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Showing posts from March, 2017

Elle (film)

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Elle directed by a Dutch director, Paul Verhoeven, is one of the most classy and subtle satires to have come out in decades. It’s a story about a female CEO Isabelle: she is elegant, aloof and has a knife-sharp tongue. She speaks her mind and that makes her unlikeable to many other people. She is great at her job and has complete authority over her staff. This Isabelle gets attacked at her own home by a masked stranger: an event that has a puzzling impact on Elle. What follows is a weird symbolism of empowerment and denigration of the physical body. I think what the film is trying to say is there are many other ways to violate a person’s sense of self and sometimes humiliation, faith or psychological abuse has far greater consequence than something like a rape incident. For Isabelle, rape and physical violence do not rank highly in what is most damaging to a person. In fact, most of the time she doesn’t seem to get upset, which makes her seem almost in-human. The film explor

Paterson (film)

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This latest work by Jim Jarmusch deserves the accolades and nominations it’s collected. It is sweet, mesmerising and subtly profound. It’s set in the city of Paterson, New Jersey and centers around a bus driver named Paterson (Adam Driver). Paterson is young and working-class, with a simple life and a modest house he shares with his wife. He drives a big city bus around town from morning till evening with a lunch break in the middle when he enjoys a lunch packaged exquisitely by his wife. He  listens in on people’s conversations while driving the bus, and working through poems in his head to write down later. Through his writing, he creates beauty out of what seems to be a relatively mundane surrounding and life.   By contrast, Paterson’s wife is constantly dreaming and striving for fame and riches with her art, cupcakes, music and so on; however, her products come across lacklustre and devoid of meaning compared to Paterson’s poems. An artist, the movie tells us, is an indi