More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
5 December
Jeune et Jolie (2013) was screened at The Little Theatre as part of Bath Film Festival 2013
How many reviews of Jeune et Jolie (2013) am I going to have to read where its uninspired writer references the completely irrelevant Belle de Jour (1967), just because - whatever the fit - it is the only film that, in each case, he or she can think of where a woman works as a prostitute ?
* Tim Robey* in The Telegraph
* Ian Freer in Empire
* James Mottram in Total Film
* Nigel Andrews in The Financial Times
* Andrew Nickolds at TAKE ONE
And so on...
Have they never seen Natalie (2003) or even Sleeping Beauty (2011), which have far more in common for how the topos is treated ? What, in fact, does a married woman with sadomasochistic fantasies have to do with a seventeen-year-old, who has just uncomfortably lost her virginity ?
Sooner that, though, than being smugly dismissive (Mark Kermode in The Observer) or claiming that Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013) is indisputably better (Brian Viner, Mail Online : Viner says that Jeune et Jolie 'is in no way a match for' the other film, but they are very different films, no more capable of being compared than Superman and Bambi just because both (of J&J and Blue) feature sex.
Reviewers tediously also want a motivation for what Isabelle does. As i** carps :
Ozon's motives in making this film are as inscrutable as those of his teenage heroine Isabelle (Marine Vacth) [...] who, for reasons Ozon doesn't even begin to make clear, decided to embark on a part-time career as a teenage prostitute
They see (as the quotation shows) the fact that no motivation is stated is a flaw, which it might be in a world of perfect rationality, but that is not our world. So, Nigel Floyd (for Film4) reports :
“I didn't really try and understand psychologically who [Isabelle] was," Vacth has said. "I wasn't interested in knowing exactly. And anyway I couldn't, because François didn't tell me anything about her psychology.” The second half of this statement is more revealing than the first. Given that their creative collaboration was so one-sided, it's not surprising that the film suffers from an atmosphere of uncontrolled, unrevealing salaciousness.
Has Floyd even seen the film, if he thinks it salacious, one might wonder.
All this business about motivation is ultimately a dead end, a red herring, and would have one interrogate Amour (2012), when Michael Haneke is on record here, and in relation to other films, that it is up to us how we view them, and there is no one way.
What more do we want, and why, than what the films tells us : that Isabelle's friend Claire and she were approached in the street (Claire previously alludes to this encounter in talking to Isabelle), and the man said his number. Do we need spelt out what impulse led Isabelle to follow up a man interested in her ? Obviously, most girls of her age would do nothing with it, but why should she not register the number and act on it ?
In fact, an answer to why she did is utterly boring, when the fact is that she did, and we see her approaching room 6598 where not her first client awaits her, but Georges, with nothing of what preceded. There is something seriously wrong with the idea of cinema-going if that does not suffice, and critics are unhappy not to be told more.
End-notes
* At least Robey goes on to make this (necessary) observation : 'The film makes more sense if you see it as a companion piece to Ozon’s last one, In the House, which had a 16-year-old male schemer insinuating himself into a series of power plays'.
** In the edition on 29 November 2013.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Showing posts with label Michael Haneke. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michael Haneke. Show all posts
Thursday 5 December 2013
Friday 21 December 2012
Not Haneke's way
This is a reaction to seeing Michael Haneke's Amour (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
21 December
This is a reaction to seeing Michael Haneke's Amour (2012)
* Contains spoilers *
Michael Haneke shows something, but leaves it to us what it means, what happened, and he has not deviated from it with Amour (2012). This is something that I value and regard as honesty, that he wants us to be co-creators of the film, and, in interviews that are the ‘extras’ on DVD releases, he has talked clearly about this aspect of film-making, e.g. with Hidden (Caché) (2005) and its ending.
That said, a friend of a friend thought the film was depressing and that it was obvious - not open to question - what had happened and why that was, so one can’t please everyone : on that view, the path had been shown, and was an inevitable and downwards one, and the response was to feel that the film itself was gloomy.
I disagreed, not because, for its own sake, I embrace the depiction of someone deteriorating (although, obviously, people do deteriorate, and that is not unrelated to death and mortality, but Amour is not a documentary), but since deterioration was not, as I saw it, the point of the film, but, rather, that it said something about Anne and Georges, about their relationship : this, too, was an account of the film to which this other viewer could not relate.
