🎬 #156 Cinematic Succession.
The impact of the choices of generations are tackled in both this week’s films. Seeing a story unfold over multiple lifetimes is a uniquely cinematic journey. Ideas planted in one grow into the next, influencing beliefs and the arc’s of all characters. The phrase ‘the sins of the father’ can be equally applied to both this week’s films. Also Ryan Gosling has never looked better.
Happy choosing, happy viewing
Bry
FILM ONE: SILENCE
2016 Dir Martin Scorsese
2 hrs 41 mins
I’d been meaning to see this for a long time and thought the Christmas break was a perfect time to sit back and let Scorsese’s tale of Christian ministers in Japan wash over me, in a more pleasant way than the torture depicted in the frame above. This is a stoic, brutal quest into a foreign land to find a fellow Christian brother who’s gone missing, feared dead. Whilst the priests also serve the secret Japanese congregations who practice christianity, despite the feudal lords trying to banish it from the island.
My favourite Scorsese is non-gangster Scorsese. And as a director who almost became a priest, this story of a man questioning the purpose of his faith is all the more poignant. Especially, when pretending that you renounce your religion will save your life. Even to the point where the people getting you to renounce it understand that a ‘faked act,’ a performative one is enough. But despite that, this is a film that shows the power of faith beyond any religion, a secret that can transcend life times.
The silence that haunts the film, and the casual brutality of the torture set amongst idyllic and striking locations lends the film a haunting quality. As if the land itself is a spectre, a different world. A place to challenge all those that step foot there.
TL;DR: Scorsese’s epic about faith and its personal power is maybe his most beautiful looking film to date.
*Available for a small rental fee on Apple and Amazon in the UK.
Fact: They used Taiwan to double for Japan.
FILM TWO: THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES
2012 Dir Derek Cianfrance
2 hrs 20 mins
Bleached hair, torn, ill-fitting t-shirts, tattoos and motorbikes - it’s a good look for Gosling and his character referred to as Handsome Luke. Derek Cianfrance infuses this crime thriller with a melancholy that makes it all the more tragically romantic. There’s a poetry in the rubber and metal, in the pain and sacrifice in order to provide for a family, that doesn’t even necessarily want you.
There is also romance in the sense of transience that haunts the film, the acknowledgment that things don’t last forever. But contrasted with the idea that things are somehow passed along. The collision of Luke with the police man, Avery, [played by Bradley Cooper] results in the film shifting form into a generational crime epic. This gear change transforms the film - and Cooper is compelling as a rookie whose life trajectory is all down to that one encounter with Luke and the secrets that wrapped in it. Also Mike Patton’s original score beautifully amplifies the grandness of the film.
TL;DR: Cianfrance’s crime thriller is more than you might think - a fitting take on the genre by the director of Blue Valentine.
*Available for a small rental fee on Apple in the US and Apple and Amazon in the UK.
Fact: "If you ride like lightning, you're going to crash like thunder." This line delivered by Robin [played by Ben Mendelsohn] was not in the script - and it’s the best line in the film.