A TRIP TO THE CINEMA RESULTS IN CRITICAL ROUNDTABLE AT THE BUS STOP
post cryptically indicates future direction
The last time I saw Gavin was in 2004. He was carrying a mattress across the grey, run-down site of the poor kid halls in Moss Side, his hair loosely tied in a ponytail and a casual Irish brogue to his voice.
I'm sitting in my second favourite spot in Manchester, on the stone front at the Cornerhouse cinema. All of life passes by this spot on a warm late-summer evening such as this. Mature folks in bespoke office wear, young art kids, entry-level freshers dressed in OR scrubs, nervous cinema buffs who never quite got over the fashion statements made in My Dinner With Andre. They clutch copies of Cahiers du Cinema and tut irritatedly when we talk through the pre-trailer advertisements.
All of life indeed, and of past life too, as Gavin from 2004 arrives dressed and sounding and looking exactly as memory had left him. Apropos of afternoon boredom we'd stuck a pin in the newspaper listings and come up with Jar City. With the upswing in the quality of police procedural on television, it finds itself increasingly pressed for cinematic real estate unless it can find itself combined with a shlocky, sepulchral or perhaps metaphysical element. The whodunnit is secondary to the whydunnit.
Jar City is a traditional whodunnit. The kind that Columbo, or even with the medical element of this picture a more serious Quincy, might encounter. There's a nice three-act structure, a denouement, a subplot and a man eating a sheep's head with his fists. Iceland itself plays a stunning role as the backdrop, at turns spellbindly mundane and jawdroppingly fantastic. I used to stare at these webcams at an old call-centre job as a way to elevate myself above the monotony.
The characters are realistic and satisfying and there's never a real jarring or overtly oblique moment to debate questions of technical competance. It is not the world's most original work, nor would it claim to be. The film never tries for your affection and never pushes you firmly away; it offers reasons for its austerity and apparent coldness. MVP award goes to the soundguys by a short head.
We leave the cinema in that familiar unusual silence, which Gavin immediately punctures. "Well, I thought the whole premise fell apart after ten minutes." He explains his reasons (this blog is a no-spoiler zone) and whilst reasonable, they did speak of an inate scientific approach to cinema that doesn't entirely sit with my cinema as art viewpoint. "You could at least suspend your disbelief", I say.
Liam, the third member of our party, seeks the role of diplomat. "Well, I kind of see what you're saying Gavin but it didn't ruin the film." We offer marks out of ten. I give it eight. Liam gives it seven. Gavin says it gets a five. Metacritic has it as a seven, as does IMDB.
A fair assumption of popular approach to mainstream cinema is that we seek a tale told efficiently with its artifice concealed - perhaps displaying an epistemelogical level of 'truth'. But what of cinema conscious of its nature as 'art cinema'? Certainly I could see the hole in the plot but dismissed it as inconsquential to the entirety of meaning to be felt through the whole film coming together at the end. For Gavin, he sought a tale told as if watching with detective's eyes; to give a thumbs up would have meant all the pieces in consonance and harmony. He admitted 'he'd quite like to go to Iceland' after seeing it, so certainly the cinematography was compelling as well as murmuring praise for the soundtrack. But the central focus was still on the plot, the story, rather than anything above it. I'm not saying he's even wrong, but just different to the way I experience film.
So, what I'm slowly getting at is this; there will be no individual reviews where I can avoid it. There will be some kind of critical roundtable of different kinds of people. I could attempt to jam my opinions down your throat but I think that 'one man with a blog and I'm gonna tell it like I see it' is so incredibly old (but hey, that's just my opinion) as to be put in a time capsule and studied in future days.
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