blakestachel

How could a three-hour film be so reductive? The Elvis, in Elvis, is but a sideshow attraction to Baz Luhrmann's insatiable thirst for style and his refusal to slow down even for a second. Characters come and go like ghosts in a museum. Even the death of his own mother passes by almost unregistered. Nearly every dramatic beat is fumbled in this way, lost in the dizzying miasma of form and the director's ego. Of course, Elvis himself was a spectacle, but to base the entire film on this principle prevents the biopic from doing its primary job. There isn't the slightest probe into the psyche of the man: what made him so complicated and why he compulsively attached himself to the blood-sucking parasite of Colonel Parker. It's a movie made in post, unfortunately, because what's in front of the camera compels. The gravitas that Butler conjures isn't allowed to sit with us for more than a few seconds at a time without Baz's ADHD-fueled sensory overload. Butler is good when allowed to be, but sadly, he's rarely the priority. After all, the film is told from the point of view of the Colonel for some incomprehensible reason.

What can you say about a man who obsessively collects photographs of people but refuses to take part in humanity himself? For the wife of this man who has no will of her own? What about Anna and Andreas? The former does her best to convince the world she's virtuous, while the latter tries desperately to convince himself that he is not.

The actors playing these wretched souls have plenty to say themselves. The short interludes which Bergman uses to cut up the action create a meta-commentary about the film during the film, a choice you either love or hate. My initial inclination when deciding for myself was that Bergman had to have been insecure about the inaccessibility of his characters and that his workaround seemed cheap.

But it became clear when noticing his aesthetics that Bergman is alluding to cinema's divide between reality and artifice and, as an extension, the misreading of one's own subjectivity. Bergman makes it very clear that these interviews themselves are staged or part of the film's fiction. Otherwise, how could he time the camera to rack focus or to increase the intensity of a light synchronically with the rhythm of the performances?

In The Passion of Anna, Bergman explores the idea that a person's perception of reality is shaped by their own experiences and that truth is always subjective. By showing the interludes as staged and artificial, he emphasizes that what we see in a film is always a representation of reality rather than reality itself; ultimately, what truths we see in ourselves are just as deficient.

One could spend lifetimes learning to see the world the way Clara does. Her intuition for the universe's hidden matrix allows her to vibrate along with its sound. She's attuned to the earth and the soil and is Mother to all the animals who share it. Every creature has a "secret name" that Clara can detect through nature's reverberations. Her distinct gaze suggests a far more piquant view of the world that offsets the rest of the film's conventionality. Her eyes are sunken and fervent; they seem to expose new beauty and meaning all the time. The film excels when we, too, are made to see through them.