Enough Stelling

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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17 September

* Contains spoilers *

I wasn't sure as early as the introduction that Bill gave to The Illusionist that it had been such a good idea, and, less than halfway through, I decided that I would let no more of the evening disappear with morbid images, as I am quite capable of generating my own without any help - this is the primary advantage of the aisle seat (which, I hope, meant that I could vanish with the minimum of inconvenience to anyone else).

And, no, I don't now want to see the Q&A with the director on Saturday night (17 September), or the other of his films for which I have a ticket (on Monday, I think - Trains, Aeroplanes, or some such), so there will be some reordering of my priorities, and, I trust, some things will prove possible that clashed with this event and screening.

Now I will grant you - but what else could the audience do, settled down for two hours' viewing a little after 8.30, and, after all, we all have our own ideas? - that there was laughter at the slapstick, at the incongruous, at the utter weird awfulness of how these people (a family?) in a mill of some sort on the edge of a polder lived, but little of that amused me very much, because it was only superficial to the feelings of dread that lay hardly below the surface.

After all, I witnessed (the depiction of) someone being beaten up (for no very good reason), then taken away to a psychiatric unit (for no very good reason), plus various stomach-churning sequences in an indeterminate reality, the last of which determined me to depart as soon as a fresh scene started. So, as I realized later (by looking at the Festival brochure) I missed the additional delights of (amongst other things): the threat of brain surgery, and a suicidal father (who, I suppose, must be the one whom I took for a hanger-on or another brother).

Well, I was well spared those things, after all that I had seen. And it wasn't that there was 'no dialogue', but there were no subtitles - not quite interchangeable descriptions. All of which, with two mentions of the Breughels (in introducing this and the earlier film), made me wonder whether there was actually here another codified display of Netherlandish mottoes or proverbs such as Breughel the Elder was found to have shown with cake-tins on the roof, etc. All very Dutch, perhaps, but, if so, with limited scope for travel, I feel.

And the listing talks about the film having 'much sound and fury', to which the qualifying end of the quotation from Macbeth reads 'signifying nothing'...