A ghostly tennis match translated as unanswered letters by Jeroen Peeters & Jack Hauser.
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Brussels, Sept. 20, 2010
Dear Jack,
After writing to you last week I took the chance to revisit Quantum of Solace (2008) on video. On a small screen in one’s living room, the movie obviously functions very differently, though I was reminded of the viewing experience I had when seeing it in the theatre two years ago. All the action scenes in the film, starting with a long chase in the very beginning, are edited in such a fast way, with very brief shots and flashes, that it almost goes too quick for the eye. Yet there is more: the editing has the effect that I don’t, or better that I can’t identify with what is going on. It provokes something like empathetic blindness. Both on the narrative and on the sensorial levels, the action blinds me. If you consider the sheer impossibility of the scenes – it’s film after all – it is interesting that Quantum of Solace dispenses with the illusion that my body, or any viewer’s body, could ever be in tune with the action scenes. The film makes up for it on a particularly symbolical level, by interspersing the action scenes with classical forms of drama, such as the carnival or parade in the Italian town where the chase takes place, or later on in the opera house – where the set design consists of one huge disembodied eye!
Gemma Arterton’s Strawberry Fields character isn’t exactly a memorable Bond girl, her being drenched and suffocated in oil a somewhat telegraphed remix of Goldfinger (1964) in the age of global warming. Fields’ being disappointed that Bond’s spell (“Oh, but then we have all night!”) turned out to be stronger than her handcuffs returned to me tonight though while watching J. Blakeson’s The Disappearance of Alice Creed – just to make it a little Gemma Arterton cycle.
Two ex-prisoners kidnap the daughter of a rich man, a waterproof plan that goes astray and eventually fails because here, too, the spell happens to be stronger than the cuffs. The whole issue of empathy played out between the three protagonists never spills over to the viewer though – it all remains an improbable and somewhat ridiculous script. While Quantum of Solace could be said to explode the limits of identification in the editing process, Alice Creed suffers from highly contrived camerawork and editing that doesn’t contribute to a specific view at all – not in reality and not in cinema and not in art either. To give you one example: when one of the kidnappers waits for a bowl of soup to warm in the microwave, the scene is filmed from inside the microwave. Is it a hint at the claustrophobic maybe, trying to pull me inside that small machine? Now you!
One detail in the film I did like though. After more than an hour of cuffs and chains and shackles and bolts and all the rituals that come with them, it appears the car of the guys can be locked with a remote control – that “beepbeep!” was simply funny and well-timed. Maybe it doesn’t come across when I write it down like this, but then I’m happy I can just write it to you, even if it was a crappy film. Perhaps that’s the good thing about a practice – it will survive a lacking punch line.
Best,
Jeroen |
To Be Continued
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