s_j_gould

In few films the title fits the content so well: Minimal Stories is exactly about that, small stories in which practically nothing that happens takes place outside the people who live them, tiny pieces of their lives where everything that occurs could be told in two or three lines. This movie is not about important events, nothing that could be called big. It is precisely that: a story of the small. The people that appear in it live in a village in South Patagonia surrounded by impressive extensions of flat land, of dust and nothing, as if to sharpen the feeling that nothing being told can be shot by the camera. To me, this is a merit of the film: to make me feel the camera is placed inside the people I see instead of outside. What it comes to show is the wonderful picture of the loneliness of the landscape impressed on them.

There is something I admire in movies: the ability to tell the truth and still be interesting and beautiful. This movie does nothing else than follow the life of a Jewish pianist during the German occupation of Warsaw in the second world war. He does not have a special role or fate except that of survival. Schindler's List tells the story of a man whose attitude changed something in the middle of the horror. Life is Beautiful is focused on the view of the world by a person instead of the world itself. This movie just makes you be there and see what happens, with no excuse for it, no obstacles and no intention to save you any pain.

Still, it is beautiful. Vladek wants to play the piano, and the thought of music in some moments of the movie, the idea of piano music and the undescribable atrocities of war together is something not easily forgotten. Human beings made both, and that is not easily believed.

I read somewhere that the worst acts that took place any time in the past seem less when we know that they won't be repeated. They happened once, life goes on, and they are forgotten. Whenever someone watches this movie, some of them happen again, and that stolen memory is not easy to bear. A friend told me something that can be translated as saying that "this movie is the crudest, the strongest I have ever seen". This person, believe me, watched many movies before. But she may be right.