The city This is a movie that boils down to family and the relationships that are formed between the members of the same family. This feels, at every step of the way, a homage to Ozu and the way he was able to portray the intergenerational struggles of what could be called modern Japan. Kogonada tries to portray the intergenerational struggles in an even more modern United States. The viewer is presented with so many clues to understand that this is a small town....
There is no easy way to start unpacking what this movie has brought to cinema in any simple manner. The influences that others films that I find dearly close to my heart found part of their voice because of this film. The film is clearly surreal and the meta/self references abound, starting by the title itself. During one of the last dialogues, his film critic brings Mallarmé and his blank page up....
It took me several days after having watched Andrey Rublyov (1966) to even begin to start making sense of it all. This is a film that leaves the viewer speechless if they do endure in its watching. This is also not made for the contemporary viewer, since this requires amount of patience that is not required in contemporary blockbusters (as in every Tarkovsky film). Tarkovsky effectively transports us to wherever he might want his story to take place....
Words, in their day to day use, are descriptive: they describe the state of affairs at a given time. When poetic language is used, however, language transcends this limitation: it precisely tries not to describe the world as is, but rather as it is experienced. A terminally-ill Greek poet attempts to finish a poem by their national poet, Dionysios Solomos, yet he says to his daughter that he just cannot find the words for it....
A revision of our society at large. The stunning cinematography in this film guided me throughout it. From the opening scene, with the Osage dancing to the findings of oil, through the idyllic moments of the wedding where the light hits the characters and the water just right, to the doomy feeling of the final funeral, every scene creates an atmosphere that adequately depicts the overall tone of it. Thematically, at least at first, this is close to There Will Be Blood (2007), where we see DDL create an empire disregarding human lives that may be affected by it....