I saw a film about John Keats. Of course, we have to have some scenes of poetry writing, a very un-cinematic activity. We have Keats writing and hear his voice intone some of his most famous lines, or Fanny walking through a garden and reciting lines from Keats. It's not that film cannot use poetic language effectively, in a variety of ways, but I feel that this is not an effective way. The lines are already too familiar. Seeing Keats listen to a Nightingale and then come up with "My heart aches..." just doesn't seem to work.
Usually a drastically effective writing scene has to involve frustration, the writer ripping sheets of paper out of a type writer and tearing them up and throwing them in the waste paper basket. That seems to be the favored trope.
I saw "Frida" again, and there were scenes of painting. That works a little better. Hayek looks enough like Kahlo to make it work, and manages to alternate between glamour and bodily decline, to offer the best of two worlds. A glamour role and one that allows for a large area of physical and mental pain.
No comments:
Post a Comment