joaophilippe-mb-monteiro

This is a welcome sight. This is not an easy one. Scene after scene, the characters, the settings, the relationship, each and every element comes in your face with incredible strength; from classroom argument to daughter-mother interaction, nothing is easy and nothing doesn't hurt. And for all that, the movie still manages to be fun, to make you laugh (albeit often at someone's painful expenses). Praise must of course go towards the main character, surprisingly multifaceted, rich and intense in about any moment of the film. She will draw you into her hopes, values and experience, her very own; morals, logic, conventions be damned! The talent from the young cinematographer at work here is to project all this with that incredible force; you will be happy when the characters are, you will cry when they do. And you will hope with them of a better tomorrow, however twisted. The synopsis here doesn't do justice to the scenario, this is much more about survival, and progress, only with the meagre supply of solutions and resources available to the heroes where they where born, in the limited scope of perspectives such life can offer them. They will not accept their fate, they will fight it, and we will be entranced by them.

At the start of the feature you may believe it to be a silent one, what with the black and white picture and lack of dialog, but it is actually not. Or I should probably say, barely not. Now the very mild spoiler here is: "And they lived happily for an undetermined amount of time afterward and had a lot of very static fat cats"... Speaking of cats, the best acting in this movie is probably done by the cat by the way, although his lines are few and between, and he can be said to be almost as marmorean as his human colleagues.

An altogether quite boring experience which didn't survive its Festival Hype at all in the theatre; most of the half empty room seemed either bored or slightly amused (I felt both), until my wife nailed it once and for all: It's been a while we haven't seen such a bad movie, period.

It is just wrong. CGI is cheap, monsters/blood/explosions don't connect to the set, to the lights; editing is awkward, sometimes a kill is full frontal, gory details and all, and sometimes it happens off-screen; story is as thin as you probably guessed, lines vary from utilitarian to abscond, with maybe an attempt at making it into genre sub-culture but unconvincingly so.

And light/camera work is terrible: if you where willing to actually see the faces, the expressions of the people at work in front of you during one of those "let me explain myself" scene, you are out of luck one time out of two - which is, in these times of all-digital processing, kind of a shame.

And it is full of mistakes, big and small, that you'll surely find a list of on this fine website if only people can be coerced to report on them.

I hope the people who worked that film had fun, where getting paid and all that, and legitimately didn't hold too much hopes for the success of that thing.

As much as I enjoyed Attack the Block, Pacific Rim or Independence Day or other stuff that people should obviously watch without taking it the least bit seriously, well, we are seriously into Anaconda III or various alligator/saurian Terribly Bad CGI siblings territory here; this is definitely no Snakes On A Plane.

While French artsy-critic magazine "telerama" gave it an ecstatic review, there is one thing I wasn't prepared for: the quality of the images. Set in an almost-but-not-quite faded black and white, of about completely square format, I was sure the movie, set and shot in Poland, was using some obscure last reels of some obscure special negatives, developed in a forgotten cold-war era lab... Well, according to the credits, that was all digital, from start to finish. All the haters of DDD processes out there (I'm one of them), we can now be assured the modern film-maker has today the ability to really work on grain, under-exposure, blurred shadows and all that; Wiene, Murneau, Dreyer, Eisenstein and Lang be damned.

I was stunned. This, and the quite audacious camera angles, the ever so close close-ups that only half a face remains visible. I even noticed what should be considered an error (walking in the forest, you only see the characters up from their ankles, missing their feet labouring trough the undergrowth)... And it just works because of the richness of the various tree trunk's winter greys.

Add to that the settings, the aesthetics of semi-derelict post-war communist décor, and the odd 'innocent girl meets nice boy' arch-cute scene, but that was to be expected from the start, even if it is just about perfect. The Hotel is... A graphic masterpiece in itself.

So yeah, the movie is worth it's weight on that alone already, and then there is Agata Kulesza, so absolutely right every part of her role as Aunt Wanda, so whole and complex inside a movie that doesn't otherwise spend lengths on character's backgrounds that she just draws you inside, whether you know her story, her past, her issues or not. A jaw-dropping performance.

This movie should not be called Ida, but Wanda.