A highly anticipated film, which I only came to discover from a friend's girlfriend. We watched it together last weekend (me, Jéssica and the two of them). Oh, just pointing out: the film has been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in the 86th Academy Awards which will take place this Sunday evening, if there's anyone who cares about such a thing.
I don't know if I should feel guilty for saying this, but the film didn't stick out for me at all. Certainly not deserving of the attention it's received and the status it's achieved. The pointless use of a character's trait of loving American bluegrass music served the film absolutely NO purpose. I've gotta say it. That's what bothered me the most. They could've been playing blues, salsa, polka, rock... goodness, samba for all I care; it would've had the same direction of motivations for the upper themes of the film (marriage, differences, children, religion, life and death, terminal illness, family, etc...). It doesn't make a whole lot of difference in the film, yet it plays a big part in it and permeates a big chunk of its aesthetics; they play it at the beginning, all of a sudden in sections where it doesn't belong at all, Didier brags about how "the USA are perfect and the land of freedom", they play it at their daughter's funeral... bluegrass is bloody everywhere, and it's annoying, because apart from not addressing the atmosphere and overall sentiment that the film proposes, sometimes it doesn't even sound like authentic American folk music.
Besides that, another aspect of the film that bothered me a bit was dialogues. Some of them look absolutely disconnected, incohesive, out of place... their deepest angers seem to be triggered by the most trivial events, out of the blue. It made the film look silly to me, mediocre editing - especially the confusing and foolishly bold sequences of flashbacks and flashforwards - and motivations.
Anyway, I don't want to write too much about bad things, even because the film isn't bad per se; besides, the analysis is already too long for my original blog proposal, so...
The positives of the film would be the art direction in general: most of the cinematography is beautiful, acting serves the purpose of the film - albeit sometimes silly - very well, and the ending is extremely moving.
Oh, and Flemish sounds amazing to my ears!
Director: Felix Van Groeningen
Score
Cinematography: 9.5
Acting: 8.0
Editing: 6.0
Sound: 7.5
Text: 8.0
Concept: 8.5
Premise Execution: 5.5
Average Score: 7.5
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