Reviews

This movie would have worked so much better if it'd had a director who actually knew how to properly tell a story. The basic idea behind the narrative is actually an interesting one, but the characters and the background to the story are never properly established. It feels like many of the scenes are presented in the wrong order, which necessitates lots of backtracking where the characters basically have to explain what's going on - i.e. lots of boring talk which could have been avoided if the director had just found a way to let the story speak for itself.

The horribly cliché-ridden "emotional" scenes don't really help either. The same goes for some of the action, like the initial scene where Deutan or whatever her name is does the full Matrix spinning-around-in-the-air-in-slow-motion routine. Not new, not exciting. To continue with the complaining I also found 90% of the music absolutely horrible... some sort of crap techno nu-metal equivalent.

All which, to come to my conclusion, is a shame since the animation is at times absolutely stunning. Granted, the close-ups don't always work very well (I wish they'd taken a more traditional approach to the facial animation in-stead of relying so much on motion capture) but some of the action scenes are among the best I've seen. For fans of traditional anime I suppose this animation method is a bit like cheating (they've recorded real actors' movements, translated these to 3D models and then "cartoon shaded" the models) but when it yields results as good as when the landmates (?) attack the bioroids' headquarter it's hard not to see the advantages.

Long live the cyborgs! But if you let them tell a story it would probably look like this.

I first heard about this film after it apparently "scandalized" movie-goers at its debut in Cannes. British media predictably (and ridiculously) denounced it as yet another euro-trash art-house shocker made for the cause of provocation alone (the left-wing Guardian being as puritanical as the more conservative papers). In one way this must have surprised Claire Denis as "Trouble every day" deals with the same subject matter as her other films (at least the ones I've seen), i.e. desire. Sure, there's a couple of quite disturbing scenes, but they fit in so well with the rest of this slow, superbly paced film as to not distract from the overall sense of peaceful melancholy that pervades it. I realise that it might sound contradictory to describe a film about flesh-eating sexual maniacs as peaceful, but the long, lingering shots together with the amazing Tindersticks soundtrack create just that: a beautiful, haunting and serene vision of the boundaries between love and desire.

This film suffers heavily from a series of misguided judgements from the director, mainly concerning the look and sound of the film. The style of the characters don't work very well with the 3D backgrounds, even though the blend between 2D and 3D itself is seamless. A lot would have been gained by paying less attention to Tezuka's original style in favour of a more "contemporary" way of drawing.

Much worse is the choice of music though, the kind of 20s jazz used throughout the film doesn't work *at all* with the futuristic and grandiose settings. This never becomes as clear as during the climax of the film, when Rock blows the tower up and Tima falls to her death, all to the tones of a bloody Ray Charles jazz-ballad. The climax immediately turns into an anti-climax.

This is overall the main flaw with the movie; the director's insistence on making everything as "twenties" as possible, even when it comes to its polar opposites. On the one hand the 20s nightlife clichés: the jazz, cabaret and variety shows, on the other the megalomaniac and modernistic projects aiming to build a new and perfect society. It's like trying to imagine Mussolini at a Josephine Baker show. It doesn't work.

There's also quite a few problems with the characterisation of most of the characters (except perhaps Tima), we just never find out enough about what really drives and motivates these people.

Which is all a shame, because this COULD have been really good, the film is (with the above objections in mind) visually stunning, and if they had fleshed out the characters a bit more the plot would have been a lot more intriguing. Oh well. Guess nothing will ever match Akira...