What happened to 1001 comments?

Rating: Null/10 (19 November 2009)

This is going to be deadly serious. Like, in 1001 nights Scheherazade cuts her narrative before dawn, responding to the restrictive threat of the khalif, you know, about cutting her head, and that saves her. Here, we have a film threatened to be cut by a kiss, for some nights at least. A kiss that automatically is much more, it spills out of its frame and threatens and treats us on the verge of becoming a bloodbath, Edward eating up his girlfriend and the rest, but none of this, thankfully, happens. Thankfully? Some reviewers, and I am on the verge of agreeing with them, say that this heats up, rewinds us back to classic Hollywood where a kiss was not just a kiss, and the consummation was invested, well, in our investment. That is totally different from identification with questioning what shall one do and the appended titillation, coming back and forth the on screen proceedings and the viewer you know, like totally.
This is going to be deadly serious I wrote. I wish it was undeadly serious. Like (I love this American like, it's not at all, like, Brit) seriously Robert Pattinson is the most gorgeous thing of all times, and if not all times surely since 1918! That is all times can give best, and it certainly happens on screen. Off screen, well, there is where problems begin, because, you know, one is a viewer of this film, he is not embedded, if I may say so, into the action. And this is the merit of a film, I deem (excuse me if I sound from another era regarding my diction, I am actually from another country, but well, nowadays that is the same anachronism). Its merit is the fact that our gaze has to participate, and if not be undercut by it, then palpitate in that sort of film. What sort one may ask. Let's pin it down. Is it unrequited love? Frustrated love? High-school, aids-era, neo-puritan, plain girly, gay overtones one, etc? None of the above. It's not an etc. love either.
The question is: is this all about love? No. Just, plainly, bluntly, no. Why? For love to emerge, there must be three. As I said, I am going to be deadly serious.
Edward and Bella fall in - what? He is a vampire, she a mortal. There seems to be an incomensurability. An incomensurability boils. Not just down to "I am afraid I will eat you", not just screaming after just recovering "don't go, don't leave me etc". It is not about plausibility. It is not about her (her, the woman being the object of desire) being paler than death, in every respect, so that one can overwhelm his identification with death, or anemia, or loving one who suffers, as she wisely introduces herself in the beginning, that makes one more plausible, as if love was a question of plausibility. I think one can insist enough on this. The thing is that there must be a third party to make it implausible, and thus redeem it like love. Movies purportedly insist, in matters of love, on someone frustrating the couple, and likewise foregrounding it to become one. Love and death is not enough, when it is, as it was an internal question. Otherwise, as many viewers pointed, and I insist on the word viewer, the film is spent in gazes, in the film. And not outside it, namely the viewer.
One likes Hitchcock, one likes film noir, another likes blockbusters where there is some suspense because someone intervenes. No one intervenes here, albeit with side glances. But one cannot build up a film or love with glances and glances, hither and thither: video-clip ones, borrowed and burrowed here and there, stylistically speaking. I mean, I know there is a verve to something in this commentary, no? I was a high-school girl once? No. But everybody is one. Everyone ends up a female impersonator. And this film, with so many women in the production, is a sad example of this.
To resume. The narrative is thrift-spent in many stylistic devices as if it would titillate the viewers. It is not amusing, it is not disorienting, it is not in-between. That makes three? No. It makes a semblance of three. And it does not make sense. Or truth.
Put a teacher while the high-school student reads, put a fighter of the vampires outside their circle, not enclose the circle with vampires of a different clan. We all are of a different clan. Put a one-line that has to do with one line, put an adolescent - but you already did that in the film, early on, where the infatuation begins, before we begin to bother. We don't identify? You don't identify with us. That's the democratic vampire speaking. No, the suspense-loving vampire one, the loving-loving vampire speaking suspense. Please don't identify with us. Are you male? Are you female? Are you undead? For, surely, you can't be dead. Are you a dead one reading these lines?
Then probably you've drank all the wines...
But I'm on a special diet.