528 491

At a turning point in the movie, we are shown a room where a dozen people, all hooked to a machine that lets them share a collective dream, come to sleep a few hours every day.

Those people are us.

They are sleeping in what looks very much like an opium den with wires in lieu of pipes and smoke. We learn they are addicted, no longer capable of dreaming on their own; they chose the reality of the shared dream over whatever their life may be like.

Ever wondered how much time our contemporaries, on average, spend per day hooked to our televisions? They are us. Or rather, they are a projection of how Inception’s director Christopher Nolan sees us: hooked to the machine 3 to 4 hours a day, dreaming a collective dream architected by the people in Hollywood, incapable of dreaming our own dreams any more.

Once you go down this rabbit hole and start seeing the whole film as a film about film (need to go deeper?), there is no turning back. If you start thinking this way, you’ll wonder if there is a reason why all location (but one – Casablanca) where Inception was shot are icons of mass culture: Los Angeles (Hollywood), London (The mighty pinewood studios), Paris (temple of high culture) and Tokyo (Gross National Cool). And isn’t Rupert Murdoch Australian, just like the character of energy mogul Fischer in the film?

I left my first viewing subscribing to one of the most the widespread theories about the story line.

I was wrong. Hint: the spinning top topples twice – in Tokyo and Paris-. And a half. Draw your own conclusions.

But I was also on to something: how the story ends for the characters of the movie actually doesn’t matter. The last shot of the movies shows us a piece of information that may or may not help us decide what is real and what is not. And you know what? The characters are no longer in the room, no longer looking at the artefact. They don’t care. The question is not theirs any more.

The question remains, not for them, but for us. And we’ve been asked the question many times before – we just didn’t notice. Why would an actor look straight at the camera and ask: “what do you believe is real?”. This, happening on the screen, or whatever awaits you when you get up, stretch you legs, rub your eyes and get back to your life?

Inception – the subtle and difficult art of planting an idea in someone’s mind while thy are deep in an altered state – is indeed performed throughout the movie. On us. And the simple fact that we all come out of the theater discussing for hours and days about what happened to Cobb (the main protagonist of the film, played by Leonardo Di Caprio) means that Christopher Nolan and his team have succeeded.

One of the children invents a game, dangers, threats, and a set of absurd, almost random rules for their game. He will lead the others to a magical place where all wishes come true, but only if they follow his lead and the convoluted path he will trace for them.

I remember playing such games as a child, and I remember being so engrossed in play that the day would pass in the blink of an eye. To an external observer, however, the game would have felt utterly boring.

Stalker - 1979 Movie Poster

I watched Andrei Tarkovski’s 1979 Stalker (Сталкер) – the 2 hours-and-half epic of three middle aged men crossing a field and visiting a house in ruins, making up absurd rules and being afraid of invisible dangers, all the while very seriously bumbling about the meaning of life. I think I almost fell asleep at some point. And yet … it has been a long time since I pondered and blabbered so much about a movie I’d just seen. Stalker has the kind of not-pretty-but beautiful aesthetic I aim for when I point a photographic camera at the world. It is a demanding mess of metaphors and false leads. Full of religious references, pagan, messianic or otherwise, it touches at the ideas of sacrifice, the question of what it means to be good.

At some point the character of the Writer, played by Anatoli Solonitsyn, wonders whether the only decent thing to do with one’s life is to dedicate it to art, because it is the only unselfish action. This line was probably on the crew’s mind as they were shooting amidst the toxic puddles of an abandoned power station that eventually killed Tarkovski, hist wife-cum-assistant-director, and Solonitsyn himself. Beyond its shooting and screening, Stalker remains a story of hope and dedication.

The film is a matter of faith and hope for the viewer, too. If you are like me, you learned about Stalker because so many critics have hailed it as a masterpiece. In the emphatic words of actress Cate Blanchett “Every single frame of the film is burned into my retina.”. But does the opinion of an inspired elite mean the movie will invariably be a pleasant, even life-changing, experience?

Only by letting go can one go past the nagging impression that this might very well be a 163 minutes-long bad joke. But when one does let go, Stalker becomes a trance-like meditation on life, hope and the nature of man; watching it gave me one of the most intellectually stimulating evenings in a decade.

This is not science-fiction for everyone. Enter at your own risks.

“Let everything that's been planned come true. Let them believe.”

Re-reading this review after watching Where the Wild Things Are makes me appreciate it even more. WtWTA is a honest and beautiful rendition of the joys and pain of being a child growing up. This is the movie children would make if they had a few million dollars and the talent of a Spike Jonze – instead of being usually limited to horrible crayon drawings.

Whether it is suitable for children is besides the point, the good question is whether adults can deal with it. Whether, as an adult, one is ready to open up to deep, old, primal pleasures and hurts. Wanting to be loved, wanting to be the center of attention, hating the awkward silence after a good joke, realising you are the bad guy in the story…

Life as an adult, too, is “all fun and games until someone gets hurt” – but we too often forget.