Strong and Moving!

Strictly average movie

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

"He loves me, he loves me not" words spoken in the darkness at the start of the movie. These words are very shortly to be repeated by Bulle Ogier in a banal play as she picks petals from a daisy. However the first speaking hints at something far less banal, it's an out-loud thought about whether God loves us. Scenes from the book of Job are relayed later on in the fourth act of the movie where Job is made to wonder about why he has been visited with affliction despite his piety, the same issue is at hand. The first act unearths the selfishness lying within everyone just beneath a thin facade, the second act is a terrible wail from an individual about their complete failure to fulfil their true self in this life, reusing text from Beckett. The third act plays scenes from atrocities and environmental catastrophes and reminds me that issues of much more import than art occur in the world. There is an element of reflexivity in the movie in that it's hinting that there is a respite from sorrows in another life that we must believe in; and also that quite a lot of the movie tests one's patience but you are then extraordinarily rewarded with a final scene of astonishing beauty, a recreation of Luciano Laurana's 15th Century painting "Ideal City" from the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino; and the ecstasy of Job, surrounded by his beautiful descendants. The interplay between Beckett and Job I find very inspiring, on the one hand people now find it hard to ->truly<- lift a finger for themselves or anyone else, and murder their true selves, and then there is the chasm to loving God even though he takes everything you have and visits you with boils. In the end, an edifying experience.

A serious case of originality, creativity and innovation coming from someone who is often considered cinema's boring old geezer, here adapting reputed early 20th century Portuguese poet and drama author José Régio's O MEU CASO. It's the only film I know which consists of 4 separate and different versions of the same story, as it were: 1) on stage, during a play's rehearsal; 2) as one of those films of the 1910s and 1920s, in which people moved at an accelerated pace; 3) with a chromatically-charged photography and dialogues of a sense of the absurd only equalled by the likes of Beckett or Ionesco ; 4) in a dusky setting, serving as a metaphor to our civilization's current state of affairs, the BOOK OF JOB is recited by byblical characters.Oliveira and his cast are rehearsing a play, with a sweet girl idyllically playing the old "forget me forget me not" game when a desperate older man bursts in and, setting the astonished poor girl aside, proceeds to let the whole world know about his ordeal saying (and it's not an exact quote): "no one cares to know whether he forgets you or not because what really matters is MY CASE".When this first part gets to its end, it starts all over again from the beginning (but shot in a different manner). And there's two more after that one. This was done in Literature by outstanding and innovative French writer Raymond Queneau's EXERCICES DE STYLE - a book in which the author rewrites numerous times the same story, each with a specific style. The second part of the film is projected as if you played an old vynil LP at 45 rpm or as if you pressed "fast forward" on your VCR. Inserted in the middle of the film are images of real tragedies and disasters taken from documentary films and TV news archives. Is it the sort of film they produce in Mars? Or is this what world cinema will be like when, in the 25th century, a new form of life will be sprouting from the ashes of a 4th and life-exterminating world war?