I know people who don't tolerate empty spaces - when a box in their room is released, they immediately fill it with a new item - whether it will be the perfume, so far sitting on the bathroom shelf, or a new book, it does not matter. Would we go anywhere without our own? Without taking a picture, neither a car nor an inheritance ring? Unless we have projected through our subjects, we have neither a past nor a future - we have not accumulated, exchanged, and bequeaths. I own, therefore I am meaningful. I don't say this with reproaches to the economic system or human psychology. We are what we are. But these fetishes must be approached with cheerful distrust, because, as I recently read by Alejandro Jodorowsky, when the stars are extinguished, "nothing belongs to us." Probably even our own shoes would leave us if they had the ability.
This is one of the themes that "A Ghost Story" develops, without necessarily leading - our painful commitment to the material world. Painful because we really suffer when we divide ourselves with our own possession. Every separation is torture - it forcibly pulls us out of the world. "As soon as I run my favorite jeans, I'll probably have to say goodbye to my friends someday, and that will make my life heavy and cold." This is the human condition - we are blessed in a cradle, and our lap fall all our values one by one. In some unnatural abyss. "A Ghost Story" accumulates exponentially the sense of loss, just as no movie has ever done. He gives the viewer this emotion and, in his quiet sadness, in his modest dialogue, in his wonderful music and his blunted sleeping colors, turns into an escalating wail, unleashed powerfully to the stars. Where are all our dead.
The film crystallizes from a real-life story by director David Lowery's life - moving them with his wife from one home to another. Once they leave, he realizes that if you are strongly attached to a house, you can suffer for it intensively and for a long time. And that pain is visualized in the movie.
Casey Affleck, photo by Bret Curry
The heroes of Runni Mara and Casey Affleck are two young people who live together (and are in the process of being out). If you have experienced it with another person, you can not mistake the emotion between them, it is one thing: love. They touch in a way that excites and excites. One of the long-lasting and stretching scenes that are emblematic of the film is precisely the two of them in bed. But at one point, far from nothing, he crashes and she remains alone. He also remains alone - to walk around the house as a ghost, covered with a sheet of bedding from the hospital. The symbol is concrete and spectacular, there is nothing ridiculous in the decision to depict so "childish and animated". A sheet underneath it is dead, no one sees it (except for another ghost with a sheet that roams across the house). Casey Affleck is the liveliest dead I've ever seen on the screen. His movements are expressive, human and moving. (Well, perhaps Daniel Radcliffe competes with him in "Swiss Army Man," but in a more comical lightweight context).
It's been hundreds of years. Rooney's georigine leaves, but the specter has unfinished work (as always in stories of ghosts, but this time "unfinished work" works) and that's why it remains. The house changes different tenants, and the scenes we are familiar with them determine their function of simply the Others. They are not heroes, the only hero he is, he and he is the whole movie (and in my opinion, a better translation would be "The Story of the Ghost"). Among these episodic appearances we have a magnificent scene with young people gathered for a party. A male (in the role of Will Oldham), sets a monologue for the end of the world and the futility of human life in a way that invites the appearance of Rose Cole from True Detective. In fact, the absolute best of the scene is its end, which is an intelligent and airy counterpoint to everything the Man has said. This moment tells the viewer that he is not watching a movie that aims to take our faith in life and suppress us. Exactly the opposite. This movie treats us from our own fears. From the Internet I read reviews - reviewers compare the film to Tarkovsky's style. For me the association is questionable, but one thing worth mentioning. Tarkovsky, when asked what the meaning of art is, says: "To prepare the man for death." Words that really touched me.
David Lowery wrote and directed, and Rooney Mara plays a grieving widow.
As I have already written, one is in a constant state of accumulation of possessions and their subsequent loss. It is not just about material things. We lose constantly and imperceptibly memories, illusions, opportunities. We lose whole life within the one we have perceived as ours. The ordered perspectives stand in us like matrixes that we never take out. The last and the greatest we divide with is our own life. If art is the arena to which provoking questions are asked, if it has the purpose of enriching our sensitivity and making it transparent and immediate to us, then it is logical that it is also his task to tell us exactly what we want the least to say, "Yes, you will die. And you have to learn how to get there. "
"A Ghost Story" is divided into two parts - before Rooney Mara's heroine leaves the house after leaving. The first part prepares us for the second part - the loss of one person is the threshold for the loss of the whole world. The first part of the film is romantic and personal. It's for two people. But then the film loses one character to enhance the isolation of the other. Begin the odious and existential search for life despite death. After the 47th minute of the movie (approximately right in the middle) Rooney leaves and then the Spirit dares to roam under an open sky. His loneliness is devastating, especially in the scenes where he is back in the house. The white sheet on it is a ball to the viewer: what if you are yourself? What questions do you ask when you die?
Time is an issue that has recently been over and over again by the big productions ("Interstellar", "First Contact"). A curious technical detail about the production of the film is that, in order to be stylistically bound by the Spirit, the film team shoots all the scenes with it at 33 frames per second. All other characters are shot with 24. For example, two temporal surfaces are superimposed over one another in a single frame: in the frames in which Rooney and the Spirit are together, it is shot with 24 frames, and it with 33. Technical and ideologically they operate in different time spaces. Effectively, right?
An additional circumstance makes the stay of Casey's hero in the special lymph. He is a musician. The creators are special in wanting to leave a trace much more insistent than other people. Not that I want to say that it is more inappropriate for them to be dead, but there are still more questions. Because: what is your creator if you have not left a trail? Listen to the song Casey puts on Rooney here.
Although the film is about Spirit, it is not about science-fiction or horror. This is a drama. For some lighter than I present with this text, but certainly drama. If you know what a loss is (and who does not know?), You will weep. When you see the beautiful green grass and the blue-and-orange sky over it, and the sheet shading like an altar, you will weep. Not to mention how you will weep when hidden fingers with a desperate urge to peel the plaster to draw a sheet of paper from there. "A Ghost Story" begins with a quotation from Virginia Woolf's novel. The quote states that at any moment you wake up, a door closed.
What's on the other side? When are we awake?
