How surprising! So far I’ve hosted Melancholia and The Future under my fledgling reviewer's finesse, because they were standouts from my festival outing this year. I’d been under the impression that a closer ‘critical’ inspection would sour my initial admiration by making their flaws apparent, not to mention the over-kill factor of the critical-revelry. Oh contraire! These excursions have only brought me closer to these two films, to the result of increased affection for them and their directors. Amidst all this, the questionable role of the critic has arisen as an odd and only vaguely relevant transistor in the ongoing language of film.
The Future had my ‘like’, but before exploring the varied breadth of its critical reception it didn’t have my love. The negativity with which it was met, as my mahara hosted run-down on this film explains, was almost singly in response to stylistic maneuvers. They were complaints that July was too twee in delivery, that she alienated uninitiated viewers by identifying too closely with twee-subcultures. Firstly, the line between twee and magical realism is much too blurry to credibly ground any claim that July actively alienates the non-twee from enjoying her film. What a notion!. Secondly, though the film universe has its own warped logic, this is easily decipherable, thus making the style a vital component of July’s idiosyncratic storytelling (albeit a delayed gratification). Imposing fluidity on consensus reality (transcending parameters of normalcy in the artists proposed suspension of the Real), is a veritable absolute of the creative process as a whole. The creative process is about assuming or advocating fluidity to escape absolutes. Subverting the given is quintessentially ‘creative’. 
No comments:
Post a Comment