While watching this convoluted concoction in search of dramatic resonance, I could not help thinking in one of John Cassavetes' sincere reflections on why he filmed what he filmed, but most of all I remembered my enthusiasm the night I saw Danny Boyle's «Shallow Grave,» back in 1994. In those days I worked as a film critic for a Panamanian newspaper. With the movie screens and markets controlled by transnational enterprises all over the world, the weekly film offer in Panamá was then and still is an impenetrable block of 98% of US mainstream productions, with the occasional European or Latin American production (independent US cinema has historically been out of our screens, due perhaps to the lack of strength of the small US companies that distribute these products).
By 1995 I left the paper, tired of having to consume and write about an almost exclusive diet of big, bad or ugly American films. Something like «Shallow Grave» was refreshing and welcome. It was followed by the admirable «Trainspottin» and Boyle seemed the bright prospect of a filmmaker with an auctorial touch. But then everything started to diverge and lose coherence... I have witnessed the "Bertolucci syndrome", as I call it, many times: very talented and even rule-breaking filmmakers who apparently seemed to have a career of original works ahead, who turned into purveyors of pedestrian entertainment, done with skill, big budgets, high production values, and little else. Of course, Bernardo Bertolucci had his flashes of brilliance every now and then, but nothing compares to his first four or five features.
In the case of Boyle, he made two remarkable early films (both written by John Hodge), but then both he and his screenwriter entered the "mainstream" of foreign cinema, writing about and filming anything, without that early original touch... It seems that the artistic nature of people like Cassavetes and Federico Fellini (who always made films in Italy) simply could not function outside of their own milieu, which they knew best. Not all filmmakers have the chameleon-like nature of Ang Lee - whose most commendable film (for me) is still «The Wedding Banquet,» for all the autobiographical touches it has. Of Boyle's later work I only gave a nod to his TV movie «Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise» and to «28 Days Later,» both for their intelligent description of lives on the edge. But I can easily pass for the rest, I would rather watch Lubitsch's «Bluebeard's Eight Wife» (which I did).
As for the pitiful «Trance», it is structurally clumsy, with too many flashbacks, too many explanations, and a too early revelation of who is the evilest of the three leading characters, almost striping the narrative of its suspense and strength. It is true that it deals with memory and the reconstruction of past events, but almost nothing seems credible or convincing. The only element that rang true for me and that I found interesting was the subject of woman abuse, but only as a cause, because the effects developed by Hodge are rather laughable... and those effects are the foundation of the whole film. On top of that, for a film dealing with TV football-consuming crooks, an unethical hypnotist and a clerk who cannot pay his bills, all related to the underworld, everything looks slick, bright, trendy, hipsterish, as Boyle previously did with misery in India and lonely agonies.
By 1995 I left the paper, tired of having to consume and write about an almost exclusive diet of big, bad or ugly American films. Something like «Shallow Grave» was refreshing and welcome. It was followed by the admirable «Trainspottin» and Boyle seemed the bright prospect of a filmmaker with an auctorial touch. But then everything started to diverge and lose coherence... I have witnessed the "Bertolucci syndrome", as I call it, many times: very talented and even rule-breaking filmmakers who apparently seemed to have a career of original works ahead, who turned into purveyors of pedestrian entertainment, done with skill, big budgets, high production values, and little else. Of course, Bernardo Bertolucci had his flashes of brilliance every now and then, but nothing compares to his first four or five features.
In the case of Boyle, he made two remarkable early films (both written by John Hodge), but then both he and his screenwriter entered the "mainstream" of foreign cinema, writing about and filming anything, without that early original touch... It seems that the artistic nature of people like Cassavetes and Federico Fellini (who always made films in Italy) simply could not function outside of their own milieu, which they knew best. Not all filmmakers have the chameleon-like nature of Ang Lee - whose most commendable film (for me) is still «The Wedding Banquet,» for all the autobiographical touches it has. Of Boyle's later work I only gave a nod to his TV movie «Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise» and to «28 Days Later,» both for their intelligent description of lives on the edge. But I can easily pass for the rest, I would rather watch Lubitsch's «Bluebeard's Eight Wife» (which I did).
As for the pitiful «Trance», it is structurally clumsy, with too many flashbacks, too many explanations, and a too early revelation of who is the evilest of the three leading characters, almost striping the narrative of its suspense and strength. It is true that it deals with memory and the reconstruction of past events, but almost nothing seems credible or convincing. The only element that rang true for me and that I found interesting was the subject of woman abuse, but only as a cause, because the effects developed by Hodge are rather laughable... and those effects are the foundation of the whole film. On top of that, for a film dealing with TV football-consuming crooks, an unethical hypnotist and a clerk who cannot pay his bills, all related to the underworld, everything looks slick, bright, trendy, hipsterish, as Boyle previously did with misery in India and lonely agonies.