Рецензия на «Афише»
Last Film on the Earth
In Charlie Kaufman's scripts, however different and polyhedral they are, always two things are described: Life as it really is and the image of it we create and display (also called Art). Or maybe this is really one, like two sides of Moebius loop. "Synecdoche, New York", Kaufman's Opus magnum for today, brings this loop to it's logical end.
Caden Cotard, provincial theater director, after discovering he is affected by strange neural disease, maybe terminal, undergoes self-imposed Kafkaesque trial, as result of which his personality literally goes down in flames. On the verge of it he is starting to reconstruct his life as a stage play, hiring actors to play himself, women he at some point loved or has been loved by and finally falling from Director's chair to a mere episodic character who could in fact never exist.
Labyrinthine and elaborate, "Synecdoche" is perfectly clear at all times, which is marvelous taking into account all the indistinctnesses used to create it. Muffled cues, transient frames, innumerable labels, notes and scraps flying through the screen create Nabokovian experience ("The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" specifically), also not by accident.
In Synecdoche, Kaufman is once again pulling the trick that left us jaw-fallen after Adaptation, but on much greater scale: following the development of the main hero we try and cannot miss how the transformations he undergoes reflect such of the movie and the author himself. The latter is not breaking the fourth wall, but strictly proving no such thing did ever exist.
Intricacy is delicacy, but what emotion it aims to create in the viewer's mind? We go through the full spectrum - family happiness, family discord, fear of death, longing of death, but at the end there is none. And concerning the previous paragraph, where does this take us?
Having mastered The Love and The Misery, Kaufman himself is in neither. The struggle between the lover and the topologist has ended - the victory is ultimate. The fact it has no taste is ultimately irrelevant.
There's nothing more to say... There's nothing more to say.
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