SIFF assault continues - Off Screen
Jun. 6th, 2006 01:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tiggymalvern
Last night's outing was Off Screen, which is based loosely around a true incident in Amsterdam in March 2002 when an armed man seized control of an office tower. What makes a fifty-nine year old bus driver, who's been slightly but harmlessly weird for many years, suddenly become mass-hostage-taking weird in order to publicise to the world the evils of widescreen television?
We both loved this film. We went along expecting to find a slightly grim dramatisation, but what we found instead was a work of sheer brilliance.
Very little of the film is actually about the hostage situation. It's mostly the story of a man's life in the months leading up to his final snap. A lonely, obsessive little man in his lonely, obsessive little routines, it should be as interesting as watching the proverbial Dulux apple white, but it's scripted and acted and shot so well that it's constantly fascinating. Some of the facts have inevitably been altered to better suit the drama (the man actually seized the wrong office building, because Philips had moved their headquarters - in reality, they'd been gone a few months, but in the film it's a few days). But this isn't a film about the facts, it's an exploration of what might have been going on in his head to convince him that he had to do it - and that, of course, is pure speculation, because nobody can never know.
The film is told rigidly from the hostage-taker's POV, which puts him right up front in every scene, and it's a hell of a lot to ask of the lead actor. If he'd been average, the film would have fallen with him, but Jan Decleir puts in an incredibly understated and yet ever-intense performance that wraps you right up in his world, real or not. The beauty of this film is in where the lines are, or aren't. Some of what he sees is clearly real, and some of it is clearly delusion, but the cut-off point is as seamlessly invisible as it would be to the man himself, so that it's only with hindsight that the viewer starts to wonder quite where they drifted over. The score was fantastic too - as understated as the man and the performance through much of the film, and then really breaking out at pivotal moments as the man starts to see sinister patterns in what was previously just marketing.
Considering the subject matter, this film is nothing like as downbeat and miserable as you'd expect, and I really want to see it again. I think I must buy this.
A quick note of unfortunateness dragging down a wonderful cinematic evening - there were about twenty people at this showing at Lincoln Square, which is without question the largest and best screen in the SIFF. There were about twenty-five people at Carmen on Sunday too, but that I put down to it being opera, and in an even weirder language. But, no, apparently east-siders are just philistines who don't care about the SIFF, and west-siders are enclavists who won't make the effort to come east to watch a bloody good film. I very much doubt the SIFF will be returning to the Lincoln next year with these audiences, which means we'll have to go right into Seattle for every screening in inferior auditoriums with less comfortable seats ::sigh::
We both loved this film. We went along expecting to find a slightly grim dramatisation, but what we found instead was a work of sheer brilliance.
Very little of the film is actually about the hostage situation. It's mostly the story of a man's life in the months leading up to his final snap. A lonely, obsessive little man in his lonely, obsessive little routines, it should be as interesting as watching the proverbial Dulux apple white, but it's scripted and acted and shot so well that it's constantly fascinating. Some of the facts have inevitably been altered to better suit the drama (the man actually seized the wrong office building, because Philips had moved their headquarters - in reality, they'd been gone a few months, but in the film it's a few days). But this isn't a film about the facts, it's an exploration of what might have been going on in his head to convince him that he had to do it - and that, of course, is pure speculation, because nobody can never know.
The film is told rigidly from the hostage-taker's POV, which puts him right up front in every scene, and it's a hell of a lot to ask of the lead actor. If he'd been average, the film would have fallen with him, but Jan Decleir puts in an incredibly understated and yet ever-intense performance that wraps you right up in his world, real or not. The beauty of this film is in where the lines are, or aren't. Some of what he sees is clearly real, and some of it is clearly delusion, but the cut-off point is as seamlessly invisible as it would be to the man himself, so that it's only with hindsight that the viewer starts to wonder quite where they drifted over. The score was fantastic too - as understated as the man and the performance through much of the film, and then really breaking out at pivotal moments as the man starts to see sinister patterns in what was previously just marketing.
Considering the subject matter, this film is nothing like as downbeat and miserable as you'd expect, and I really want to see it again. I think I must buy this.
A quick note of unfortunateness dragging down a wonderful cinematic evening - there were about twenty people at this showing at Lincoln Square, which is without question the largest and best screen in the SIFF. There were about twenty-five people at Carmen on Sunday too, but that I put down to it being opera, and in an even weirder language. But, no, apparently east-siders are just philistines who don't care about the SIFF, and west-siders are enclavists who won't make the effort to come east to watch a bloody good film. I very much doubt the SIFF will be returning to the Lincoln next year with these audiences, which means we'll have to go right into Seattle for every screening in inferior auditoriums with less comfortable seats ::sigh::
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no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 09:23 pm (UTC)I very much doubt the SIFF will be returning to the Lincoln next year with these audiences, which means we'll have to go right into Seattle for every screening in inferior auditoriums with less comfortable seats
What? Are you saying something's wrong with the seats at the Egyptian? Preposterous! The Seattle venues are charming, historic, and add to the whole festival experience. Being comfortable is just so unhip, so bourgeois, so terribly Eastside
and I'm scared to cross the 520 bridge. Besides, scrambling for parking builds character. ;-)no subject
Date: 2006-06-07 01:38 am (UTC)Some of the Seattle venues are charming - I like the Neptune. And Pacific Place is a decent cinema, but by the time I've actually found a parking space, I have to pay money for it! What's with that?
no subject
Date: 2006-06-07 06:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-07 03:22 am (UTC)Shame about LS, of course it plays into the stereotype that people on the eastside are boring suburbanities. Not that there isn't some truth to that, but I thought there were a lot of exceptions (well, like us and you and Mr. Tiggy) and maybe there aren't as many as I thought.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-07 07:00 am (UTC)