#33
Post
by therewillbeblus » Sun Apr 05, 2020 12:50 am
I’ve never been a huge Greenaway fan, often finding his stagey Brechtian style to be detaching and pretentious rather than engaging, but there’s something intriguing theoretically about what he does that keeps me coming back and re-evaluating his work with mixed success.
This was always one of my least favorites but a revisit was far more interesting for many of the reasons Colin mentioned in his excellent post on the first page of this thread. I appreciated the calligraphy and the fading text as Michael mentioned, which seem like small details but aided the transient flow of narrative progression to match the philosophical temperament. Here the distancing techniques captured my attention earnestly with their less predictable methods of visually inserting the frame with split screen images and dictating ideas in a meditative hazy manner that caused more surrender to curiosity in its assembly of culture and technique rather than frustration and condescension. I thought it was amusing that underneath a strange presentation of an eccentric narrative lived raw materials of unoriginal concepts: family history, jealousy, vengeance, misinterpretation, tragedy, identity exploration, etc. often in Shakespearean elicitations.
The fetishized exploration of sex and writing made me think of how both are forms of expression that stem from a personal place but that for eroticism to occur must be shared. The context of culture/individual perspective as a variable adds weight to the personal side and imbalances the protagonist away from connection due to her own standards and expectations, but this also represents the power that she desires in a relationship and can be looked at as a strength in refusing to settle. Her behavior indicates a specific need as well as the universal tendency to tire and seek new ancillary experiences, though part of what worked well here is the mystery of our bonds to literature and history, which she has been raised to identify with and has thus shaped her. In some ways this is similar to how many of us are conditioned into foundations for our identity development in early childhood that progress through youth, though the relationship to culture outside of a broad definition was unique and enough outside of my scope of knowledge to provoke interest rather than write off.
I can’t say I loved the movie, and only liked parts of it, but I wasn’t repelled for the same reasons I have been in the past by the filmmaker. There was more indifference to the content buried within the style, but the narrative process in moving everything along was never boring and I could see repeat viewings (and a re-evaluation of Greenaway’s work, which I plan to do soon) providing a better framework to appreciate this film.