 Remembrance of Things to Come (2001) Directed by Yannick Bellon & Chris Marker Rendering the present at times excruciatingly boring. The film's novel narrative approach is intriguing, but very hard to peg down. It drifts from idea to idea with the internal logic of a passionate letter written to one's deepest lover, dispensing with context and explanation in favor of impact and expression. It's exactly this kind of approach that satisfies intellectual film critics, but I had to ask myself, scanning the overeducated and undersexed members of the audience – the same types you see in Woody Allen movies and on "Frasier"—whether it's essential to meet a work of art head on and take it in rapturously, or whether it's okay to call a spade a spade and admit that the film is lost way up inside it's own ass. The overall vibe is like settling into a video installation room in a contemporary art museum to aim for edification on something with which you have no prior experience, nor particular interest. You can stick with it, try hard, and still come away with only 10% of the experience sticking to your bones. Does that make it, or me, a failure? The overeducated and undersexed part of me enjoyed Remembrance. Its theme of the present consciously and unconsciously "remembering" the future is challenging to consider, but absolutely relevant. Its topics, ranging from Bellon's life to the rise and fall of the Surrealist movement, from art to culture to war to mundane everyday existence, are stimulating to hang out with. The photography is wonderful. Its non-linearity gives the film the feel of a conversation with someone much smarter than you, if also deficient in focus. The parts of me that live outside my brain, however, sat through it with the same stultified impatience of a student harangued by a triple-doctorate academic. Like, okay, so you read Simone Weil, so you can dissect Miró … what's your favorite candy bar? Do you love your dog? Can you cry when you need to? Perhaps it's that my own intellectualism is a mask I don't like to wear much anymore, in favor of the tiny, private, satisfied pleasures of living, instead of thinking. Maybe, though, Remembrance of Things to Come is simply a loving indulgence, brief if boring, existing in a vacuum only for those who care. Surely no one will contend that this is some kind of essential masterpiece, but as with many art films, I find that you can "get" it and still not care all that much. Perhaps it's just about sitting patiently, hearing out the monologue, and deciding whether you want to spend time with that pompous ass ever again. I'll pass, and go chill for awhile with, like, Revenge of the Ninja.
Review by Jacob Ocular-Migraine |