The Size of the Brick

Rating: Null/10 (10 April 2004)

What an exciting time to be alive! We can actually go to our corner theater and participate in the invention of a new medium. Fundamental elements of the vocabulary are still being explored and invented.
I knew that I was witnessing something important halfway through. Superficially this is another Kaufman exercise in self-reference. Those are always interesting, he knows how to fold the story with methods of telling the story plus a third story about those methods. There's some of that here, but it is shoehorned into the 'big idea' that wasn't his in the first place. So although you have one of the most powerful folding actors ever (Winslet), the real advance here is in another area.
Hundreds of films have tried to portray dreams and visions, folding them into 'reality.' Some are blunt ('What Dreams may Come'), others frantic ('Pi') and puzzling
('Mulholland Dr'). No one has yet managed the arbitrary slipperiness of visions as successfully as Tarkovsky in 'Nostalgia.'
Part of Tarkovsky's genius is in making ordinary objects exotic by bending the context. But he does his work in large chunks.
Any filmmaker, the real ones, make an early decision about the materials of their creation, just as an architect does. In architecture, you can choose to make the structure out of bricks. These things actually hold the building up. Then you have to design the brick. What's the right size?
Tarkovsky used large bricks, so we could read them from a distance. Rodriguez , for instance, in his second act of 'Once Upon a Time in Mexico,' used what looks like small bricks, but they are just for show: they carry no narrative.
What we have here are small bricks, small minivignettes that come at blinding speed from all tenses and actually hold up the narrative. You need an intelligent actor to help carry this off and in this case we have the redoubtable Kate who is one of our most intelligent masters of this sort of architectural material. After all, her very first film ('heavenly Creatures') was about this same matter: how small a fantasy or memory could be and still create reality.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.