Atonement (2007)
Finally a movie that deserves the Oscar nomination. I liked most things about it - from the sound to the camera, to acting and plot. Joe Wright (the 35yo director) puts together an new type of non-linear epic story that poses problems close to me. We'll probably see his name again. The image is fantastic - and I don't have in mind only the long shoot in the middle of the movie but the many little elegant camera movements and framings that are also meaningful. I have to mention the typewriter in the soundtrack and the way it stresses characters and situation but also as a meta-comment on the power of words. I liked the acting of Saoirse Ronan who can be wonderfully senseless.
I will watch this movie again for sure. Let's see if it also ages well but for now I totally recommend it.
1 comment:
I saw the movie last week in St. Andrews cinema with Helen Amiri from the hc and Renate. I had read the book some years ago and remembered I liked it for its sharpness and almost mathematical tension between the main characters.
At the beginning I liked the movie very much, as you say, swift camera, nice sound (made in the London recording studio where Renate's daughter works!), and certainly powerful shots (pictures, paintings really) throughout the movie.
I was a bit disappointed that the initially manifold storytelling where we get to know an event through the eyes of different characters (the guy who falls in love vs. the little girl who watches imagining him to be a threatening sex monster especially) - that this kind of storytelling is abandoned after the first part. For our readers who haven't seen the movie: the couple in love gets separated from each other and he goes to war all because of the girl's misjudgment. And then nothing happens much, except he misses her, and she misses him, and the little girl growing up feels guilty all her life. - Maybe that is the point though: through the little girl's eyes it cannot be other than that the couple would have lived in utter harmony had she not given false evidence. From that perspective it would also make sense to split perspectives at the beginning, as she is telling the story from a point in time when she knows exactly what went wrong.
--- Come to think about it, with this technique the movie is probably exceptional at showing only one person's understanding of the events. And maybe she gets it wrong again when she turns right and wrong around 180 degrees and thinks it's all her fault! Maybe the good-or-bad-parts in this movie are actually a good depiction of that feeling of guilt.
--- I'll watch it again with you!
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