This is a review of Cloud Atlas (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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14 April 2013
This is a review of Cloud Atlas (2012)
* Spoiler warning : assumes a knowledge of the film, so best not read without one *
Follows on from A cloudy prospect
Cloud Atlas is loved up and fucked up, sublime and ridiculous. a Hollywood Inland Empire, a life's work, a lifetime's work...
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) March 21, 2013
As a re-viewing reminded me, there are even clouds in Warner Bros' corporate title, and there are probably many more than the other ones that I did spot, which include the striking ones reflected in water (impossibly and DalÃesquely) on the beach when Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess) fatefully first meets Dr Henry Goose (Tom Hanks)
Clouds are transient things, a fact that Hamlet exploits (and even artist Alexander Cozens in his illustrated treatise, A New Method of Landscape), but I do not yet know what role they play in David Mitchell's novel, on which this film is based.
Yet there are, just as clouds pass overhead, communications between :
1849 and 1936 - Adam Ewing's journal (read by Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw)), plus the effects on history of Tilda's (Doona Bae's) and his joining the abolitionists
1936 and 1973 - Robert Frobisher's compositions (heard by Luisa Rey (Halle Berry)), and letters to Rufus Sixsmith (James D'Arcy) (read by Luisa Ray, and passed to the mother of Megan), and it is through Sixsmith that Rey becomes aware of the report on the Hydra reactor at Swannekke, plus the effect of her exposing the attempt to discredit that form of power by allowing a nuclear catastrophe
1973 and 2012 - What Isaac Sachs (Tom Hanks) was writing on the plane could not physically have survived its being blown-up, but his words seem to resonate; in 1973, Luisa Rey was friends with Javier Gomez (Brody Nicholas Lee), and, in 2012, Timothy Cavendish (Jim Broadbent) is reading Gomez' script, heading north on the train; later, Cavendish writes of his experiences at Acacia House, and a film is made at some point (Tom Hanks)
2012 and 2144 - Yoona-939 (Xun Zhou) shows Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae) a device on which a short segment of the film based on Cavendish's writing is looping; a recording of Sonmi's broadcast, and the account that she gives in captivity (taken by James D'Arcy), form part of the archive on her
2144 and 2321 - A venerated form of some of Sonmi's words is kept sacred by the Abbess (Susan Sarandon), and read to Zachry (Tom Hanks) when he consults her, and Sonmi's image is represented both in the valleys, and on Mount Seoul
In short, a series of nested what ifs
Cloud Atlas is, for me, as trippy as Hollywood gets (except for 2001: A Space Odyssey), as queer as 300 or Fellini.
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) March 21, 2013
I touched previously on what significance 'the doubling' of parts might have : in fact, if IMDb is to be trusted*, six actors play a part in all six time-strands, although those of Hugh Grant, though instrumental, are minor ones (and some of those played by, say, Doona Bae, are far less significant than that of Sonmi-451), which is surely no accident.
Georges Melies would have loved Cloud Atlas.
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) March 21, 2013
To be continued
End-notes
* Since, as seems accurate, Jim Broadbent is not credited in that from 1973.
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