting human pettiness and desperation and showing them to be flimsy curtains that can flutter and let air and light through rather than just hang.
Where you put in life to always have a lover or a pension fund? If any of these go, like the guitarist lover the girl searches for, they have been returned. Something lingers in the air, a beautiful dream here of a moving house. And when you are negligent of the 200 year old china that you smash trying to perform an impossible tablecloth trick because it was a boring dinner-party (a hilarious moment in the film), does anything prevent you, if it comes to that, from taking punishment with the same smile as part of only another absurd game?
Some poignant satire, but even better, the mind that would fret and despair over suffering is not here, a stoic mind is.
A marvelous image encapsulates this worldview, a brass band is rehearsing in an empty room, one of them is standing before huge windows playing his clarinet while outside a storm is heard booming and roaring. We are small, yes, and the outside is vast. But what prevents him from playing his music against the storm? If something does, he will stop then.