If one doubted that there are ambiguities, here are some examples :
* Anne does not tell us why she asks Georges to turn off the new CD of her former pupil Alexandre Tharaud (as himself) playing Schubert – she does not explain the request, so we could infer one of several things, such as that she does not wish to be reminded of Tharaud’s recent visit (for any number of reasons), or of her own inability to play
* When Georges is playing the piano, why he stops, and does not continue or explain, when Anne asks him why he has stopped
* Why Georges dismisses the second nurse whom he engaged – is it really because he is disgusted with her care of Anne, or because he does not want her around and invents a pretext to pay her off ?
* What becomes of Georges and why he chose to do as he did (then and now)
I do not think that I need go on. The point is that Haneke and his film are silent on these things – he is not telling us the answers, and we have to decide for ourselves the rationale in these two people’s minds and hearts. He may have a choice in mind that they made, but he has left it to us to make inferences and not pointed to it. So the viewer who finds the film depressing may be projecting a trajectory onto it, but I say that it is not the only one, and that maybe it was hoped that we would feel more torn, not just about the judgements that we may find ourselves making here, but more generally in life.
Not, though, a didacticism in film-making, I would say, but merely mirroring the complexity of our being, that I may guess at what you mean or your actions, but can I be sure? And was Emmanuelle Riva as Anne ever really helpless ? She was defiant, in pain, stubborn, she was a person, and Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), her husband (and another person), was caring, bewildered, resigned, and even frustratedly angry with her.
The film, on my view, was about them and only about what happened to Anne in how it affected them : at the outset, when Georges has been trying to determine what has happened to Georges, she says that he is a monster, but that he is also (I forget the exact word) kind (or caring), and that description rang with me, in a quiet way, as I saw him during the film, and saw her for seeing him that way.
Both actors were in these roles fully, Trintignant, for example, with his trainers about the flat and his varying facial expression, and the reality that Anne and he brought to the everyday made the moments of imagination, memory, dream and even terror that came more powerful – a seeming naturalism against which their unusualness could come to the fore.
As I have suggested, we felt that we were on the inside of Anne’s experience, not that something was happening to her and she was a victim : when she desires her death, there is even a recollection of the grim humour of Samuel Beckettt’s novel Malone Dies, where he writes (Malone is the writer / narrator) that, if he had the strength, he would throw himself out of the window.
Their daughter Eva, played by Isabelle Huppert, seemed on the outside of it all, not just because she was kept out, but because her belief in medical science meant that she was to slow to acknowledge what had happened and was happening (and that led to her being kept out). Tharaud, too, concentrating too much on what had happened to Anne and not on being with her, almost seemed to doubt that Anne, whom one felt he viewed as her wheelchair, could benefit from hearing him play for them.
This film contains beautiful French, beautifully spoken, and with subtitles that intelligently interpret the dialogue. As to why it is called Amour, not L’Amour, I have puzzled over that one. Thanks to http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amour_(homonymie), I know, though, that a film of the same name in 1971 also dropped the article (although the title of the novel by Marguerite Duras did not):
I still busy myself with whether, as I suspect, the meaning ‘love’ is changed by the omission to be of less general application, as in amour fou, where one knows that Love is not embodied, but a type (or example) of love.
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Monday 15 October 2012
Holy Motors is another Funny Games
This is a review of Holy Motors (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
16 October
This is a review of Holy Motors (2012)
By which I mean (in the title)... ?
Well, if you've ever looked at the extras on the DVD of the original German version of Funny Games (1997), writer / director Michael Haneke doesn't expect you to go through the unremitting torture right to the end, which, itself, is just the beginning of the next cycle of it, which was set up during the film.
In fact, he suggests that it's a normal reaction to get to a point where you have seen enough. So, too, with Holy Motors (2012), and I have already indicated that, for me, that point would have been not long after the interlude, and thereby cut my losses.
After all, although there is a pretence that the contents of the day that we see are in real time, by the end of the third of M. Oscar's nine appointments, night has already unaccountably fallen, and nine appointments, despite a schedule to keep, do not get kept. But as if one cares, just as, with Haneke, as if one cares to keep willing evil to be defeated, whereas callous, pointless, calculated persecution is not going to be that easy - so why witness it all, just in the hope?
