Convoluted stuff. Overwrought. Cluttered. Melodramatic. Overstayed its welcome. Laughable at times (without meaning to). Meh. Etc. etc.

Hushpuppy. Queen of the Bathtub. Friends to the Aurochs. Fending for herself in the swamps of people fending for themselves. Beasting it: childhood, or Life itself.
Didn't you wish you also had it in you?
I did.

Other than the possibility of finding your footing back into the world through the presence of a whole other lost, immature and wandering soul, what else could be glimpsed through this movie before it could put you to sleep? Even setting it in Italy could be considered cheating because it looked beautiful regardless of the absence of any redeeming qualities in these one dimensional portrayals. Even those recordings of Grandma Eves' experiences during the war somehow reverberated a nagging thought that she should be in a different film altogether.
Well, at least they're all pretty (albeit they're pretty bored).
That much can be said.

How horrifically alive the past is, pervading the present into a bleak and uncertain future...

All the hurt could only stand above you if you let it. And the shadow it casts, someone (if you can't) must take notice does not, need not define you and the rest of your days. Some of them are in this picture. They are as real as any of your fears can be. Let this film ease up some of the burdens.

Maddeningly hopeful, I could cry. And I don't even need to try. Just dance on bowling alleys of our past hurts towards redemption, a more forgiving earth for those who fall and will. Let it ring but don't you dare be still.

I guess in the end, Rocco's purity failed him. He's complicit in the murder of Nadia in a supposed act of selflessness for the redemption of Simone, the brute. But how about the feelings of Nadia, did he even consider? Probably maybe but most definitely not and that's the cross he has to bear.

In the end it is Ciro who appeared as the emotional anchor of the family. No wonder he has the film's final words to counter Rocco's "There's no hope now." declaration (even if to self-effacingly proclaim Rocco as a Saint).

The tragic ménage à trois-- bookended by Vincenzo's engagement party and Ciro's surprise rendezvous with his fianceé-- gnawed on their lives 'til all they could have left to hope for is a homecoming to much simpler times.

Will Luca ever set foot on Lucania again?
Will he ever?

...Other Bitchslapping Mansplanations

I could have lived and died with this movie if not for the hackneyed and tedious usage of embellishments. The eccentric producer, the bazaar incident, the tension and chase at the airport. They all added the much needed 'thrill' other than what the hostage crisis was already enveloped in. As if the said hostage crisis wasn't posing enough peril already in a country waging a vengeful (otherwise fair) war against those who wronged their socio-religious sensibilities. Spies or not.

It's an impressionistic depiction of an otherwise straight-up picture.

The guy at the counter felt it was his duty to inform me that the movie was not in English. I answered rather curtly that I knew. And then he showed me the seating chart and told me I would have the cinema all by myself which I did for about fifteen minutes. Ten minutes into the movie two Arabs came. Then six Turks or Azerbaijani (probably). It was a Turkish film after all albeit dubbed in Arabic which was rather disappointing. I know, I know. I wouldn't have understood either way and would still have to rely on the subtitles but the poetry would have resonated with me in a different manner, something peculiarly holistic to a Turkish experience.

And so it went that it was overwrought. Like dying of consumption. Like poetry in this film rather than a film which is poetic.

... Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom (Orphaned Sam settling down and troubled Suzy anchoring herself through humor darkly)

The stylized depiction of precociousness and oddity is but a jump up point. What ensues is rarely ever novel. It's just that we're looking into it with an overwhelming enthusiasm like Saturday nights when you were still excited to go to church. You couldn't quite contain it. You couldn't quite take your eyes off of your Sunday clothes. This is probably the calm before the storm of disillusionment. The warring circumstances that were sure to take a piece of the life you're living now that you're subsisting on alms of grace your paeans to which you scribbled through into pages and pages of poetry, doodled into some semblance of order in an abstract art, hissed into a tape recorder ever unsure when to sing the first words. It's 1965. As always, it's the end of the world as we knew it. But did we ever feel fine?

The first meeting was with bespectacled Sam in a bird sanctuary. It was love at first sight. You couldn't really guess what they saw in one another. It's inexplicable to a fault like all loves at first sight are. Then came, Khaki Scout Sam in summer camp outcasted by the prevalent machismo and utter competitiveness. A resonance of days spent in orphanages. A leitmotif that would be aggregated by Police Captain Sharp in contrast, resigned to an adulterous idleness of an affair while Suzy and her band of brothers were as trapped as their parents in a failed marriage. And her knowing why and how and when and where complicated the matter. It was amplified and intensified by her troubled adolescent sensibilities. They corresponded like birds to other birds in the darkness of adolescence. They have to meet and stow away in an impulse that wouldn't make much sense in hindsight into a whimsical adventure into the depths of the woods. A scaringly amusing thought, it was actually lovely.

The sexual tension was understated: fish hook earrings that pierce through the lobes of naivete. We could have assumed just by shrieks emitted and heard. But of course, we knew.

Torrents of troubles chased them that would resonate until the denouement.

And we would survive as in Noye's Fluddde: animals in pairs of seven and one, scathed and unscathed.

... With Trauma Inducing Tolerance


A wrong assumption that proved genocidal. How infuriatingly futile could lives be worth under the orchestrations of war. Even in animation, in non-linear documentation. Dreams. Delusion. Disillusionment. We're nothing but pawns.

That cacophony of wailing Palestinian women would tingle a guilt long dormant. In fact, the labels (Christians, Phalangists, Muslims, Palestinians, Lebanese, Jews) are enough to tickle for a laugh at how we've divided ourselves into categories, classes, races, castes, sects, adherences; as if incendiaries that would soon only fizzle out after a body count.

No wonder Ari Folman didn't have a say at all. The subconscious just had to do what it could. To forget.
But the visions of Sabra and Shatila massacre must creep up. It needed to be told.
And this guilt of having survived, or being the one to survive, it needed to be felt, to suffer through until you could wriggle free from it with a conviction that it must not happen again.
Although it might. And it will. Again and again.

Ah, Bashir! Ah, humanity!