The scene where he visits his dad in jail is incredible, and enough to make this movie an all-time classic all on its own imo.
Of course, the scene where the building facade falls over him is eternal too.
It was tough to put the four year old to bed after this because all the stunts and pratfalls that make up the grand finale had set his brain on fire, and he couldn’t stop pretending to flop around, caught in a huge gust of wind.
To me this felt like an extended demo reel for the animators, a simulation of cinema. Maybe i shouldn’t review animated movies.
Although he’s watched and enjoyed several silent movies with me recently, the four year old basically never got over the fact that the animals couldn’t talk.
I’ve been having a Bad Time recently, and this is a beautiful movie about the crushing ambivalence of bad times, lost identity, living at the mercy of corporate and political figureheads who can never really look you in the eye. Paranoid and jazzy, like Inherent Vice in a minor key. In ten years, people will be mad at me for saying this is the best movie ever made about covid (is there any competition?), but I don’t care.
I couldn’t tell if I liked the movie at first. Then, when I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, trying to piece it all back together with a strange, disproportionate urgency —it’s as if the venom at the center of the parable kicks in with a delay. With this in mind, I hope it’s not too crass to mention that several of the people involved with the film, including Tarkovsky and the actor who plays The Writer, died years later, at relatively young ages, probably due to exposure to toxic waste while filming on location.
