Tesis

My name is Angela. They're going to kill me

How many times we watch violent films «just for fun»? How many times we think, that the best part in the news are crime reportages? How many times we think, that the people who are disgusted by violence are just pretending? How many times, when we see a crash or some other disaster we are curious to watch the real death and injuries?

When we do this, we always calm ourselves with such thoughts: «The blood in cinema is not real; It doesn’t concern us; He is just pretending; We should be afraid of alive, not dead». But what, if we would vitness the real violent death, how we would speak?

«Tesis» starts and ends with death. In the first scene, the train is stopped because of the accident and the passengers are escorted out of the station. Lots of them want to watch the dead body, but paramedics and metro employees are not allowing it. Nevertheless, the sympathies of the most spectators wouldn’t be on the side of paramedics and metro employees. Then, when Angela’s professor dies, she got a chance to witness the actual death. Angela, at the first sight, is disgusted and afraid, but it is merely the societal norm. In reality she is deeply interested and curious.

The director brilliantly portrays the irrationality of a human nature and attractiveness of the evil. Angela, after watching a snuff film and identifying the main suspect, is continuing to «play with fire» practically and erotically. As with watching death, the investigation of a murder is merely a societal norm; in reality Angela desperately wants to touch the real evil.

Angela is the typical consumer, who always wants more and more «spice». The snuff is merely a cinema genre. In the opinion of a director, snuff is only still stays in the category of a «specialty film», but one day it will be in the mainstream cinema.

Watch and think!

10/10

L'heure d'été

Of things and men

Olivier Assayas frequently makes films about people, who are struck in the past. In Carlos, the film director has shown an old and physically wasted terrorist, who imagined that he is still the number one threat. Accordingly, in Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas portrayed the French cinema, hopelessly struck in the «nouvelle vague» paradigm.

Summer Hours shows the influence of globalization on a family and the «lifecycle» of family things from important items to lifeless museum objects. Olivier Assayas divides the film by «acts», separated by black screen. In the «premier act», the family is centered around a pariah – 75 year old Helene, but her death breaks down the link and for the rest of the film we see the fate of an inheritance.

The film resembles The Cherry Orchard (a play by Anton Chekhov). As in the play, the «main hero» is an old mansion which symbolizes the Old France. The mansion is turned into the shrine of a famous old painter by his niece Helen. Nevertheless, she understands that her children – Frederick, Jeremy and Adrienne – cannot go on living in the past as her. Helen tries to explain it to her son Frederick – the only child who stays in France – but he doesn’t want to listen.

The main theme of Summer Hours is a history of things; their emotional meaning for people. Every character has a certain thing, which has its own emotional value. This value is destroyed by the harsh reality in a form of taxes, expenses and generational values. The dream of Frederick of keeping the mansion as a «Shrine for the Past» is destroyed by a simple voting – Jeremy and Adrienne are not interested into frozen past. Accordingly, a lot of family things would end up as a faceless museum items.

Olivier Assayas has made Summer Hours as a simple life history. He doesn’t dramatize or sentimentalize. But despite the «simpleness» the film is full of sadness and melancholy for the past. Despite all of that, the file must go on.

8/10