I went into this Cannes crowdpleaser unaware that it is a video game adaptation. This belated knowledge adds a substantial gloss to my impressions of what worked here and what didn't.
The game concept is experimental and sparse. You are trapped in M.C. Escher’s take on the Tokyo Metro. You must traverse the loop (at least) 8 times, attentive to any anomalies which would require you to turn around and reverse your personal flow.
Kawamura has clearly thought hard how he could embrace the minimalism of this conceit while at the same time extracting a maximal amount of metaphorical meaning, all within a cinematic packaging that never goes easy on the eerie.
In the movie making trade transitions from a first person source to the third person perspective are often irredeemably lossy, at least in my experience.
Here it generally works, as we are presented with one key protagonist ('The Lost Man') whose personal crossroads threatens to become an inescapable cycle and although his crisis and sense of existential traped-ness is not one that I might immediately identify with, the film does carry the apparently universal intuition that we are often inclined to settle into life's loops, and perhaps need to be looking out for those missable (and un-missable) anomalies, which will show us the way to move ahead more fruitfully.
I particularly enjoyed the use of Ravel's Bolero — beginning and end — as a kind of musical emblem of a spiral with a sense of progression.
No comments:
Post a Comment