eternal sunshine, with a kick

Rating: Null/10 (20 September 2010)

This is a page turn, an important statement by an important director of our days. It is also the peak (so far) of whatever interesting things Nolan has been exploring so far. Di Caprio is in this ride and this is probably his best effort into becoming a serious actor in the film world. He won me here.
I am a perfectly defined film viewer. I care for emotions, for feelings (love or others), and for their visual depiction. And i really really care for storytelling devices and the narrative building of a film. I really despise any film that banalizes simple and real emotions. So i appreciate more the films that conceive a coherent narrative structure even if they don't hit so hard on the emotional tension, than films that depict love or friendship or empathy as sentimental pornography. So, the top of the game for me in what concerns cinema is sensitive and honest stories, backed up but intelligent narrative structures.
That's what we have here, shiny and beautiful as i have seen very few times. The very abstract concept of what is being told merges with the fabric of the film. The film itself builds the content we are supposed to have in the story. The structure of the film Is the story. How we enter those sub structures mimics how the characters do it. It is as simple as that to explain, and as complex as the film is to understand.
There are several notions, dear to me, that moved me. We have Obvious layers (dreams within dreams) that are literally and constantly explained to us by many characters in the film. Moving from one layer to the other is literally moving deeper, in a spatial sense. Each layer has autonomy, but is severely affected by how the other layers progress. So a sneeze in a layer is an earthquake in the other.
The most beautiful notion is that we have people on the inside of people. We have people bending the soul of other people, intimately touching each other, touching in a sense deeper than what we have ever seen in cinema. Nolan nearly leverages literature in how we can reach the inside of a character beyond what we can see. For those matters alone, the best sequence is probably the visit to Paris. Di Caprio and Page. How she bends his memories of Paris, how she literally bends the set. And the final sequence, the collapsing city, a reinvention of di Caprio's memories of his memories. One of the greatest things here is how emotion is mapped into space. Every set is the very portrait of a memory, of a sensation. It's an original way (for how it's done) to associate film with the visual use of space. I'll mark this.
Marion Cotillard as the character who, from where we can see, is merely a memory (invented or not) and hardly the real person. Her performance is great, eventually the greatest in this film.
We play the game of invented/shared memories, that happen over reality, and we move deeper into the layer where we can bend and change those memories, thus creating new ones, or inventing them. That's the Inception. Can you create the memory of this film? Can you co-create its layers while you dream it? And more important, can you induce it into the layers of your own life as naturally as if it had grown out of you?
My opinion: 5/5 experience it.
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