Emails:
From:
Howard, did you see the film again? What did you think?
To:
Yup, and was left with much the same impressions as on first viewing, most particularly that it deliberately enacts many of its ideas about non-linearity, irreducibility, liminality, etc in Art and Life rather than merely depicting them, and as such avoids any kind of formal closure or single or coherent reading. One of the underlying ideas, clear on the face of the film (if I can put it in those terms), is that art and life tend to blur into each other, and from there it's a short step to the notion of art as a metaphor for life, and then another (longer, but still not too long) step to the idea that life is, in some meaningful sense, at the same time a metaphor for art. And perhaps it's in theatre that we get, if not the purest (although perhaps) then certainly at least the most obvious example of those phenomena...simulacrum, synecdoche.
I enjoyed all the stuff about fragile/fluid identities and (relatedly) senses of time, too. (Did you notice that, when he first rings the bell to go about to what appears to be Adele's apartment, a handwritten label bearing the word 'Capgras' is attached to name tag beside the button? Capgras syndrome is - as I know from coming across it in more than one novel recently - a condition where a person becomes convinced that someone close to them has been replaced by an impostor who looks exactly like the supposed replacee.)
(last time - I'm still not sure whether I liked this film or not, even after a second viewing, but it certainly has something. This second time was with David and Ruth, neither of whom liked it much at all.)
