jean

watched and loved this film often. it was strange seeing it on a large screen for the first time. seeing all the dirt on the carpet floor of the apartment. the crumbling wallpaper coming off the walls. the dust on the objects. the ashes of the cigarettes next to the ashtrays. the film had a new tonality, displayed a yet unnoticed distress and porous lostness. the figures seemed like flamboyant dandies when i saw them small, grand in their refusal to work and love and live according to the patterns, rash and coquet. they still were. but surrounded by all of the dirt and their visibly aging bodies, the felt poverty and inaptitude, the morbidity of their games, the dust on the old film copy, the few crazy people that had come to the cinema on a saturday evening to watch this almost 4 hour long film, the silences between the character's words, the size of their faces in the darkness of the cinema, the film had a gravity that i had perceived as lightness before. painful watching the film. sad but all the more touching, seeing the fragile, clairvoyant poetry of the negating peripheral figures crushed by the weight of worries and lowering insanity. guess that is what makes them beautiful, how lucidly they know of death. of the existing death in the conformity of unfelt, copied lives and their own death. such a strange thing, a film that can can make you love and fear its figures at the same time.