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Story of My Death/Historia de la meva Mort (2013)
Topic Started: Apr 11 2014, 09:07 PM (315 Views)
nrh
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headache
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Was very much looking forward to seeing this, the newest film by Albert Serra, as I really enjoyed his two previous features (Quixotic and Birdsong), and the premise - aging Casanova meets Dracula in the hills of Romania - sounded too promising to give up.

I found myself pretty disappointed by the film, though I wonder how much of that had to do with seeing a 148-minute film at the end of a long workday (it started at 9:30; Albert Serra talked for nearly an hour after, so it was almost 12:45am when we left the theater).

The film does have a lot to offer - much of the first section, where Casanova entertains guests at his crumbling villa, is actually very funny; the long passage of Casanova and his servant passing through twilight forests into the hills of Northern Europe are among the greatest passages of Serra's career thus far; and the long first sequence, a perfectly modulated mid-shot, in which a kind of seduction plays out at a candle-lit open air banquet, is an example of just how much potential Serra has as a director.

But the film is almost ludicrously over-extended. Serra shoots almost all of his (lengthy) dialogue scenes in mid-closeups, framed so that his amateur actors have nearly no room to breathe, let alone move or gesture; a valid technique, yes, but at two and a half hours the technique becomes suffocating. The film is being released on 35mm prints, but shot on video in extremely low light; when the technique works the effect is striking, but when it doesn't the amount of noise and distortion in the image is genuinely ugly, and with so little to focus on in terms of staging or design there is very little to look at in the anemic pallor of the image work.

If this sounds harsh, I do think the film is, in some ways, a healthy mid-career feature from a talented director who has room to grow. But in many ways the film worries me about the direction Serra might be taking - he spoke about his process at length after the film, and someone I also knew at the screening, a very experienced film editor, wondered whether he was reifying technique at the conceptual level, rather than applying that technique openly or honestly on set (I had very similar misgivings after hearing Lav Diaz talk about his dreadful film Norte last fall).

notes
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rischka
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nazi trumps fuck off!!
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i have a copy of this and was looking forward to it too hmmm.
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nrh
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I wonder if you'll like it more than I did - I was immensely tired when I saw it, but and my expectations may have been unfairly high. I do think it's worth seeing, or maybe I selfishly just want to hear another opinion...
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blueboy
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I totally agree with your review nrh.
It's one of the three films of our decade i was sure i'd love (the Master & Post Tenebras Lux are the two others). I can't say I hated them but they weren't as good as I thought...
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