With Motors, arbitrary acts that are, at best, morally neutral have been stipulated for the day, but what is the point of following this diary through to an end? For it to mean something, when it is just a construct in Carax' mind, and, if he chooses not to explain it (or, at the end, to hint at banality), then it is hardly amazing that such withholding will occur or be foreseeable.
The DVD blurb for Haneke's film almost has a strapline of How fare will you go? I believe that Motors implicitly has the same one...
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Saturday 10 March 2012
What, if anything, can we learn from Project X?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 March
To-night, I read Joe Walsh's condemnation of this film* on New Empress Magazine's web-site - at http://newempressmagazine.com/2012/03/in-review-project-x-2012/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NewEmpressMagazine+%28New+Empress+Magazine+|+The+film+magazine+that+breaks+convention%29 - and it has prompted me to write the following (in addition to the comment made there):
What is the purpose of film?
Or does it have a variety of purposes, not all of which need be served at all - or not in the same scene?
I ask these questions, because Joe, in what he wrote, is clearly looking to what Project X might have been saying - but, in his not finding a 'moral arc', it neglects (did not seek?) to say - about responsibility and the consequences of our actions.
Reading between the lines of what he describes, I'm just guessing that the film didn't care** about anything more than a tokenistic reproof in the form of the simple slap on the wrist, which Joe, given what has gone before, finds inadequate.
Right, so what about Haneke's Funny Games (1997)***? The interview with Haneke that is included as 'an extra' on the DVD shows him saying two things:
(1) If one wants to stop watching the film, then it has served its purpose - and if one wants to watch it to the end, that is actually (he does not use these words) a less healthy impulse than saying that one has had enough.
(2) Relatedly, he reports what happened when Funny Games was shown at Cannes, at the moment when the mother, after her husband, son and she have been terrorized for a long time, succeeds in getting hold of the shotgun (some such gun) and kills one of the two teenagers. There was keen applause and acclaim from those present.
However, as they watched what happened, the other teenager swears a bit, rummages around for the t.v. remote-control, and - amazingly - winds back the action (as, in those days, one would a VHS cassette) to before his accomplice's killer gets the weapon, and ensures that she does not get near it a second time.
Cinematically, of course, that sequence is doing many things (as are the occasional addresses to the camera), but what concerns me is that it highlights the unremitting, unstoppable course of the reign that Tom and Jerry (or Peter and Paul - they have no real names) have over this family: they do what they do, because they enjoy it, and because they can.
I am not saying that there probably is any connection with whatever Project X may be, but neither film is going to make you feel at the end, as Spielberg almost invariably wants, gooey and that humanity has been redeemed - definitely not in Funny Games, where the pair of torturer killers just go on to further victims (whom they set up earlier).
In the same interview, Haneke is quite candid that his pair are stereotypes, his response to hearing reports that there were numbers of disaffected young people who committed such crimes for the sheer hell of it. In that case, then, really quite a straightforward 'moral arc', being the depiction of the ultimate absence of positive affect, unlike, say, Alex's journey through A Clockwork Orange (1971) (or, following the same actor, in O Lucky Man! (1973)).
Project X, I must infer, really is not in the same league, and sounds as though it is the vehicle - albeit a rather uncomfortable one - for jokes that did not pay off for Joe. So, essentially, the primary purpose of the film - even if it proves to have failed - is entertainment, and maybe a challenge in the form of being confronted with what the trio get up to.
Returning to Haneke for a moment, two of his films, Code Unknown (2000) and Hidden (2005), are related in being likely to provoke one of two reactions: either irritation that one is not being presented with a clear and unambiguous story, or seeing how he uses the medium to show what is uncertain or even unknowable about life, yet we have to - or are tempted to - fill in the gaps.
Which, of course, leads to 10 (1979), the impulse to pursue Bo Derek at any cost, just as Joe concludes that the message of Project X could be to say that similar abandonment of moral thinking is justified by the enjoyment to be had from one's actions.
In one film, though, the place that said Derek has occupied to the exclusion of Julie Andrews is seen for the mistake that it is (even if that realization on Dudley Moore's part may just seem a sop for all that has gone before), whereas it seems that Project X embodies a moral void, where maybe unnaturally rich and / or indulgent families overlook the excesses of the young (and I gather that they are quite excessive excesses).
