the infinity of the womb

Rating: Null/10 (30 November 2013)

I've been absent. Not only from writing about films, but from watching them with the frequency of past days as well. Part of it was life-driven, as i don't have the time i used to have. Part of it is because from time to time i feel the need to step a little back from whatever i'm doing more intensely and reevaluate things. Passions are better enhanced through fasting. I've had 6 or 7 very intense years where my life mixed a great deal with the lives of the films i've watched. That's the beauty of films, when you approach the films that change you by allowing then to become a part of your life, by blending them into you - as if you had a choice... Cuarón had changed me before, he's so intense because his narrative is always in the eye. His films are bits intimacies that arise from the magic of the relation between character, space, and camera. That's the basis of his dramatic construction, that's where the story lies. That's what allows him to spin and make beautiful free yet coordinated movements, like a planet circling the sun. Children of men changed me because of that. When i heard that Cuarón decided to go to space and enhance even more that special relation between space and camera, i knew he was going for something even bigger. He changes me now, once again
Nothing is more powerful, and as such more difficult to bend as space. It's infinite in its possibilities (like desert), it is totally spatial and it is the opposite of architecture, which is also all about space. Children of men mastered the built space, as this one masters the infinite. Intimacy of a space capsule as opposed to the possibilities of gravity zero. The camera as the ultimate non-animated disembodied character, as chaotic as space itself, yet as emotional as any of the 2 characters in the film. Cuarón ranks at the highest point, together with Kalatozov, in that so dear (to me) theme of space manipulation and film.
Both actors do what was expected. Clooney plays Clooney's character, and becomes a useful wheel in the mechanism, allowing with his persona to make the audiences enter easily this otherwise strange unexplored film frame. Sandra tries hard, as she always does, perhaps harder than she should, and also as always, she seats uneasily in the role, but again that works in favor of the narrative, as her character also does not belong to the world where she moves. Than comes the magic. And world, from the moment it starts to shake, is always a sequence of total stillness followed by spatial chaos. Meteo rain vs the silence inside a capsule, breaking cranes (again the cranes are flying...) vs the sight of Earth framed by a window. We get the most powerful womb representation that i can think of in my whole life in films, and the metaphor of poles, of touching extremes is complete, as the intimacy of the uterus kisses the intimacy of the infinite, where Clooney is allowed to sing while he sees the sunset, or rise.
This is the second film in 2 years that: -really changed me; -was compared by a great deal of people to 2001; -which i find has nothing to do with it. Is it the fact that he films planets and black space? That the actors are dressed as astronauts? That we have scenes in zero gravity? The other film was Malick's Tree of Life.
This is the best 3D i've seen. Nowhere else have i seen such a meaningful use of the possibilities.
My opinion: 5/5