This is a VERY INTERESTING CASE! One of those which is difficult to evaluate because there are some great individual elements, but the puzzle pieces don’t come together to form a beautiful image.
It’s a memoir film, so we know it’s going to be difficult to deliver strong narrative drive. And to be fair to Boorman, the happenings in the film seem authentic. And you might think “Normal and boring then,” but no, because so many of these anecdotes and vignettes are a bit strange, you know they must have happened in real life. Because if it was fiction, any sensible person would cut them out. The studio head would be like, “That guy is weird and, tonally, it doesn’t fit with the rest of the film. He needs to go.” But he was real, so you can’t, I guess.
Some have more impact than others, from silly, to witty and endearing, to quite moving. I was raising an eyebrow in one scene, and in the next holding back tears. It’s a tonal rollercoaster.
Broad interpretations/meaning are hard to grasp, but the film did make me reflect about some things. First of all, how a smidgen of destruction and chaos can threaten the whole social order. You just blow up a few houses and require numerous fathers to be separate from their children, and the kids will start looting neighbourhoods and threatening each other.
The very real threat to life and livelihood made me think of my grandfather, whose home, whilst he and the family were sheltering, was bombed. This happened twice. Cue sadness and existential panic.
And basically anything to do with family brings forth the tears for me. The last scene is also transcendent.
Can I moan when the things that bothered me are actually authentic? The jam scene is unbelievably irritating. It is probably real. The elder sister is a brat. She probably was a brat in real life. I say, yes I can, because I’m a man who watched a movie and my task writing a Letterboxd review is to report on what happened to that man. And that man was bothered.
The main issue though is that this film is not a continuous story with a solid through-line, but a series of occurrences. Like someone telling you about their year abroad, “this happened, and then this happened…” etc. It seems as if Boorman overcorrected - he tried to make a film that was not an odd fantasy, and in the process made granddad’s rambling soliloquy, The Movie.
This is a VERY INTERESTING CASE! One of those which is difficult to evaluate because there are some great individual elements, but the puzzle pieces don’t come together to form a beautiful image.
It’s a memoir film, so we know it’s going to be difficult to deliver strong narrative drive. And to be fair to Boorman, the happenings in the film seem authentic. And you might think “Normal and boring then,” but no, because so many of these anecdotes and vignettes are a bit strange, you know they must have happened in real life. Because if it was fiction, any sensible person would cut them out. The studio head would be like, “That guy is weird and, tonally, it doesn’t fit with the rest of the film. He needs to go.” But he was real, so you can’t, I guess.
Some have more impact than others, from silly, to witty and endearing, to quite moving. I was raising an eyebrow in one scene, and in the next holding back tears. It’s a tonal rollercoaster.
Broad interpretations/meaning are hard to grasp, but the film did make me reflect about some things. First of all, how a smidgen of destruction and chaos can threaten the whole social order. You just blow up a few houses and require numerous fathers to be separate from their children, and the kids will start looting neighbourhoods and threatening each other.
The very real threat to life and livelihood made me think of my grandfather, whose home, whilst he and the family were sheltering, was bombed. This happened twice. Cue sadness and existential panic.
And basically anything to do with family brings forth the tears for me. The last scene is also transcendent.
Can I moan when the things that bothered me are actually authentic? The jam scene is unbelievably irritating. It is probably real. The elder sister is a brat. She probably was a brat in real life. I say, yes I can, because I’m a man who watched a movie and my task writing a Letterboxd review is to report on what happened to that man. And that man was bothered.
The main issue though is that this film is not a continuous story with a solid through-line, but a series of occurrences. Like someone telling you about their year abroad, “this happened, and then this happened…” etc. It seems as if Boorman overcorrected - he tried to make a film that was not an odd fantasy, and in the process made granddad’s rambling soliloquy, The Movie.
