Having said that...
We may have reasons for thinking a movie is good or bad, whether it is well made or incoherent, whether we find it honest or deceitful, but we don't, maybe can't, choose the movies we love.
"Love" here means more than just happening to align with personal preference and/or taste. It means more than really enjoying watching a movie or thinking that it is "one of the greats". The movies we end up loving can be distasteful to us at first. That's often been the case with me. My initial, immediate reaction to Lost Highway was to reject it, but it haunted me: it made demands on me that I could not ignore.
To put it another way: some movies call on us to champion them, to defend them against their critics; other movies, objectively just as well made, just as much within the boundaries of our own preferences, do not.
These thoughts came up when I was mulling over my response to a film that is much beloved by a cinephile friend. I thought that the movie in question was, without question, a good one. I admired it quite a bit. And, on paper, it had all of these qualities that I love and feel we don't see enough of: apart from being beautifully shot and acted, it strove to capture a certain time and place and a way of being in that time and place without trying to make a large statement. But I didn't love it: I can come up for reasons why it's a great movie, but they're not reasons I fully believe in.
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"My initial, immediate reaction to Lost Highway was to reject it, but it haunted me: it made demands on me that I could not ignore."
ReplyDeleteI could have written that sentence to the letter.
I feel like I need both sides of this story to comment in a way that's more than, "Me Too." What's a generally beloved movie that doesn't grab you? It doesn't have to be the one you're mulling your response to. Can you point to why the movie doesn't grab you? What in Lost Highway forces you to hold it up as exemplary? LH certainly seems to have gotten a better reputation since its release, whereas Mulholland Drive has stayed about the same or even dipped a bit. I've only seen MD.
ReplyDeleteI dunno, this post feels like a prologue to a longer discussion about movie love.
Remi -
ReplyDeleteThis is definitely a prologue, but I'll try to be a bit more specific:
The movie I was mulling over is in this post was Jan Troell's Everlasting Moments - not exactly universally beloved, but it's stuck in my mind because (a) one of my friends really loves it and (b) I don't have any reasons why I don't. I do think it is a very well made movie and, from my point of view, it makes all the right moves (for instance, it doesn't make a Big Statement, even though it is the kind of movie that we expect a Big Statement from), but it just didn't grab me like it did my friend. On my walks home from work recently, I've been comparing my response to Everlasting Moments to my response to Hong Sang-soo's Woman on the Beach, a movie I saw at about the same time that did grab me. When I compare the movies, both the objective and (rational) subjective cases I make for them equal out. I'm left feeling that loving Woman on the Beach and merely admiring Everlasting Moments is ultimately irrational. (Not that this is an original observation!)
So, I'm not sure what it is in Lost Highway or Woman on the Beach that makes me feel a deep and profound connection to them. My guess is that there's something in them - in their worldview perhaps? - that fulfills an unconscious psychological or emotional need. But that's just mere surmise right now...