By 
JAUJA *****
With the arrival of the new season, Lisandro Alonso’s metaphorical drama is a visually arresting experience that confirms its splendorous beauty as the first great film of 2015. Through the journey of a man into an unknown land, in search of his missing daughter, Alonso contemplates the most pure and natural aspects of beauty, as his camera captures dazzling moments in natural landscapes and humans, building an exhilarating cinematic force as the result of the perfect harmony among nature, existential elements and art. Viggo Mortensen is highly complex and seductive as a Danish engineer, hired for a job in the Tropics during the colonization period. He delves into the forest seeking for his 15-year-old daughter who escaped with a love interest, and the consequences of the eccentric encounters along the way create a mysterious and subtle atmosphere of a dreamlike journey. Majestically conceived with a sexual tension throughout the narrative, strongly performed and filled with breathtaking images that resemble people moving around to uncertain destinations, the film proves Alonso is a natural story-teller. (Opens Friday at Film Society of Lincoln Center, 144 West 65th Street Broadway, NYC)
3 HEARTS **
It’s hard to believe the conflicting romance Benoit Jacquot’s film is trying to impose. A man misses his train and meets a mysteriously sad woman, with whom he takes a long walk through the ghostly quiet streets of a country town. Morning rises and he must leave, but they arrange a meeting a week ahead in Paris. Obviously something happens and they never meet again, until years later when she learns he’s marrying her sister. This whole situation is thrown as a snowball in the first half of the film. We learn the coincidences about the affair and there’s not much reason or substance for the reactions: this is nothing like the Sunset trilogy, meaning, the hours these two characters spent wandering town wasn’t quite revelatory enough to come to the drastic situation the film tries to develop. The mistake is also noticed on the technical attempts of rapid editing, claustrophobic atmosphere and the misplaced soundtrack, which actually sounds more like one of a horror movie. Although some points in the narrative become relevant and admirable due to the talent and efforts of the cast, Catherine Deneuve, Chiarra Mastroianni, Charlotte Gainsbourg, the film doesn’t really match any of its proposals, failing to be a seductive forbidden romance or a tragicomedy of moral issues.
ON DVD
Hard to control Girls: Dakota Fanning is Errol Flynn’s sex-toy in “The Last of Robin Hood” a coherent comedy about the final affairs of one of Hollywood’s finest bon-vivant. Greta Gerwig resurrects Al Pacino’s desire to live and artistic aspirations in Barry Levinson’s cynical and darkly funny “The Humbling”. She shines as a dysfunctional lesbian seductress and he’s mesmerizing as an aging cuckoo actor trying to prove he’s still got it.
Comments