(Contains possible spoilers) This is a strong impressive movie, which employs many fascination details to create a stirring atmosphere and an awesome story (O.K., enough adjectives). I heard some people saying this film is great because of the surrealistic atmosphere but I think this is like saying, Yeah Crime and Punishment from Dostojewski is great because it is a great crime novel. Of course it is but there is more to it and so it is the case with Odishon. The difference between this movie and movies from Cronenberg like Naked Lunch is, that Cronenberg often employs bizarre effects for it's own sake while in this movie they are used in order to enlightening the meaning of the movie. This is a movie about a man who looses his wife and a long time he can't get over it. Then he decides to marry again and through a rather odd way he encounters a mysterious woman. He tries to know her and falls in lover with her. But when he makes his effort to marry her she disappears. After some hard attempt to find her she returns but not in the way he expected. From the point, when he tries to regain her the movie uses the surrealistic effects, some very hard scenes and breaks the former story into pieces. Now, my idea is that the movie is about this: the man wants to get over his pain (he tragically lost his wife) by marrying again. So he looks for another person who experienced some kind of tragic too. He makes the mistake that he too fast thinks that he knows the other person, her feelings and her pains. While he thinks he had understood her in reality he projected his own feelings into her. While he thinks they are two hurt souls who can understand each other because of this in reality there is a deep gap between them and he understood nothing of her. The surrealistic scenes at the end tell you how vague your own impression of reality can be and how different it can look from another point of view. The painful scenes are a symbol for the man's realization how strongly he had misinterpreted the situation and how he looses confidence in believing if he can ever trust his own perception. The key sentence is when the woman is torturing the man and tells him: `Only pains are real, words don't mean anything.' This works so well because a lot of time is put in action to know the man very well. Because of the moving family scenes at the beginning I felt very sympathetic with the man. He makes the crucial mistake to become acquainted with another woman through some kind of a contest (This turning-point is, what the title Odishon / Audition means). So he treats the woman as objects and he has to pay for it. This is all the more dreadful because his uneasiness about the situation is well described. There is so much to be said about this movie and how well it uses every detail to underline the basic meaning so I can only mention some of them. First of all this film owns a lot to Hitchcock's Vertigo. In both film we have a man who went through some kind of traumatic experience. Both meet a mysterious woman to whom they fall in love and whom they loose in the middle of the movie. In both movies the story now starts afresh. Finally in both movies the men detect that their own feelings to the other woman depended on severe misinterpretation and lack of not focussing too much on themselves. Secondly the movie was often praised for his great camera-movement. And indeed it is great; sometimes I had even the feeling that the beauty of the shot disturbed the story. But I think
this is used at the beginning to emphasize the man's sorrow about the loss of his wife. It is the same beauty, which Tarkovsky uses in his movie Nostalghia to underscore the man's homesickness to Russia. An evidence for this is when Aoyaina's best friend asks during the audition one woman if she knows Tarkovsky. And if you look for some other great shot experience than you have to look Tarkovsky's Nostalghia. Thirdly some camera-movements are indebted to David Lynch's Twin Peaks as far as Bob is concerned. Before writing another 800 words I will close and I hope somebody will read this at last. Finally I would be happy if somebody wants to discuss this with me and I'm eager to be told if she or he found something useful in my comment.
Reviews
2 Reviews
Bread and Tulips
(2000)
No real characters, constructed story
6 February 2001
I left this movie with mixed feelings but the bad impression prevailed. There are too many artificial elements in the story to make it a good movie. First of all the plot. It isn´t very elaborated, too constructed and sometimes even obvious sloppy. Two examples. At the beginning we see Rosalba in a sightseeing-bus. The bus stops at a road-house for a short rest and then the bus leaves without her. Her husband detects that she is missing, calls her and tells her to wait until the bus returns. Now I knew from the previews that she will make her own way and I wondered by which means the movie will achieve this. The answer was astonishing simple. There is a rough cut and all the sudden we find her sitting in a strange car without any convincing explanation, why she changed her mind. Another minor but typical detail. Later a detective tries to find her in Venice. Eventually he finds her and they meet. He gets a telephone call and she sneaks away. He follows her and leaves his suitcase behind. But you never get to know how he now makes his way without his suitcase. Secondly the characters. O.K., I know this is a comedy so you don´t have to expect any kind of Ingmar Bermann characters and relationships but do they have to be THAT shallow? The main character Rosalba reminds me of Jackie Brown, a woman in her 40s, still attractive (a rather showy camera-movement along Rosalba´s body at the beginning is employed to overemphasize this) but frustrated with her life. But while Jackie Brown changes her life through responding to the circumstances in a natural, convincing and exciting way, which emerge from the story alone, for Rosalba there are a lot of extraneous details used. Like her accordion-playing, knowing how to work with flowers and so on. Another characteristic example is the florist by whom she works. He is a little odd, but that´s it. You can´t take him as a real person. The ending is like you expected it right away, but it is too achieved in a rude way, as if the writers thought, well this has to be that way but why it becomes this way we don´t really care. This is all the more unsatisfactory than there are some good details. The camera-work especially in Fernando´s apartment is great, I liked Bruno Ganz acting very much and there were nice scenes when Rosalba talked with her son. But this isn´s enough for a thoroughly good comedy.
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