The cursi has a bad press. In the rigorous conception of which he knows what is said, the cursive is all that exceeds the limits of emotionality to be impudably redundant, failed beautiful or adverbially cargo. The cursi is neither ridiculous nor sublime, it is the two things in an uncomfortable way. This paragraph, for example, already begins to be a corny. And, nevertheless, and a little that one does not let himself be overcome by the prejudices, the cursive trees in itself enough power of transgression to get to be edifying even. A gravel that spider the eardrum makes the one who listens to street, lower the view and, come the case, Prove. And the complaint of him is no other than the recognition. Everyone at some point in his life has been corny because, simply, he has fallen in love. The cursi is, of all aesthetic defeats, the most democratic.
The latest film by Zhang Yimou (best known for the curses like the master of the fifth generation) is corny. And it is so cheeky, self-conscious and even sincere that it would be said that all of it obeys a calculated sublime strategy. "A second ', this is called, I drag a shameful story, which not cheesy. At the Berlin Festival of 2019, two days after its projection in the lavish and still free of Coronavirus Berlinale Palast, a note from the organization let it know that "by technical problems" the film was withdrawn from the official section. Rare. Then it was learned that the reason was very different: it had been censored and had been dispossessed from the seal of government approval that enables it as a pure and non-contaminated product.
Subsequently, after several unsuccessful remounts, the director had no other than rolling several scenes to the taste of his centers. Now, yes, 'a second' is pure. And cheesy Enter within the speculation to know what was before seen. The truth is that the film runs in the years of bloody cultural revolution that between 1966 and 1976 devoted himself to cleaning bourgeois elements to Chinese society and who suffered the Yimou himself in his meat. Several films realize it. Although time ago criticism was allowed, the truth is that recently, after the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, the authorities of the Asian country have decided that it is already well to stir the story, which last past is and that if those of the cinema ... nothing that does not sound. And within this new policy, Chinese films before compliance as a festival will be preciable have disappeared in a non-exactly mysterious way.
What was seen on Friday at the inauguration of the San Sebastián Festival is the story of a man (Zhang Yi) who escapes a field of work and "reeducation" in the province of Gansu with a single purpose: attending the projection of 'Sons and Heroic Daughters, "Wu Zhaodi signed in 1964. His desire is not so much to see the beautiful, classic and excessive propaganda film as the not-do type news that precedes it. There and during the second he announces the title appears the daughter of him already deceased. The film is arranged as an adventure in transit through the sand dunes of a region of the world as inhospitable as shamelessly lyrical. Our protagonist will be late for the projection in a town and it will not be another to run to the next. At the side of him, he will do another girl for different reasons that not opposed.
With this budget, what follows is a beautiful and, in fact, extremely corny homage to the cinema. What elements of the original assembly were replaced so that everything rhyme, as a rhyme, without a modesty and without measure is already and forever matter of speculation. And the conjecture, why not, reaches the root of a proposal that would say so aware of his / her / her / her / her no other than to silence, look down and, if necessary, protest. The coughing of 'a second' is, let's admit it, ours.
Let's say that the classics director of other times as 'the red lantern' leaves the effort to which the last decade of composing a huge international success. Far from proposals as apparatus and rigid as' the flowers of war '(2011) or' the Great Wall '(2016), Yimou returns to the melancholic and feverish comedy of recent tapes as' a woman, a pistol and a store of Chinese noodles' (2009) or much more aged like 'Keep Cool' (1997) with the idea of convincing the spectator of the most primary emotions. And all this through a redundantly nostalgic look at cinema as a factory, you already know, of dreams, alternative realities and leak points. He is cheesy but perfectly aware of pleasure not by guilty force of happy buffer.
It would be said that the way to answer the censor tax that Zhang Yimou finds is to serve without ambages to the demands of his centers. The film internalizes each of the artistic and expressive limitations of it until it exposes them as perfect as delicate in the eyes of the viewer. What should be conflict between the state that represses and the individual who is repressed to the point that he can not even see a second to his daughter, suddenly becomes the odyssey of a man whose unique comfort to his despair is the shadow of an unreal and already expired past.
'A second' barely aims with slight indications towards a huge tragedy. We know nothing about the ghostly daughter that the wound sees in the movie. It is only possible to fall that instead of dedicating himself to the things of her age, the girl was forced, as she appears on the news, to download bags of flour from a truck. Be that as it may, the daughter died and the father's drama is unabhable. Perhaps, the relationship that is established between the man who flees and the orphan who follows him a kind of vicarious relationship that barely accesses a pain that crosses entire generations.
For the father to fully contemplate his daughter's face, the film, which fell from the car that transported her and disrupted between the sand, has to be first restored with mime by all the people. Yimou trace there a metaphor as evident in its forms as intentionally warm and cruel. The result is, it has already been said, a film as checked as recognizable. Or, better, recognizable by revolutionary and transgressively corny. Sublime and ridiculous at the same time. Beautiful boot for a San Sebastian, no doubt, decisive. That no corny
And fulfilled with the protocol of the openings, the first film arrived by which every Festival sighs. The cinema itself, without exceptions and without cursilerries, is all a sigh in the always disturbing hands of the French Lucile Hadzihalilovic. 'Earwig' - as well as the previous tapes also contemplated in San Sebastián 'Innocence' (2004) and 'Evolution' (2015) - is a proposal launched at the limit with a vocation of simple and evident abyss. It sounds tremendous and, in effect, it is with all the consequences.
On a poet novel, sculptor, filmmaker and more things Brian Catling, the principal barely tells the story of Mia (Romane Hemelarers), a girl with ice teeth. The man who serves her (Paul Hilton) prepares her denture daily with care. And very cold. From time to time, he responds to the phone and in the distance hears the instructions of the teacher. One day she receives the order to prepare for a trip that is also a dream; A nightmare that stumbles at every step that she gives with the remains of a shipwreck that is presumed eternal and so distant that she would say daily and shared by all.
The filmmaker makes up a sinister, hypnotic poem and sonmbol that runs through an unexplored territory; A dark and resplendent space at the same time that it forces us to rethink again and again each of the folds that form the retina. All in 'Earwig' is designed for the enigma, for the suggestion, for doubt. It is cinema built for uncertainty, to unbalance, to make the curses aullar. It is simply an unassailable miracle, incomprehensible and perfect. And nothing chaotic.
Each piece of this jewel is meticulously ordered Merced to a model artistic direction signed by Julia Irribarria, a photograph of infinite melancholy signed by Jonathan Ricquerbourg and a music by Augustin Viard and Warren Ellis Elf and Elliptical where every sound of glass, bells a The distance or the clock ticker is recomposed in each of the senses to smell, moan, dry mouth or just dazzle. Lucile Hadzihalilovic achieves the highest expression of an abstract, synesthetic and both perfectly sensory cinema where the geometry of eternal shapes is mixed with the salty taste of blood.
Undoubtedly, the first masterpiece of a San Sebastian who does not stop starting better and better.
Date Of Update: 21 September 2021, 06:49
