In the interests of revolutions: DiCaprio is back in satire about the USA
"DiCaprio's best role in many years", "Sean Penn's best role", "Paul Thomas Anderson's best film since "Magnolia", "the main American film of the year" — the world film press gives the ironic action thriller "Battle after Battle" the highest scores and practically condemns it to all the Oscars in advance one of the possible ones. A movie that everyone likes without exception. Almost three hours in one go. It's kind of about America, but in fact it's about everyone at once, and about no one in particular. A perfect spectacle with perfect drama. This week, "Battle after Battle" is scheduled to appear on Russian screens — Izvestia explains why this film is worth watching in the cinema.
GTA + GTA = "Battle after battle"
The entire global film industry, and above all Hollywood, has been in a panic for several years. People stop going to the movies. Proven recipes don't work, even superhero franchises that have been providing all the cinemas in the world with young audiences for the last decade are failing. Neither superstars, even if there are a dozen of them on the poster at once, nor advertisements from each iron help. Or rather, they help, of course, but they don't guarantee anything. Just look at the results of "Snow White", "Captain America", "Mission: impossible" — their creators were clearly counting on a large box office.
But there is an answer: we need to make a movie. Conceptual, original, and vibrant. "Barbie", "Oppenheimer", "Minecraft", "Evil", both parts of "Dune" are all examples of how an original author's vision combined with respect for the general audience is sure to resonate. As a result, the halls are full and there is hope. Therefore, large studios risk a lot of money and invest not in proven recipes, but in something seemingly insane, but immediately fascinating, fascinating and at the same time cinematic. That is, something that will make people watch a movie not at home or on their phone, but at the cinema, even if the tickets are expensive, and with popcorn and coke it doesn't come out on a budget at all. We have now become such an experiment with Pinocchio, which is not just a fairy tale film, but also a conceptual film made by the author of Nirvana and Ya, and it will be a tape where these iconic punk manifestos, commedia dell'arte, and the aesthetics of Carlo Gozzi are guessed, what surprises and excites.
Every film connoisseur in the world knows the abbreviation PTAH. Paul Thomas Anderson is a symbol of the author's conceptual vision, uncompromising creative solutions, black humor, twisted, confusing plots, incredible acting ensembles, character systems, each of which is forever etched into the memory. A director with an impeccable reputation and cult status. "Boogie Nights", "Magnolia", "Oil", "Master", "Ghost Thread", "Licorice Pizza" — he almost unmistakably gives out masterpiece after masterpiece. And any actor knows that he will get, if not the best, then one of the best roles in his life, whether it's Tom Cruise, Joaquin Phoenix, Paul Dano or Mark Wahlberg. And Daniel Day-Lewis and Philip Seymour Hoffman are simply associated with the PT, they have been its main actors for many years.
Another thing is that PTA has always made movies that are too piecemeal to bring a wide audience to the cinema. And now he's been given $150 million and the opportunity to make an art blockbuster, and the brilliant American PTAH has made GTA, an action super thriller with frenzied energy, nerve-wracking music, an excruciatingly unpredictable absurdist plot and such black humor that the walls of the cinema begin to vibrate with laughter. If there's anything you need to go to the cinema for this year, it's here, to "Battle after Battle."
Roller coaster
The key and most discussed scene of "Battle after Battle" is a car chase in the desert. A deserted highway stretches undulating through the hills. The driver can only see the valley where he is currently descending, and the nearest hill, which he is now entering. The effect is like Sergei Eisenstein's Odessa staircase: in "Potemkin" it seemed endless due to the installation. It's the same here. Neither we nor the heroes know what will happen beyond such a close and dangerous horizon. This is a complete disorientation. But they are rushing towards either death or salvation.
In the same way, PTAH builds his dramaturgy, and due to this, by some miracle, 160 minutes of the film pass instantly - so fast that you want to immediately go to another session and review it again. Not only are we not given an easy understanding of what this picture is about, we can't even figure out for a long time who it is about, who the main character is, what we will be watching for the next at least five minutes. Let's say you've read Thomas Pynchon's "Vineland," the novel based on which "Battle after Battle" was filmed, but there's not much left of the plot, even less than when Anderson last referred to the work of this writer—in "Inherent Vice."
So, at first it seems that this will be a story about the new Bonnie and Clyde (or Mickey and Mallory from "Natural Born Killers"), played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor. Anarchists, criminals, lovers, they have assembled a gang that terrorizes the whole of America. They rob banks, break into military bases, and release Mexican immigrants from detention centers. No one can handle them, they have gadgets, ingenuity, audacity, and a black avenger beauty. But one day they cross Colonel Lockjaw's path. A cross between Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, Major Payne and Terminator, Lockjo is both a Clansman by conviction and a very passionate older alpha male. His passion for a black anarchist woman has captured him — and what should he do now? Maybe we should just cut out this whole gang using an administrative resource, and that's the end of it?
But this is all a fairy tale, and the fairy tale will be 16 years later. DiCaprio's aged hero lives the life of a Dude from The Big Lebowski, he even has the same robe. He is so saturated with various substances that when they ask him for the old revolutionary password, he is not even able to understand what it is about. He has changed his name, he is raising a teenage girl alone (Chase Infinity is now doomed to star status), whose daughter she is, given the events of many years ago, it is difficult to say. But this is not as important as the fact that Colonel Lockjaw is on their trail, and now it seems that the entire army, police, and special services of the United States are looking for an old drug addict and a black schoolgirl.
Why is it brilliant?
Sometimes miracles happen. For example, in "Battle after Battle" there is a plot that does not even pretend to be plausible, but you believe in it immediately and irrevocably. Most of the "guns on the wall" don't fire here, but for some reason it doesn't bring irritation, but almost animal pleasure. Johnny Greenwood's music from Radiohead sometimes lasts longer than 10 minutes at a time, which is completely out of the question, but in the end it brings together a seemingly finished novel and when it suddenly ends, you realize that a new and even more fascinating chapter has begun.
Cult films seem to visit here and stay for a long time — not as quotes, but as an integral part of the work. Some of the names have already been mentioned above, but the cinephile range here is completely encyclopedic in scale. PTAH freely turns on the classic "Battle for Algeria" here, and a few minutes later Benicio del Toro enters the frame — and at the same time brings with him the cinematography of PTAH's star namesake, Wes Anderson, with whom del Toro has just starred in two films. Apparently, PTAH liked the way of acting in these paintings so much that he made the scenes with this artist look like they were shot by Wes Anderson. And — nothing, it fit perfectly with the general atmosphere of the film, DiCaprio, existing in a completely different organics, perfectly fit in there, and suddenly it turned out that the humor of PT and Wes Anderson was also not so diverse. PTAH sewed incongruous fabrics with a ghostly thread, and it turned out to be royal clothes.
PTAH has never had such graceful ease in handling the material, that's for sure. He created a world on the screen that you want to explore endlessly, in which you want to stay. I created characters about each of whom I want another full meter, or better yet, a thick novel. I've achieved a degree of action that hasn't been seen in a movie for a long time. He filled each frame with a huge amount of vivid details that can only be viewed and appreciated on a large screen.
Let "Gangs of New York" and "The Renegades" move over, let Tarantino squirm in his chair and let him think where else to jump off from, Tom Cruise — "Battle after Battle" sets a new bar for cinematic quality. And not at the expense of chatter, visual effects, stunt tricks, or an agenda carefully scattered in every scene. "All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl," Godard famously once remarked. And he was right. But if the third term turns out to be Paul Thomas Anderson, it turns out to be more than a movie. It turns out to be "Battle after battle."
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
