A visual and technical masterpiece. Filled with grotesqueries from the primordial soup of Tippett's subconscious, with biblical, and mythological imagery from the start to its 2001-inspired ending. I gather Tippett doesn't care much for religion. It's a cynical bleak world with endless suffering and meaningless death. But the plot is thin and the behind-the-scenes story might be more interesting.
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Mr. Klein 1976
Surreal and darkly comic, you know, Kafkaesque. Touching on themes of identity and our indifference to human suffering. While it looks at the disregard of white Europeans to the treatment of Jews at the time, it now plays as an indictment of the indifference shown by the majority, of ordinary citizens, to the mistreatment of any minority by the group in power or by the state.
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Nostalgia 1983
Tarkovsky seemed to become more minimalist as his films went along and this might be his most minimalist with barely a thread of plot. It all feels filmed in the same square mile of ruins and stone buildings somewhere in Italy. The camera is slow with some tracking shots moving a matter of feet and inches, the sets are sparse, and there are really only three main roles in the film. Gorchakov may be Tarkovsky’s most immobile protagonist. He dreams…
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The Swimmer 1968
I imagine if Antonioni adapted Heart of Darkness it would look something like this (but with more architecture). Upper middle-class Burt Lancaster swims up the river of his life encountering past mistakes and regrets with each stop chipping away at the facade he’s built up for himself. As the film progresses it becomes more surreal and dreamlike with Lancaster becoming more delusional as he reaches his house of broken dreams, a decaying bourgeois inner station or Kurtz compound. The Apocalypse Now of upper middle-class ennui.
