domenica 5 agosto 2012

Death and the Compass - Alex Cox

tratto da un racconto di JL Borges ("La muerte y la brujula"), il film di Cox non delude.
il suo cinema è inconfondibile e impegnativo,  e quella con Borges è una sfida difficile, ma nel complesso riuscita.
atmosfere da "Blade Runner" e una sceneggiatura solida, con attori validi.
non ti annoi di sicuro, a me è piaciuto molto - Ismaele



Many of Jorge Luis Borges's fictions are convoluted despite being very short, and most do not have much that is describable as a "plot." The ten-page 1942 story "Death and the Compass," however, is an exception. It is linear (it's also meta-linear, but I won't get into that) and has an almost conventional ruminative. intuitive detective solving three murders and seeking to prevent a fourth. 
An adaptation by Alex Cox was unlikely to be so conventional. Cox's quirky 1984 film "Repo Man," with Harry Dean Stanton and Emilio Estevez playing car repossesors, delighted independent film aficionados. Cox is probably best known for "Sid and Nancy," though I was intrigued by his movie "Walker" with Ed Harris and the megalomaniac American who tried to become emperor of Central America after getting a start negotiating freight crossings for Cornelius Vanderbilt. Cox seemed to me to have an interesting vision of violence and corruption and Latin American politics. Plus adapting one of the most famous works of twentieth century American literature by the antipolitical Anglophile Argentine writer…

It’s as though Cox doesn’t wish for us to view his film in a conventional manner. Death and the Compass may conclude with an easily digestible explanation of events, but in the lead up we’re dazzled by a stream of references rendering the narrative oblique and effusive. Characters and situations are colour-coded, film stocks alternate and the whole thing is shot through with a remarkable level of low-budget imagination. (At times I was reminded of Orson Welles’ more personal undertakings, specifically his similarly dense thriller Confidential Report.) Yet importantly, there is a coherency to Cox’s approach; everything fits together perfectly. His method of utilising long takes, for example, only serves to enhance the film’s labyrinthine nature as we get deeper and deeper and go around and around. As said, it creates a distinctive, fully realised world, albeit one in which Boyle portrays a pastel blue Dick Tracy…

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