Casablanca is a utopian world, a great metaphor about life that is at once the limbo linking hell to paradise.

Rating: 9/10 (17 June 2017)

In "Adaptation" by Spike Jonze, "Casablanca" is referred to as a masterpiece for those who want to study and create a screenplay, the consideration is made by screenwriter Robert McKee (Brian Cox), and without a doubt: it is.
The 1942 classic directed by Michael Curtiz, goes through the centuries as the reference of the seventh art, mainly for the development of its history, an exquisite script that follows the classic linear structure (beginning, middle and end), and who knows how to take advantage of it To provoke small breaks in linearity, in developing a dramatic history whose past we do not know but which is a fundamental part that interferes with the decisions and characteristics of a character, and an uncertain future, but with clear possibilities. We know the paths available to the protagonists, but which will be the chosen and the reason, this only know at the end of the film. The script is based on the play "Everybody Comes To Rick's," being developed in three hands, by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koc. A curiosity is that the text of the piece only got to be mounted (years) later, and the rights to the cinema was one of the highest values ​​paid at the time.
"Casablanca" begins with an ironic narration, close to the comedies that parody wars, and at different moments we have this jocular air in the dialogues of the personages, such as Richard Blane (Humphrey Bogart ) That satirizes its condition of abandoned man or of the transitory condition and of waiting of the great room of connections that is the "airport Casablanca". However, the script makes the slide precisely by wanting to present the external world through flash black, a feature that does not add anything interesting to the film, but is an easy way out to try to clarify important facts of the past, yet something that a script So bright and a precise direction, could have solved with other means.
A thriving feature used to compose the illumination of the film is the idea of ​​a lantern of a lighthouse, which reflects its turn throughout that city, although spatially speaking, the light of this lighthouse reveals that Casablanca is as short as the extension between two open arms , But it is clear the proposal of director Michael Curtiz that with the direction of photography of Arthur Edeson, create an atmosphere of occultism, and that as the characters, we only have vestiges of shadows, they are not clear, as the lapses of illumination , Which little by little reveals something. Another point that contributes to the illumination and photography adopted is the total superficiality employed. We are in a city in Morocco, where sunlight is strong and abundant, but as "Casablanca" was shot in the studio, and also proposes the features of a Superficial city, its illumination is composed of lamps, chandeliers, lamps, glares and lighthouses and rarely we have reflections of the sun. This artificiality is also felt in the direction of art performed by Carl Jules Weyl, who in what would be internal and external scenarios, works with very definite oppositions, in the internal environments we have the richness of details, as in the bar "Ricks Café American" or " Club Owner Signor Ferrari "in these environments everything is very luxurious and grandiose and well explored in open plans or the close detail minutiae revealing a beautiful work of composition of images and Mise en scène.
The soundtrack is marked by the classic "Like the Time Goes By" and La Marseillaise, the national anthem of France. Both gain "status" in addition to soundtrack, become "leitmotiv", and generating some uneasiness, in the third strand of La Marseillaise more than to know that the French are there or that it is a quest to praise France, we know that It is an insecurity on the part of the director to clarify points that are already established as local skin frequented or by the uniforms used by the characters (eg differentiate German soldiers from the French). But the apex of exaltation of the national anthem of France occurs when it is used to provoke the Germans, capable even of uniting the French who are in the Rick café and under German rule.
Humphrey Bogart as Richard Blane, Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa Lund Laszlo and Paul Henreid as Victor Laszlo, stand out individually, and the alien origin of each actor favors the clandestine and migratory game inherent in the film. If separately each actor stands out, the combination in a love triangle works even more, and greatly divides the viewer to the lovable favoritism of Ilsa's character, for both the charming Blane and the heroic Victor are charismatic and with divergent qualities, but Together only complicate yet another position that helps in determining who Ilsa should stay with. None of these characters fall on a Manichean scale to the bad side. Some are cynical, some lie, some kill