Someone is trying to have a thought. please bear with us:
I was sort of thinking about how Pulp Fiction marked, at least in America, the beginning of the multiple-storyline-fractured-narrative movie when the Brits are the ones that really do the best jobs with it. Take Gosford Park. Thousands of characters, millions of plotlines intersecting, and it all sort of made sense by the end. So...Love Actually wasn't quite on that level in terms of complexity (there were only 11 couples (dani thinks 12, but she's just wrong. claudia schiffer was the resolution of a different relationship, not half a relationship in her own right) as opposed to the millions in GP) or ingenuity of plotlines (after all, LA was essentially a glorified chickflick). Still, watching the various plotlines and personalities unfold and intersect was still more entertaining than the actual plots themselves. Talk about form over substance.
Even better, Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean, Black Adder, et al) looms over the movie like a sort of a demigod, swooping down twice when his intervention was required at key plot turning points. He wasn't at his top form (in his real-life role he's Funniest Man Alive, after all), but, well, he is Rowan Atkinson, and he's in a movie, and I saw it, so all is well with the universe. And, he played his roles perfectly. Funny, slightly off-putting, and so totally himself.
dani: i liked the movie. i suggest that if you have a sense of humor and some tolerance for sappiness, you see it, and enjoy it. shavua tov, everybody. <singing> i feel it in my fingers, i feel it in my toes...
disclaimer: i do not endorse watching nakedness and soft porn. but they give you plenty of time to look away. and it's great for the whole "let me gaze into your eyes instead of sitting next to you and staring at a huge flickering screen" moment that we all take so rarely.
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ReplyDeleteMonday, 1 December 2003 6:34 pm
Just my three cents on the film:
I liked this movie in general, but I thought it had a lot of potential that was really wasted. The plotlines were intertwined just enough to keep us interested, but not enough to make the film an integrated whole with themes that arose from their content. On the other hand, the storylines were not separated fully enough to make them foils to each other, or to make the structure of the film itself speak in a relevant way.
I think you got it exactly right: "watching the various plotlines and personalities unfold and intersect was still more entertaining than the actual plots themselves." Entertaining, yes, enlightening, no. In the way of most romantic comedies, it was a piece of entertainment, which used whatever techniques it had at its disposal to make us feel good about ourselves and our already-held views of love (even if those views are intelligent ones, wisely tempered by a knowledge of all the ways in which love can fail, go wrong, etc.), rather than to really challenge anything or make us see anything in what might be considered a new way. This is not to say that it was not enjoyable, or even that its point of view might not have been a 'wakeup call' to some people. But it was a cinematic wakeup call, that, in my opinion, rarely rose above the movie-fiction version of what love is supposed to be
If you want to know what I mean, go rent a movie called "Til There Was You." It is a film that is a romantic comedy in every way, a story of two people (Jeanne Tripplehorn and Dylan McDermott) who are destined to get together and finally do. But it manages, mostly through protraying all of the things these two protagonists have to get through and learn to eventually get together, to transcend its romantic comedy frame. It evinces a subtle irony about love (and especially the kind of love we often see in movies) through wonderful dialogue and careful plotting, that shows us that the central love plot of the film has nasty side-effects, dependencies on lonliness, weaknesses, etc., that need to be acknowledged in order for what seems like love to be more than movie fantasy. It's subtle, but it's there, and it makes this movie a cut above most if not all cheesy romantic comedies.
ReplyDelete(Also: weirdly, almost every character in the film smokes. I have no idea why this is, but it lends to the overall impression that all is not quite hunky-dory in chickflickland. Companionship surrogates, perhaps?)
As far as fractured storylines in general go, Robert Altman (who directed Gosford Park) has been making films of this sort for years, long before Pulp Fiction. Altman's work has always been very well-respected in America. And many other directors, many of them Asian and French, have played with these dislocations and intertwined plots to great effect since the 60s. One of the things that made Pulp Fiction such a groundbreaking film is that American films had long been criticized (and celebrated by many) for always being so straightforward. Tarantino, who was a huge film buff, and knew European and especially Hong Kong and Japanese film backwards and forwards, took the fractured storyline concept and (instead of making another Hong Kong film, just in English, as he did with Reservoir Dogs) he showed that fractured storylines and intertwined plots were actually a very American thing, just not until now in the medium of film, but in the genre of the cheap pulp novel. Hence the title, which shows brilliantly how this is not a avant-garde pretentious technique, but an essential form for real entertaining, complex and interesting storytelling. It doesn't need to be Altman's high-falutin films to use these elements to great and highly intelligent use.
ReplyDeleteAll this by way of saying: we don't need to forgive a film its faults just because it is labelled a 'chick flick' or a romantic comedy, etc. The slack that we cut films labelled this way is just encouragement for fewer filmmakers to go out and to make a "Til There Was You" or a "Pulp Fiction" or even a "When Harry Met Sally." They get lazy because they can, and instead make a "Love Actually," which could have been a great film and instead was just a pretty good one.
Just my seventeen cents.
amateur film guy