I saw Duplicity, which I thought was a lot of fun. Clive Owen strikes me as being much better suited to playing James Bond – I mean the James Bond of the books – than anyone who’s actually played him. And for what it’s worth, based on her performance in this film Julia Roberts now strikes me as a viable albeit imperfect Dagny Taggart.
The movie also has a terrific theme song: Being Bad by bitter:sweet.
But what’s up with the reviews of that movie? I’ve seen review after review moaning not just that the plot is complicated (which it is) but that it’s a hopeless incomprehensible tangle (which it isn’t).
This review, which calls the film “inscrutable” and “too confusing for its own good,” is typical – as is this one, which calls the film “stylish but muddled,” and complains: [MILD SPOILER follows:]
the movie never does reveal, at least not with enough precision to be truly satisfying, just what Claire and Ray’s prefab conversation (which will recur at intervals throughout the movie) is all about.
Um … yes it does. It’s explained completely. Were we watching the same movie? The third enactment of the conversation contains an explicit backward reference to the second one and an explicit forward reference to the first – spelling it out loud and clear for the audience just in case there could be any doubt. [SPOILER OVER]
Admittedly the movie cuts forward and backward in time, and we often don’t fully understand what was really going on in one scene until we see a later (i.e. later for us, but earlier in internal chronology) scene. But this is not exactly some bewilderingly innovative postmodern narrative technique, and it’s a bit odd to be thrown by it. By the end of the movie there are no major puzzles left unexplained – at least to audiences that were paying attention.
But the reviews that complain about the movie being bewildering aren’t the most bewildering reviews. That prize would have to go to this one: [SERIOUS SPOILER follows – and I mean SERIOUS, as in IF YOU’RE PLANNING TO SEE THE MOVIE, STOP READING NOW:]
It’s pretty people versus ugly people. Guess who wins? … the movie boils down to this rudimentary formula: morality and success are functions of beauty.
Here I have to ask once again, in a still more incredulous tone: Were we watching the same movie? You can debate about who wins the morality points in the movie – it’s not obvious that anyone does, really – but success? The pretty people lose. That’s what that whole scene was about at the end, you know, with the two pretty people sitting there looking all depressed? Remember the end? You did stay for the whole movie, right? [SECOND SPOILER OVER]
Okay, rant over.
Which novels/movies set a precedent in using abrupt time jumps the way this movie does? I can see how it would be confusing if no effort is made to visually inform the audience that a flashback or flashforward has occurred.
Which novels/movies set a precedent in using abrupt time jumps the way this movie does?
Flashbacks have been part of western literature since Homer, and part of movies since the beginning too. The amount of introductory cues needed for flashbacks has been steadily declining (just as it has been for, say, novels as a whole, which used to have to begin “In a certain county in the southwest of England there was a fishing village called Ipcress, where our scene is set …”).
I can see how it would be confusing if no effort is made to visually inform the audience that a flashback or flashforward has occured.
Sure, but the flashbacks in Duplicity are all introduced with words on the screen saying “Rome – fourteen months ago” or whatever.
Roderick, don’t you know that everything has to be spelled out in great big, bright neon letters for today’s audiences–repeatedly? After the first showing of the title “Rome: 14 Months Ago,” they should have flashed “Remember Now, this is Rome: 14 Months Ago” intermittently throughout the entire scene for all those with the attention span of a gnat (i.e., film critics).
Sure, but the flashbacks in Duplicity are all introduced with words on the screen saying “Rome – fourteen months ago” or whatever.
Oh that’s different then. I was assuming you’d want to be more subtle and indicate it with say a recalled event happening or a particular location.
“Which novels/movies set a precedent in using abrupt time jumps the way this movie does?”
If I remember correctly, the critically acclaimed (and rather stupid) 21 Grams had a completely non-linear structure that had flashbacks and flashforwards with nothing indicating them. Duplicity, apparently, uses subtitles, but there definitely are, at least, films that make no effort to inform the viewer of changes in time that critics have loved.
That sort of complaint seems to me like something easy to hang your hat on because the critic didn’t like the movie for a variety of other reasons, it’s just easier to say it’s confusing than to articulately dissect the film.
Pulp Fiction doesn’t tell you which scenes are earlier and which are later, but it does mark off temporally separated segments as different stories.
There are some novels (e.g. LeGuin’s Dispossessed, MacLeod’s Stone Canal) in which the chapters systematically alternate between present and past without explicitly saying so, but present and past are so different that it’s easy to track.
And then there are the new Elric collections ….