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Quien diablos es Juliette/Who The Hell Is J - Carlos Marcovich, 1997 (MC 2018)
Topic Started: May 9 2018, 01:33 PM (173 Views)
Lencho of the Apes
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Quien diablos es Juliette/Who The Hell Is J - Carlos Marcovich, 1997

"Frothy and silly" isn't a flavor I usually go for, and I was hot/cold about programming this one, but I couldn't get hold of the Japanese mindfuck I was planning on, and the synchronicity this one had with K.'s movie from last week was something I couldn't ignore.

I'll be lazy and plug in my less-than-perfect LB review in here, just for starters:

Unmappable 'meta' wackiness. It's a documentary? But the playful presentation makes it look like fiction? It could be a fiction film about the making of a documentary? Except the documentary is real? It could be a fiction documentary about the making of a real film? It could be the real real of a real about the real of a real real? Or the real real of a real about the real of a fake real real?

A twelve-year-old boy announces to the camera that the director has hired him as the official explainerizer, and that whenever anyone doesn't understand something, he's the go-to guy with all the answers. Every time we see him after that, people are asking him questions, and his answer is always the same. "How the hell should I know?"

Constant fourth-wall breaking, non-fiction characters assuming each other's roles in the narrative, running jokes and shaggy-dog stories... It's baffling, and sweet, and ineffably funny.

Enjoy!
Edited by Lencho of the Apes, May 9 2018, 01:35 PM.
"The four cardinal points of the compass? In reality, there are only three: North and South."
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kanafani
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That was fun. It's meta alright. Movies that so self-consciously play with structure and genre tropes are often overwrought sterile messes, but there's none of that here. It's breezy, thoroughly unpretentious, and it's got vitality in spades. I love how the people we see are all fully engaged with it. They feel closer to collaborators/co-creators than to subjects of a documentary. I wasn't particularly consumed by the "what's true and what's not" aspect of things. A lot of what's said might be pure fabrication, but that doesn't matter, the movie still expresses a fundamental truth, about Cuba, about Havana at that time, and about the lives of the charismatic, impish 16-year-old tomboy/hustler/prostitute and the people around her. There are tons of gags and ideas flying by, and not all of them work, but I was overall quite engaged by it. Good selection, señor Lencho!
Edited by kanafani, May 11 2018, 12:11 AM.
letterboxd
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Lencho of the Apes
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Glad you liked it, kanafani, and I appreciate the concise and cogent write-up where you unpacked your reaction to it.

I wasn't really hung up on what was true or what wasn't, I was just trying to convey something about the way it blurred the lines between fiction and doc. Your comment about the subjects seeming like co-creators highlighted one of the most important parts of that blurrishness.


Cheers!
"The four cardinal points of the compass? In reality, there are only three: North and South."
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mesnalty
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Co-sign everything that kanafani said. Juliette is just magnetic, she really holds the film together so that even if its experiments fell flat (which they mostly don't) it'd still work.

Curious if you've got any thoughts on the constant playing with the words actuar and actual, Lencho. It obviously plays into the metafictional aspects by highlighting the idea that the subjects are giving a performance, but are there other nuances there that us non-native speakers might be missing out on?
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Lencho of the Apes
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I don't remember anything about that pun that stood out, mesnalty, but they could be goofing on Cuban accents; words ending in R often get shifted over to a final L sound. Other than that, I got nothing.
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