How does a film work?

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

20 November

Well, when it works, you don't need to ask: not that there's any real magic involved, just movie magic, where something has been put together with care.

When it doesn't work, the holes leap out at you, because the thing doesn't bear thinking about coherently - if the music and fast action have just dazzled you, there is still time for reflection - if the plot has taken you somewhere where you weren't convinced to go, you will know why later.

OK, so getting back to The Future, who has time for a couple of 35-year-olds who glibly reckon that, if the next five-year period is taken up with caring for a cat, they will then be 40, which is effectively just 50, which is effectively just decline, decay and death? For this analysis, dismissive of the rest of their lives (except, of course, the month remaining before they collect the cat), is so assinine that:


(a) It can't be the supporting premise for everything else that happens (let alone our believing that they treat it as one)*;

(b) What happens, in Jason's part of it at least, proves him (factually) wrong; and

(c) If anyone should have been given this denial to deliver that they have any future, Miranda July should have given it to her own character, Sophie, as Jason is a little more knowing and less likely to utter such nonsense.


Unfortunately for these two, only Sophie appears to have any friends (or family), she only appears to have two, and they seem as poor at contacting her as she them (although Jason does mention their names at least twice, which is helpful when they do make a brief appearance - too late). July may not have deliberately plotted this, but their 'experiment with living' can then happen in a vacuum: starved the oxygen of publicity, it deserved to die.


Oh, and two things about the cat / veterinary centre:

(1) In these days of concern for humane treatment, so many such places carry out at least home visits, if not other assessments, prior to 'adoption';

(2) But maybe this one, which cares so little for a cat that has been waiting with it for a month for an injury to heal (and yet the cat still has the bandage on its paw), is therefore quite content, as it advertised*, to exterminate the animal that it has housed (at whose cost?) for all that time when those due to collect it do not turn up until a day later? - or can they not afford the cost of a telephone call or e-mail (but can that of the necessary euthanasia injection)?


*For me, these starred items are just the scars of lazy film-making, of July wanting Sophie to have an affair with Marshall without being troubled to come up with any - or any convincing - scenario.

Let alone her taking the step of calling a number that she expertly reads upside-down, which may be a charming non sequitur, but then why bother with making the cat out to be the impetus for all of this?

In fact, I almost wish I had bothered to watch Revolutionary Road...


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