Young Brazilian guy in London falls in love with Spanish girl about to be married to a rich English man. Featuring heaps of video cameras ...
Preposterous and badly written, the visual style is jarring and too self-consciously cool for the story to make much sense. Films like this one are too easy to make. They are all about coming with with a new surprise twist every 15 minutes, and they don't even have to be good, so long as they keep us surprised they don't need to add up. And then, if you say that it is a meta-indie-flick, all opposition among cineasts must be stilled.
Or ...? Well, I don't buy into it. The recent 'Wicker Park' tried to do the same, boasting a non-linear plot line that covered the fact that there was no actual story to tell. 'Memento' had something it wanted to convey, but that was the exception. Too many movies nowadays ape this faux-documentary style because they hope the jarring aesthetics will keep us riveted, but without substance I dare say they will not.
The film's first-time director, who, alas, is also the writer (almost always a bad idea) insists on not giving away his secrets, knowing that his house of cards will tumble down first chance it gets.
The lead character Carmen is utterly unsympathetic, in the tradition we know from fatal French cinema, 'Betty Blue' and so on, her English boyfriend is a convenient caricature of the rich papa's boy slash cynical rich fart. The most startling thing about the film, in a good way, was James D'Arcy's suicide scene which was really well-played, and I must say that he was the only actor to actually get something out of this venture, although his part stinks.
Gael Garcia Bernal seriously needs a career counselor, he won't survive much more muck like this one
Preposterous and badly written, the visual style is jarring and too self-consciously cool for the story to make much sense. Films like this one are too easy to make. They are all about coming with with a new surprise twist every 15 minutes, and they don't even have to be good, so long as they keep us surprised they don't need to add up. And then, if you say that it is a meta-indie-flick, all opposition among cineasts must be stilled.
Or ...? Well, I don't buy into it. The recent 'Wicker Park' tried to do the same, boasting a non-linear plot line that covered the fact that there was no actual story to tell. 'Memento' had something it wanted to convey, but that was the exception. Too many movies nowadays ape this faux-documentary style because they hope the jarring aesthetics will keep us riveted, but without substance I dare say they will not.
The film's first-time director, who, alas, is also the writer (almost always a bad idea) insists on not giving away his secrets, knowing that his house of cards will tumble down first chance it gets.
The lead character Carmen is utterly unsympathetic, in the tradition we know from fatal French cinema, 'Betty Blue' and so on, her English boyfriend is a convenient caricature of the rich papa's boy slash cynical rich fart. The most startling thing about the film, in a good way, was James D'Arcy's suicide scene which was really well-played, and I must say that he was the only actor to actually get something out of this venture, although his part stinks.
Gael Garcia Bernal seriously needs a career counselor, he won't survive much more muck like this one