Neither of these is a Pilgrim's Progress, neither a Crime and Punishment, and they do not bear further examination. But, in closing, they do make me think of this:
For all that Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck (unfinished at his death in 1837), however we come to approach it (e.g. through Berg's opera or Herzog's film), is, in study circles, routinely looked at as a piece of some sort of social archaeology (as Büchner studied the evidence of what had happened to the real Woyzeck in 1821), seeing the causes of Woyzeck's thoughts, and the actions resulting from them, in how he is treated as less than a person. (Black Swan (2011), more than 170 years later, appears to have very similar preoccupations, in considering how pressures can impact on an individual.)
Yet, in many ways, our psychiatric care in England and Wales often seems to struggle to comprehend those truths, which maybe the general public think self evident in Natalie Portman's portrayal, and that talking to a person and coming to understand his or her fears and concerns might be more humane than simply dosing up with haloperidol or the like: if you can imagine walking through treacle, or picture crossing a ploughed field and your feet gradually getting heavier and heavier, you will have some idea of what haloperidol does to a person and his or her self-worth.
End-notes
* I had previously satisfied myself that there would be 'no lasting benefit' from watching it, just by the cursory glance at a write-up that I recommend (in a mere five postings, beginning with The Future or How do you choose a satisfying film? (Part 1)): in this case, the 140 words or so in the booklet that the Arts Picturehouse produces every six weeks or so.
I deliberately use the phrase no lasting benefit, because, by text-message, I wished my friend Chris something to which the opposite applied when he was recently attending a conference in my home town.
He replied the following morning, wondering whether (since there is no such thing as 'an attendee') those words might apply in a different way from which it was intended to some of his fellow delegates: they would still be feeling, in all probability, every drop of how heavily they had been drinking, and doing so till 4.00 a.m.
** OK, I know that a film can't care or not care about anything (but it might have hurt feelings if it doesn't get shown very much), but a team of people put the thing together as a product and seek to market it for distribution - if that proves harder than it should be, the product gets changed (to the extent that it can be). The people who corporately bring the film into being and into circulation have intentions for it and how (pun intended!) it will be viewed.
*** I still find it bizarre that Haneke remade this film in English 10 years later, but I am referring to the original version (in German).
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 March
To-night, I read Joe Walsh's condemnation of this film* on New Empress Magazine's web-site - at http://newempressmagazine.com/2012/03/in-review-project-x-2012/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NewEmpressMagazine+%28New+Empress+Magazine+|+The+film+magazine+that+breaks+convention%29 - and it has prompted me to write the following (in addition to the comment made there):
What is the purpose of film?
Or does it have a variety of purposes, not all of which need be served at all - or not in the same scene?
I ask these questions, because Joe, in what he wrote, is clearly looking to what Project X might have been saying - but, in his not finding a 'moral arc', it neglects (did not seek?) to say - about responsibility and the consequences of our actions.
Reading between the lines of what he describes, I'm just guessing that the film didn't care** about anything more than a tokenistic reproof in the form of the simple slap on the wrist, which Joe, given what has gone before, finds inadequate.
Right, so what about Haneke's Funny Games (1997)***? The interview with Haneke that is included as 'an extra' on the DVD shows him saying two things:
(1) If one wants to stop watching the film, then it has served its purpose - and if one wants to watch it to the end, that is actually (he does not use these words) a less healthy impulse than saying that one has had enough.
(2) Relatedly, he reports what happened when Funny Games was shown at Cannes, at the moment when the mother, after her husband, son and she have been terrorized for a long time, succeeds in getting hold of the shotgun (some such gun) and kills one of the two teenagers. There was keen applause and acclaim from those present.
However, as they watched what happened, the other teenager swears a bit, rummages around for the t.v. remote-control, and - amazingly - winds back the action (as, in those days, one would a VHS cassette) to before his accomplice's killer gets the weapon, and ensures that she does not get near it a second time.
Cinematically, of course, that sequence is doing many things (as are the occasional addresses to the camera), but what concerns me is that it highlights the unremitting, unstoppable course of the reign that Tom and Jerry (or Peter and Paul - they have no real names) have over this family: they do what they do, because they enjoy it, and because they can.
