somehow approaches Window Water Baby Moving not only for sheer shocking intimacy but also for its joyful admiration of the body
I just read yesterday that in one of his noh plays Mishima “symbolically demonstrates the hapless plight of the aesthetic spirit in the modern world.” I’m sure the same can be said for much of his work, but Patriotism has the doomed aesthetic spirit impossibly winning out in the end, losing with such ferocity you get the sense they wouldn’t have had it any other way.
excess in the midst of want and indulgence as an expression of spiritual need. as someone from an impoverished bumfuck corner of georgia, i was prepared to find this distasteful right up until the last three minutes, when i finally saw a portrait (a caricature, certainly) of a community defined by trauma more than depravity
while i prefer his earlier, sloppier, less paper-doll characters and less beat-for-beat scripts, here wes anderson plays to the strength of his recent works: their function as interludes. there are hard borders around this movie, a set frame of stylization and alienation such that it can’t resonate thematically outside of its run time. and i don’t think it really tries to, which is perhaps less refreshing than it is just not irritating. it’s content to be a brief little dream that its own characters can just drive away from.
somehow captures the intuitive nature of loneliness without resorting to either abstraction or concretization. she is so real, foolish, and familiar that delphine would be a horribly uncomfortable mirror to look into except that rohmer treats his subject with such sensitivity. wish i had the filmic know-how to understand how this movie can be everything that it is.
