A story that never ends...

Rating: 10/10 (13 December 2019)

Scarlett Johansson is mesmerizing in everything she does - performing a role, singing, dancing, and defending her political views, existing, simply. Everything in her is delicately appropriate: the firm, and at the same time, smooth voice; the skewed and hypnotizing eyes, the provoking lips as perfect frames for touching words as "love" and "nostalgia", her performance in the movie built by the way she looks, in all possible senses. The movie begins with a formula: over an assembling of scenes, Nicole (Scarlett) and Charlie (Adam Driver) exchange compliments. We soon realize that it is discourse written in a therapeutic session. They are on the verge of separation, that indefinable, painful, irreparable, destructive, incapacitating moment. Yes, before the rupture, there was love and affection, and this is the most devastating punch at this point. Nevertheless, there is a child and he is going to be used as a manipulative element by both of them, which invariably happens in these cases. There are also the parts' lawyers: Laura Dern and Ray Liotta rock maneuvering the divorce in an indignantly and competitive way. Nicole and Charlie are at that process in which neither of them knows exactly why the marriage failed, and this is disturbing for them and, of course, for us. It seems clear that each other's dimension got lost along the time they spent together, despite (or because) the connections that still exist between them. Scarlett is the physical form of talent, playing a woman who wants the best for her family, but cannot wait anymore to make her dreams come true. Adam Driver takes off Kylo Ren's character and takes the plunge into the role that may redefine him as one of the most talented actors of his time - his losses, after the separation, are shown on his face like Mike Tyson's jabs. The director Noah Baumbach displays autobiographical references in his works, as he did in his best movie so far THE SQUID AND THE WHALE. It is not different here: he shows a depressing trait of the post-modern times, the outsourcing of the sentimental matters, in charge, here, of the two lawyers, who fight over everything that could have been but was not, as once said Manuel Bandeira.