I am not saying that there probably is any connection with whatever Project X may be, but neither film is going to make you feel at the end, as Spielberg almost invariably wants, gooey and that humanity has been redeemed - definitely not in Funny Games, where the pair of torturer killers just go on to further victims (whom they set up earlier).
In the same interview, Haneke is quite candid that his pair are stereotypes, his response to hearing reports that there were numbers of disaffected young people who committed such crimes for the sheer hell of it. In that case, then, really quite a straightforward 'moral arc', being the depiction of the ultimate absence of positive affect, unlike, say, Alex's journey through A Clockwork Orange (1971) (or, following the same actor, in O Lucky Man! (1973)).
Project X, I must infer, really is not in the same league, and sounds as though it is the vehicle - albeit a rather uncomfortable one - for jokes that did not pay off for Joe. So, essentially, the primary purpose of the film - even if it proves to have failed - is entertainment, and maybe a challenge in the form of being confronted with what the trio get up to.
Returning to Haneke for a moment, two of his films, Code Unknown (2000) and Hidden (2005), are related in being likely to provoke one of two reactions: either irritation that one is not being presented with a clear and unambiguous story, or seeing how he uses the medium to show what is uncertain or even unknowable about life, yet we have to - or are tempted to - fill in the gaps.
Which, of course, leads to 10 (1979), the impulse to pursue Bo Derek at any cost, just as Joe concludes that the message of Project X could be to say that similar abandonment of moral thinking is justified by the enjoyment to be had from one's actions.
In one film, though, the place that said Derek has occupied to the exclusion of Julie Andrews is seen for the mistake that it is (even if that realization on Dudley Moore's part may just seem a sop for all that has gone before), whereas it seems that Project X embodies a moral void, where maybe unnaturally rich and / or indulgent families overlook the excesses of the young (and I gather that they are quite excessive excesses).
Neither of these is a Pilgrim's Progress, neither a Crime and Punishment, and they do not bear further examination. But, in closing, they do make me think of this:
For all that Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck (unfinished at his death in 1837), however we come to approach it (e.g. through Berg's opera or Herzog's film), is, in study circles, routinely looked at as a piece of some sort of social archaeology (as Büchner studied the evidence of what had happened to the real Woyzeck in 1821), seeing the causes of Woyzeck's thoughts, and the actions resulting from them, in how he is treated as less than a person. (Black Swan (2011), more than 170 years later, appears to have very similar preoccupations, in considering how pressures can impact on an individual.)
Yet, in many ways, our psychiatric care in England and Wales often seems to struggle to comprehend those truths, which maybe the general public think self evident in Natalie Portman's portrayal, and that talking to a person and coming to understand his or her fears and concerns might be more humane than simply dosing up with haloperidol or the like: if you can imagine walking through treacle, or picture crossing a ploughed field and your feet gradually getting heavier and heavier, you will have some idea of what haloperidol does to a person and his or her self-worth.
End-notes
* I had previously satisfied myself that there would be 'no lasting benefit' from watching it, just by the cursory glance at a write-up that I recommend (in a mere five postings, beginning with The Future or How do you choose a satisfying film? (Part 1)): in this case, the 140 words or so in the booklet that the Arts Picturehouse produces every six weeks or so.
I deliberately use the phrase no lasting benefit, because, by text-message, I wished my friend Chris something to which the opposite applied when he was recently attending a conference in my home town.
He replied the following morning, wondering whether (since there is no such thing as 'an attendee') those words might apply in a different way from which it was intended to some of his fellow delegates: they would still be feeling, in all probability, every drop of how heavily they had been drinking, and doing so till 4.00 a.m.
** OK, I know that a film can't care or not care about anything (but it might have hurt feelings if it doesn't get shown very much), but a team of people put the thing together as a product and seek to market it for distribution - if that proves harder than it should be, the product gets changed (to the extent that it can be). The people who corporately bring the film into being and into circulation have intentions for it and how (pun intended!) it will be viewed.
*** I still find it bizarre that Haneke remade this film in English 10 years later, but I am referring to the original version (in German).
