Hanna and her slip ups.

I was sure I didn’t like Hanna until I realized that people are loving it! And when I say people, I don’t mean the masses who have scrambled eggs for brains, I mean people I associate myself with, the sunny side up for brains, and I’m trying to figure out what they liked about it. Because I came out of Hanna feeling… nothing.

So I thought about it… and then it hit me. I didn’t hate it. In fact, I never hated it. And that’s the thing. While you’re watching it, you’re not bored; in fact, you find yourself smiling a lot of the time, because it’s ingenuous! It’s violent, yet funny; thrilling, yet sensitive. It has Cate Blanchett and Saoirse Ronan, who deliver great performances and might I add, bear a striking resemblance to each other. It has great characters, great cinematography and a great sound score featuring the Chemical Brothers. But as it happens, snippets of greatness do not a great movie make.

The attention to detail by setting the tone of the movie in greys and reds is very arty and it’s combined with great action sequences cut in perfect sync to the music, which is all very well, but these two great facets don’t come together.  At one level you love it for the former and at another for the latter, but as a whole, it’s neither.  It’s not an art film, it’s not an action film and neither is it a music video.

And as much as I respect a director’s choice to make something out of the box, I failed to grasp the meaning of wanting to do so. Clearly he had something else to say with the film, because it started out as an action thriller and then it slowed down, with the promise of being something more, but it never quite delivered on that promise.

So as much as I have nothing bad to say about this film, I really have nothing great to say either. You want to give it a standing ovation on the grounds of bravery and choices well made, but it falls short on so many accounts, that your knees give way just as you’re about to stand up. 

"Unappreciation" of the art film

Has the history of narrative cinema denied us the pleasure of seeing things as they are? I'm beginning to believe that with the absence of the "glitz and gloss" of narrative cinema we are starting to undermine our own capabilities of seeing things for what they are. Is it really that people find art films boring? Or are they just scared of letting themselves go into a world where you're left to your own devices and conclusions? Art films don't set out to do, or say anything in particular. Various things happen....and the expectation of that one particular thing to happen never gets fulfilled. They provide no answers to what one might understand as the principle question. They don't try to engage us with conversation and we never really find out anything about the characters in the film (if there are any). Ideas and images are thrown together to tell a story....and only a story....the conversations never come alive and neither do the characters....you never enter their world.....you can watch from afar....and take what you like and leave what you don't understand. That's the joy of it! You don't have to understand. You just watch and appreciate things for what they are. Have we gotten so used to the ideas of clear cut narratives where there exists a security of a plot and illusion, characters and situations that can be followed, and emotions that can be shared, that the idea of just looking at something for what it is without putting it into a greater perspective is lost? Are situations and images not able to stand on their own without standing out? The feeling of security that one gets from narratives is a lot more. Of course it is, they provide us with emotional resolutions and final endings. But their endings are so absolute, that it feels almost as if they were taking possesion of the world with their final endings. And with the knowledge that the world is not absolute and it isn't actually possible to take possesion of the world, why aren't we able to overlook the narrative structure? Is it a history we can't let go of? Or do we just always need to identify with something?