Radu Jude (Last at NYFF with BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN) is a back...and if you liked his earlier films you'll possibly like this and if you didn't stay away.
The film follows a girl named Angela as she goes through her day as a production assistant. She is scouting locations, filming people who were hurt on the job for an upcoming film, and doing her errands as she sits in traffic and drives around. At the same time Jude intercuts life of this Angela with that of another girl named Angela from a 1983 communist film traveling in the same locations.
How you react to Jude's sense of humor and his love of long takes where nothing happens will determine if you like this film or not. If they click great, if not you'll get up and leave.
His sense of humor is such that he has Angela talk about how in America you can buy all the guns you want at a grocery store and that if buy a bazooka they'll send a machine gun to Ukraine. He starts off with a poke in the eye about how the world sees America, which he pushes too far and neuters the jab (it ends up a nerf ball and not a stick). A lot of the satire is like that, obvious points pushed too far. It might have worked but the writing isn't as clever as it thinks it is.
The other problem is Jude loves the long take. Some directors can make it work, but I've never found that Jude has been able to pull it off. In his previous film BAD LUCK BANGING he had one of his characters wandering across a city for no real reason for the better part of an hour . While there is nothing as long as that in this film there are numerous sequences where I don't know why they are running so long. The sequences could have been trimmed. (There is no reason this needs to be almost 3 hours long)
To be honest as with Jude's other films, if he trimmed it down it would be the winner it could of been and not the bore it actually is.
No comments:
Post a Comment