Ever since A was born, I have not really seen any films besides on special occasions or on the airplane. The special occasion means a literal trip to a movie theater so the choice of theater and film is a very important one. I never just watch films “on the side” (in front of the laptop while munching my lunch or something) anymore.
The trailer to “A Ghost Story” ran in the subway while Pip and I were contemplating which film to see, and we loved it. It’s the exactly the kind of calm and quirky and unusual premise that we’d been looking for, but surprisingly I ended up liking the film while Pip didn’t. It is notable that we saw it in this super small indie film theater cum bar/hanging out space for hip people, and the atmosphere in the room was perfect for the film. It definitely put me into the right mood for it (this is not a film that would have worked while munching my lunch for sure).
A Ghost Story
The tricky thing with films that ask big questions is that the enjoyment of these films largely hinges on how satisfied you are with their answers to these big questions (or at least with the way they are being asked). For me, I thought “A Ghost Story” did a fine job expressing the various feelings its protagonists go through – M with her horrible pie scene and C with his inability to leave the place that he has lived in last. I thought the atmosphere of the film was cleverly captured by the slowness of many shots (and not just meandering like it does for most wannabe meaningful films), and the young love between the two main characters is perfectly illustrated by how cozily they are laying together in their sleep.
On the other hand, there is a strange emptiness in what the film is trying to say (I don’t know how else to describe it). In the end, the film doesn’t have a very cohesive universe; it’s one of these cases where everything is cryptic and you can read stuff into it if you want – and I doubt the film will ever garner the type of following like Donnie Darko such that fans would retro-actively give it analyses that make sense. Unsurprisingly the film ends with a big question mark and feels completely unresolved. I was less bothered by it than I did at the end of “Broken Flowers” because I completely expected it. How could you ever resolve this? It’s virtually impossible to come up with a clever solution that somehow makes everything make sense, or not feel sappy or silly (all of which the film has successfully avoided at least).
Personally I enjoyed the film because I was taken in by its atmosphere, the immense chemistry between the protagonists and how it makes you feel the vastness of time so palpably, but somehow it seems to me that the film could have been so much more – as it is the film feels more like a side project and could probably have worked better as a (longer) short. Then again, the slowness of the film is strikingly effective in contributing to the atmosphere I liked so much.