Nothing but a big nothing After seeing
The Ghost Writer by Roman Polanski, I tried a strange sense of joy, as though the film, and more generally the cinema, I had reconciled with the rest of the world, or at least its major part.
That a film can bring happiness is not strange, but surprisingly, it does a movie with a bad end so clean and so gloomy a view of history, made up of secrets, conspiracies and lies.
Yet I can not find an emotion clearer, less ambiguous, the joy that I learned at the end of the film by Polanski. I was happy to have seen, finally, a great film, full-bodied, redundant, full of tension, of ideas, references, full movies, in fact.
not a product for a select few and not one of those movies prissy where it all back, everything fits, but pure cinema. Where everything looks like reality but there is more. Where dreams come true and nightmares as well. Where can bend the curve of time and slide the vital flow of players to the rhythm of the soundtrack.
What could be more liberating of all this? The immense power of imagination that takes shape before our eyes, especially for us, shows us life through the mirror. Catharsis, venting, sublimation of desire. Images that refer to other images. Identification.
Exactly ...
few days ago a friend of mine said he prefers to identify himself in the film rather than live. Not that then removes himself from life, clear, nor would I ever that he or others did, I at first, but it's true that films protect us, that film wraps us in its amniotic fluid, and I certainly do not have to say for the first time .. .
What I love about watching the shadows
The man was charged extremely positive that the film has given me. Polanski in the film puts it all himself, cites all (or nearly) and closes his previous films had many accounts with the past.
A seventy-seven, the director said he can not come to an end, and unfortunately some of his biography ghosts still haunt him (think of the injustice and abusive arrest which is been submitted in Switzerland for a cause that began in 1977 and in which the director is found to be not only the victim and perpetrator), but something has changed from the previous films. And he wants to tell him to pray by his daughter Morgane dressed like Sharon Tate in
Please do not bite on the neck (even with the same braids !!!), here in the role of the receptionist at the inn. But there are many elements that come back, now declared quotes now as wanted and never forced similarities, mainly because Polanski is an author and as such has its own style, its own rhythm, but also a vision of reality.
scroll through his filmography at random, here then that plot, staging, set design, style, actantial roles, objects, symbols, events and recompose mix - just like the lettering at the beginning of the end credits - and they come to build a kind of poetic map of the artist. From the aforementioned
Please Dance of the Vampires, in addition to the girl at the front desk of the inn, Polanski also incorporates the desolate atmosphere of the country upon arrival of the main character on the island, with the insignia of local flaps in the wind, clear harbinger of widespread concern and yet to be discovered.
The island itself, or the sense of isolation of living surrounded by water to bring back
Cul de sac ,
What? but also other ways to
Knife in the Water ,
Pirates and the second part of
Bitter Moon, and always in these films also rely on ambiguous married couples, united by ties morbid opposed to them in different ways and under siege from ' outside. The beginning of The Ghost Writer
first and all these similarities make me rethink even mentioned all'incipit
of Death and the Maiden , where the insulation was not due to water but was just as extreme, where everything seemed different from the principle as it was (and where doubts remained about the truth even at the end, just like the last movie), and where behind the apparent unity of the couple was hiding a universe of secrets and traumas.
Polanski is a world, and how the world is difficult to know fully, you can explore, map, and you can plot the trajectories of groped to follow it. Madness and standard blend, for example, between a film and the other mental and normality of the character played by Ewan McGregor's latest film - never in doubt on a narrative level - is affected by certain situations that associate with the protagonist
The Tenant (think of the slippers of his predecessor died that emerge from under the bed, worrying signs of a presence / absence, but also inevitable fetish that creates a bond between the two men). Living in the same place, doing the same work, interact with the objects of those who preceded him weaken the identity of the man who somehow takes the place (although this is not a disguise, and save buttanto slippers in the trash), inheriting the mission (in fact, will trace the same way that his predecessor had proved fatal) to finally be able to finish it.
Some elements occur only in what ways, with different meanings or just reduced. Example might be the case that the protagonist of The Ghost Writer
fills the clothes of dead and ghostwriter doing this simple action is appropriate for the envelope will reveal the entire detenction element solver. This case reminds
Frantic to
but plays a minor role here and overturned: it is not its content to uncover the plot as a key element in the 1988 movie but it is what does not, the fact that it is empty and as such "to be filled "made it work like magic element, because it is the act of man discovers that fill the envelope. Return
actantial some important roles, as already mentioned, think of how many couples are ambiguous, even dangerous, are part of the film by Polanski (Macbeth
included). Or the people who live in isolation and are often in situations of control and siege, of impending danger due to some sort of conspiracy by Despite their history (
Tess ,
Rosemary's Baby, The Pianist
,
Oliver Twist). Among the most obvious
quotes, note also that the opening words of the chapters that contain a secret, filtered directly from
The Ninth Gate, where the evil secret of the book was hidden in a similar mechanism.
What binds the whole filmography is the certainty that nothing is as it seems, and although there seems to be able to glimpse in the latter film the sign of a past trauma, as I said, it remains intact pessimism "lucid and radical "that has always characterized the work of Polanski.
Frantic ,
Chinatown, Death and the Maiden
,
The Ninth Gate, The Ghost Writer
are movies where the search for truth has more space. Everything revolves around this frantic search, sometimes obsessive, extreme and dangerous and always end up incomplete. This is why the words of Silvio Alovisio written a few years ago about
Chinatown may apply for now
The Ghost Writer: "reconciliation with the language of truth is not achieved through the mediation of the detective, but is initiative of the director. [...] The characters are killed that wanted to speak or remain silent forever. Only the camera retains the power to overcome that claustrophobic closing of the text, to escape the collapse of the truth. "At the end of both films, the character leaves the frame, engulfed in a kind of vortex (the crowd, the wind), the director surrender his fate to the out field and raises the eye of the camera by moving the crane up.
The flow of life goes on without him and without his knowledge.
Perhaps the truth is nothing a big nothing.
