Inception, dreaming and is Cobb 'awake' [whatever that is] when the film ends ? (work in progress)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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26 July
Inception, dreaming and is Cobb 'awake' [whatever that is] when the film ends ? (work in progress)
Michael Caine, as a lecturer in an unspecified discipline at a French academy (which, however, we may rightly assume to be La Sorbonne), graces a scene close to the start of Inception [which, thanks to this word from the world of insurance, necessarily sounds like the start of the start], and then does not reappear until the closing ones.
From their conversation, we learn that Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), whom he addresses as 'Dom', is his son-in-law and that he had once been one of his brighter students. (The credits tell us that Caine's character is called Miles, but we do not hear that name used.) Despite Cobb's seeming implication in the death of his daughter (Mal**, played by Marion Cotillard), Miles appears to have relatively few reservations about introducing Cobb to one of his current students, once he has first urged Cobb 'to come back to reality', and Cobb has argued both that, after what happened, he has to use what he was taught to do as he does (but cannot now be the architect of his own dream-deceptions), and, moreover, that the job that he is undertaking represents his only chance to be what Miles and Cobb want him to be able to be, a father to his children.
When Cobb asks for someone 'at least as good as' he was, Miles claims that Ariadne (Elliot Page) is 'better than' Cobb. (Apart from at the end of the film, where Miles meets Cobb at the airport, we see Caine do no more than effect an introduction to Ariadne. (If, that is, Cobb and co. have actually reached Arrivals...))
More to come...
Appendix :
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
