A movie to be felt

Rating: 9/10 (21 February 2007)

Most people I know would HATE this movie, and I that's understandable. (Classic comment at the end of it from a fellow film-goer: 'What the f*ck did the dude in the ball have to do with it?') It is slow paced, arty, self-indulgent, and if watched with a mind for plot and coherency, ultimately frustrating. It is a hard and demanding film, and I don't think it can be enjoyed in any sort of normal conscious terms. As the filmmaker has stated, Requiem for a Dream this is not. I don't think its a film to be necessarily understood, just experienced. It plays like a dream, repeating motifs and themes in vastly different contexts, connecting them by way of suggestion and symbols rather than an ordered narrative. It is, above all else, a movie about accepting death, that death is part of the key to eternal life, and therefore a mystery and a paradox which we cannot understand by applying conscious human tools of perception. And this is why people will hate this movie. Its answer, its heart, is impenetrable by the conscious mind. Walking out is like waking from a dream, or coming down from an hour and a half nitrous oxide high where something in you knows you have seen a truth, there is a feeling of some kind of vague understanding, but you could not express it in the words we have to use. It is the same way one might feel after meditating on the meaning of life - you reach a point where you have to accept the mystery of it all. And that is frustrating. Unless you can just accept it. To just let the images, the hints, the paradoxes, go into you and to feel them. I know why people compare this to 2001 - I certainly couldn't say what 2001 is about - but I damn sure have a feeling. Its like my stomach knows something my brain doesn't. People hate that feeling. An extremely ambitious film which so nearly fails so often, but I applaud the filmmakers for having the guts to do it.