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Reviews
Case départ (2011)
A smart and funny comedy
Roberto Benigni's La Vitta e Bella tried to bring comedy into a concentration camp. Some have loved the result, but many have complained that the camp didn't look as hard as it really was, or that it was too easy to depict the nicest Jews against the evil Nazis.
Case Départ avoids both of these problems: the two heroes are both horrible, horrible persons, and their exposition scenes are small masterpiece in dark humor. And then, when, through the spell of a witch, they go back to 1780 at the time of slavery, the scenes are really painful to watch. You got the chains, the whip... They hardly toned it down to keep it funny.
You gotta hand it to the writers, who managed to make a comedy about slavery, when few things are less funny. But the movie also has quite a social statement to make, and makes it smartly as well as funnily. By having the two main characters representing one extreme of being Black in France (one is an "Oreo", the other a never-do-good who blames Whites first)... as you can guess, by the end of their journey, they will both have learned something important about their identity.
I recommend this film wholeheartedly.
Lost Highway (1997)
The visual equivalent to Steve Reich's music
To start with, anybody who thinks LH is too slow has been spoil by too many Hollywood flicks designed for the masses. By European standards, it is not slow at all. If you ever listened to 'Phase patterns' by Steve Reich, you've heard four organs playing patterns and then getting out of control until they all interact and all you can hear is harmonics; listen to it with some friends and you'll see that nobody hears the same melody. This movie does the exact same thing. The whole fun of it is to check out what other people saw and/or understood. Here's what I think I understood after three viewings (in the light of Mulholland Drive which is very similar): the whole movie is a flashback. On the verge of dying in the Chair, Fred relives his whole life. But he sees it as he remembers it, not how it actually happened (he says it himself). That is why it starts with 'Dick Laurent is dead' although he is not dead yet; he knows he will die because he's already lived the story. He changes all sorts of things, starting with himself. Instead of an older sexually inadequate murderer, he is a young, virile and innocent man. But reality haunts him (like in MD), in the form of the Mystery Man - Evil - who tells him that when you're sentenced to death, you cannot escape (reality). You have to accept that Evil can take the form of an actual man (like Bob in Twin Peaks). Which is why when Fred disappears into the dark side of his house (of himself), he reappears as two men (there are two shadows), one kills his wife, the other one puts it on film (his memory?). Or maybe Pete is really a younger Fred - everything in the second part of the movie seems less 90's looking than the first half. Except the music... But while Pete is dancing with Sheila in the dance hall, the music is fast, but everybody's dancing a slow, so he's changed the music in his mind. Or wait, maybe... Damn, let's face it, I didn't understand anything about this movie. Yet I've enjoyed it. Which is what makes it so great. I liked Mulholland Drive better because it actually makes sense if you try hard enough, but I really liked LH, it's like a first draft of MD.