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Wednesday 7 September 2011
Days of Heaven
6 September
This 'new digital restoration' from the British Film Institute of a title from 1978 is what the Arts Picturehouse, the BFI and the festival are all about : the opportunity to see something that is only just being premiered or has otherwise not been easily obtainable.
The feature itself was, for me, a bit like a fairy tale - it appears, although not accurately in terms of any correlation between what the images show us and what the voiceover seems (or seeks) to tells us about the underlying situation, to be the narration of a 12-year-old girl, but, for my mind, not nearly as cleverly as in the case of the narrator of Haneke's The White Ribbon.
The person with whom I watched it - and the lobby card, issued with a still (not, as I recall, a scene from the film as screened), bears this view out - commented that there were people in rags posed against the stunning landscape in neat array, and even the rags were beautifully done. Maybe that is part of the fairly tale, the mystification and magification of the (to my mind) somewhat unlikely series of events that unfolds:
If it hadn't come first, one could have sworn that Days of Heaven was playing with the theme of Indecent Proposal - as it is, given that Demi Moore in the latter film bears what I would say is more than a passing resemblance to Brooke Adams (playing Abby), I wonder whether there was a tribute being paid, and, if so, how many spotted it at the time. Certainly, as to the result of these interactions (on the world and the characters), one thinks inevitably of Exodus (if that isn't the young girl's wishful thinking of vengeance, stirred up by some religious teaching to which she makes reference), or even Genesis and the garden of Eden, but, with what one source states is a quotation from Leviticus.
Maybe, maybe not, and with the Bonnie and Clyde tone of part of the close of the film, one isn't exactly encouraged to dwell on it, or, with that strand, how Abby seemingly ends up unscathed and able just to disappear from sight (unless, again, as a fairy-tale fictionalizing, where actions don't necessarily have consequences).
What did, though, for me give the greatest reward, other than the photography of wide skies, are the minute depictions of nature (locusts, otters (?), pheasants, and so on), which are interspersed with (what one would assume is) the main action, and which, with the adept editing, give it richness and texture, and, even, a hint of heaven.
Tweet away @TheAgentApsley
This 'new digital restoration' from the British Film Institute of a title from 1978 is what the Arts Picturehouse, the BFI and the festival are all about : the opportunity to see something that is only just being premiered or has otherwise not been easily obtainable.
The feature itself was, for me, a bit like a fairy tale - it appears, although not accurately in terms of any correlation between what the images show us and what the voiceover seems (or seeks) to tells us about the underlying situation, to be the narration of a 12-year-old girl, but, for my mind, not nearly as cleverly as in the case of the narrator of Haneke's The White Ribbon.
Richard Gere & Brooke Adams
Days of Heaven (1978) pic.twitter.com/IynS09DaUD
— Mademoiselle Cinéma. (@BelleDeJour15) December 2, 2014
The person with whom I watched it - and the lobby card, issued with a still (not, as I recall, a scene from the film as screened), bears this view out - commented that there were people in rags posed against the stunning landscape in neat array, and even the rags were beautifully done. Maybe that is part of the fairly tale, the mystification and magification of the (to my mind) somewhat unlikely series of events that unfolds:
If it hadn't come first, one could have sworn that Days of Heaven was playing with the theme of Indecent Proposal - as it is, given that Demi Moore in the latter film bears what I would say is more than a passing resemblance to Brooke Adams (playing Abby), I wonder whether there was a tribute being paid, and, if so, how many spotted it at the time. Certainly, as to the result of these interactions (on the world and the characters), one thinks inevitably of Exodus (if that isn't the young girl's wishful thinking of vengeance, stirred up by some religious teaching to which she makes reference), or even Genesis and the garden of Eden, but, with what one source states is a quotation from Leviticus.
Maybe, maybe not, and with the Bonnie and Clyde tone of part of the close of the film, one isn't exactly encouraged to dwell on it, or, with that strand, how Abby seemingly ends up unscathed and able just to disappear from sight (unless, again, as a fairy-tale fictionalizing, where actions don't necessarily have consequences).
What did, though, for me give the greatest reward, other than the photography of wide skies, are the minute depictions of nature (locusts, otters (?), pheasants, and so on), which are interspersed with (what one would assume is) the main action, and which, with the adept editing, give it richness and texture, and, even, a hint of heaven.
Tweet away @TheAgentApsley
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