Reviews

I gave Tideland a try in the belief it could only be better than Gilliam's rock bottom 'The Brothers Grimm'. I heard it was a real personal project for him, without big studio interference, so it looked promising. Boy, was I disappointed. I can't imagine what led him to the literary source in the first place. What did he see in this counterfeited story, so full of expired clichés like the front page of DeviantArt? "Little girl lost in a world of creeps survives through the power of her innocence - and lipstick." Derivative doesn't even begin to describe this rough mess of Dickens, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Psycho, Coraline and some really stinky emo-Gothic junk. Even so, it could have turned out decent, as it often does when poor material lands in the hands of a good director. But instead of trying to refine the material, Gilliam opted to over-thicken the stereotyped Gothic to the detriment of minimum plausibility. Well, how lifelike is to you a little girl cuddling up to her junkie father's disemboweled corpse without any sign of nervous breakdown? Count in a few other characters, similarly unbelievable, and you have B.U.L.L.S.H.I.T. spelled out big and bold for you. And of course, the constant bombast of the wide-angle optics won't help you suspend your towering disbelief. Maybe a bit of suggestion, instead of the dumb show-it-all, would have helped. Maybe something that resembles a real-life perverted childhood. I love Gilliam, but this is just awful. Rewatch 'To Kill a Mockingbird' instead.

The news of the Palm d'Or going to a Romanian film exhilarated me, but the film itself was a big letdown. While the story was involving and the actors rather good, I couldn't help observing an ominous incongruence. For a movie that goes out of its way to imply a sense of "vérité" (heavy subject matter / fly-on-the-wall camera / barely-there editing / dramaturgy centered on eloquent minutiae / no musical soundtrack etc.) "4-3-2" is surprisingly careless in handling factual detail inherent to the time and place it claims to evoke – i.e. Romania in the '80s. For a start, the clothes and hairstyles are nothing like the era. Nowhere a mullet, shoulder-pad or tapered baggy leg. Instead, you get long close-ups of the main character's blatant post-millenial haircut. (Wrong hair in a period piece means instant disillusion for me.) Same goes for the scenery. The hotel is ridiculously tidy and comfortable for the time. We are talking about a world in which hot water was a luxury item – how do you think ordinary hotels looked like? They looked like death row. Unfortunately, the shortage of credibility in "4-3-2" is not limited to visual signifiers alone. Mixed-sex college dormitories in the obsessively prudish Ceausescu regime? Nope. French kissing in a public place like a university hallway? Nope. And what about the 48 (!) gladioli for mum's birthday and financially challenged Otilia not even blinking? As if such extravagance had been the norm in an otherwise starving country... Speaking of starvation: the variety of meat dishes enumerated by the waiter in the last sequence would have sounded like science fiction in any Romanian restaurant at the time. All that food might have been available to participants in a privately (=conspiratively) organized wedding party, but surely not to the casual guest. Sadly, these inaccuracies found their way into the core of the plot. Mr Bebe, the abortionist, declares he won't risk going to jail for a couple of banknotes. As to why he risks going there for a joyless quickie with two coerced sourfaces, we are left in the dark. Could it be his sick libido, shaped by the perversity of the Ceausescu regime? The movie presents nothing in the way of that explanation. I know, most people won't be bothered by these inconsistencies, just like the Cannes jury wasn't. But several Romanian reviewers have already complained about not being able to recognize the period in question in the movie. One of them gave Mungiu's film one angry star, reproaching the anachronisms - and consequently got his "not useful" majority verdict. But fact is, he was right. Compatibility with international film trends is one thing, authenticity is another. Not being meticulous when reality is your creed equals with cheating both on your artistic premises and your audience.

Going by the amount of formalist peacockery, one can guess this was meant to be seen as some kind of serious stuff, a 'masterpiece' perhaps. Well, that doesn't exactly work out. I don't mind eclecticism if justified and done smartly, but this is definitely not the case. Here we have a big mess of stylistic incoherency, no more, no less. Annoying as it is, it still can't detract attention from an even more repulsive aspect: an ever conspicuous, moronic interest in seeing a naked woman (you know, tits and crotch and all) raped or otherwise humiliated. The peasantwoman in question lives in the Middle Ages, sports manicured nails and a general Yves Saint-Laurent sketchbook look. Her clothes always desintegrating, she is constantly abused by fallic entities. When for whatever reason she is crucified and burned, even the smoke of the stake pushes itself between her thighs. The story is just a pretext for such 'subtleties' throughout, so it's all the more gross when in the end-sequence the tit-owner martyr turns into Marianne of the French Revolution, leading the people towards Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Sorry... what?! Since when being 'psychedelic' is an excuse for being cretinous? The barnstormer voice-acting and schmaltzy music ("Beradonna... Beradonna..." - moans ad infinitum a nerve-racking karaoke singer) add more unpleasantry to this charmless trainwreck.

P.S. I'm aware there may be legions of immature people out there, fed on visual hamburgers & pornography & all things Japanese, who may find this crap "different" and "interesting". All my sympathy for them.