|
Naet posted:I generally like Jacobin but I don't fully understand this review. Jones's critique resembles the common criticism of Wes Anderson: he makes gilded, all-style-no-substance, overly 'Wes Anderson-y' films. She ascribes a lot of meaninglessness to the film: the nesting narration, the different appearances of young/old Gustave and Zero, the casual nature of death, the idea/existence of nostalgia, etc. She assumes Anderson made aesthetic choices with no purpose. Maybe he did, but I'm not convinced by Jones's argument. It's a surprisingly shallow and superficial reading which treats everything presented on screen as literal and true. I agree. She seems to read the film as reveling in feelings of nostalgia when it's actually a condemnation of the concept of the "good old days." The entire movie, of course, takes place in the imagination of the woman in the opening scene. The nested narrative is there to draw the viewer into the increasing levels of abstraction and unreliability - the movie basically portrays eighty-some years' worth of whisper-down-the-lane. Old Zero doesn't look like Young Zero because the woman imagines them as possessing differing appearances - Young Zero is a dark-skinned kid fresh from the Middle East, while Old Zero (as described by the author) is a regal old man with no overt "foreign" qualities about him. The deaths that take place throughout the film appear incidental because, with a couple of exceptions, they are incidental to Old Zero - the only deaths that really stuck with him are Gustave's and his wife's, and the second is mentioned as a footnote only because it has no real bearing on the outcome of Young Zero and Gustave's story. This all seems fairly obvious to me. It seems like Jones already had her mind made up about the movie before even seeing it.
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2014 16:54
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 12:45 |
|