![]() Is she a poet or a painter? Is she studying physics or gerontology? Is she actually called Lucy? Or is it Lucia or Louisa or something else altogether? Buckley (who is, incidentally, better at accents than any other actor in the business) makes her believable and likeable throughout, but her clothes, her occupation and even her name change without anyone acknowledging what’s happening. ![]() And Lucy herself is prone to such transformations. People grow decades older and younger as the evening goes on, as if Lucy is realising that, if she stays with Jake, she will be stuck with his past and his distant future. ![]() Jake’s parents, played unnervingly well by Colette and Thewlis, are like alien robots who have been programmed to behave like human beings, but keep glitching. That’s just the beginning of the strangeness. Then comes the dinner, a glutinous spread that seems simultaneously generous and disgusting, but no one ever touches the food. Once they reach the remote farm, Jake insists on giving Lucy a tour of the outbuildings before they go into the house, a tour that includes some lambs that have frozen to death in a barn, and the spot where a pig was eaten alive by maggots. They sit next to each other, but Kaufman cuts back and forth between them, rather than putting them both in the same frame, so we can see how disconnected they are. The hunched, stocky, faintly aggressive Jake – who resembles the star of Synecdoche, New York, Philip Seymour Hoffman – can’t stop butting in with his views on Wordsworth and musical theatre. Lucy tries to retreat into her thoughts about their wobbly relationship – hence the title. In all sorts of small ways that make most films seem staid, Kaufman establishes that we are in an uncanny, decidedly creepy parallel universe.Įven the drive to the farm is a purgatory of low-level irritation in which the supposedly loved-up young couple can never agree on anything or find a conversational rhythm. Scenes go on far longer than expected, dialogue overlaps with internal monologues, characters recite lengthy poems and even film reviews by heart. It’s not that anyone behaves outrageously or threateningly. This being a Kaufman film, though, nothing is as it should be. At the family farm, they are served dinner, and Jake’s parents embarrass him with proud reminiscences of his schooldays before they drive off again. Twenty-something Lucy (Jessie Buckley, the vivacious star of Beast, Wild Rose and Misbehaviour) and Jake (Jesse Plemons), her boyfriend of a few weeks, drive out of a city and into the snowy countryside to meet his parents, Toni Colette and David Thewlis. The premise is as straightforward as it is in the Ben Stiller comedy. Da 5 Bloods is Spike Lee’s best film yet ![]() To put it another way, you won’t really know what to expect at all, because Kaufman’s films are always weirder, gloomier, and more unsettling than you might assume, and his latest, adapted from a novel by Iain Reid, could be the weirdest of them all. Imagine if Meet the Parents was remade by the writer of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and by the writer-director of Synecdoche, New York and Anomalisa, and you’ll have a fair idea of what to expect from Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |