Windows on the World

This is the great thing about Dvd’s: the “extras” you get can sometimes be more interesting than the film itself.

The chatty commentary Richard Jobson does is entertaining – and kind of revealing: about how much sweat and toil, and commendable effort he went to in the making of his film; and also it reveals that, despite all the “Big Idea’s” and mystical quantum physic profundity he was trying to bring off – how, fatuous and facile his seeming “spiritually” is.

At the end of the film commentary he sums up what he’s been up to:

“I wanted to do something experimental, to play around with narrative, deal with big themes, create a film rich in atmosphere and tone, try new things with the camera and the software so as to create a distinctive visual language, with the ambience via vivid sound design. So as to say something about the spiritual planes we inhabit in the modern age; with the central message being: “all that matters is love”.

All achieved on a very tiny budget! He keeps banging on about how little money he had. It was about £400,000 – which i suppose in film producing terms is a tiny budget (in nitty gritty real life terms tho, I go “What?!!”)

His film was definitely “trying to do something different…. to show how British film can tune into a European sensibility” I’ll give him that. “You’re in a strange existential Art House film” he says. Ok Richard, you wanna be deep. Cool. “It’s ethereal blah”…. and “magical blah blah”…and “magically ethereally blah blah blah” Ok, Richard you wanna be taken seriously, we get it. A “Psychological Sci Fi film influenced by Tarkovsky’s Solaris“. Ok Richard, cut the crap now – You are NOT Tarkovsky!

“I was gonna do the whole film in French” (Grrr!. Give him some bleedin Sartre to read for Gawds sake!)

“I have a problem with big dialogue scenes; I want to go somewhere else, layer verbal with visual language, look for an interesting shot, think about the camera, the lighting”. Yes he does. He thinks more about the lighting than what the beauty-rapt faces of his posy actors are actually saying to one another.

“Some people have accused me of being too aware of the camera – but for me cinema is an audio-visual experience, it’s not about people sitting around talking”. No, but at least when they do talk it shouldn’t be such a cringeworthy advertisement for – and you said it Richard! – the pomposity of the story telling i go for”

“So many scripts are dialogue heavy, especially British ones. And British actors come from TV/Theatre and they do too much. I like Movie acting (like the French do) I think he should have just shipped a whole load of French actors over -and got them to speak in “egghisstenchal Ingliss” (ala Daniel Auteuil)

“I didn’t write naturalistic dialogue – it’s lyrical. I want to engage with lyricism without being pretentious”. Sorry Richard, but the dialogue did come across as being pretty pretentious. And i know the 2 main characters were meant to be ghosts (maybe) but they were hollow ghosts, ghosts without much earth about them, or substantial reality, or even – dare i say it – any heart-felt credibility as authentic lovers (of the “love” you want us to believe is the be all and end all – of it all)

“The aesthetic pulls it into a complicated layered story, not a simple commercial story. I want to construct scenes with inbuilt ambiguity, with a sense of “where am i?” Well, nobody likes not knowing where i am and getting a bit lost in a maze of ambiguity more than me – but the places you were getting me lost in in your film Richard were somewhere slightly too close to Arsehole.

And when you say, “A little implicit clue there… it all means something (yeah – means to “mean” something) I feel like the something it means has got me lodged right up Yours Richard. Ambiguously lost in a heap of prime pile bullshit.

Still, I’m learning lots about camera gimmickry: slow-mo’s and flash forwards, freeze frames and layering ala photoshop; random fractals and digitized CGI and sudden silences that go black on you before they go Bam!. And scenes lit like photo’s, and shot without reverses or cutaways – so as to make it all seem stylistically experimental.

“I want every frame to have its own beauty, to be like a photograph. I want to fetishize the beauty of it” (the frame, the “frozen moment”)

Yes – come to think of it Richard – you do come across as a bit of a fetishist. Something vain, self-regarding and self-consciously “look at me” about your directing. And wanting to style spirituality so that it looks deep and seems meaningful.

A European Auteur Wannabe – that’s Richard Jobson. A Lookalike Resnais.

“A woman in winter” gets nowhere near conveying that

“Humility is the science of sadness”

The sad thing being there is no humility in the film making at all. It’ s all show and showing off, pomposity.

But the less sad thing is, I don’t mind him for it. In fact i kind of like him for it. “Trying to be different”. In a way. Cus at least he’s “having a go”.

6/10

Yes, that’s sad: with commentary his film is more engaging than without. Without it leaves out too much humility….