THE PAST, opening soon at The Lido Cinema - Hamilton. This morning I awoke and walked into the city for an 8:45am preview screening of the new film by the Director of the critically acclaimed A SEPARATION, a film which won many prestigious awards including the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. After a perfectly prepared latte, courtesy of the house, I sat down with the doyen of local film criticism Sam Edwards to watch what turned out to be two hours of transcendent cinema, the kind of cinema that makes you forget yourself for a short while and transports you to another world, this world in particular being the outer suburbs of Paris to which Ahmad returns to finalise his divorce from his estranged wife Maree. As he walks through the door of his former home, Ahmad is confronted with stark immediacy by a simmering cauldron of unspoken emotion, emotion which through the course of the this stunningly composed film, is carefully disseminated and laid bare by a camera that moves unobtrusively and effortlessly from character to character, examining with profundity the pain of the human heart, the claustrophobic prison of self, half-truth, fear and delusion until all superfluous layers have been cleared away, pausing then and only then to observe an unseen tear, a tear which at the end of our journey describes in a spare moment of translucent meaning the pain that is an inescapable fact of loving. Storytelling of this calibre is rare indeed and seldom is the reality of human nature so profoundly expressed. The cinephile will be well pleased with this glorious work of filmic art. The Past is a 2013 French drama film written and directed by the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi. It was nominated for the Palme dOr at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury which honours works of artistic quality which use the power of film to reveal the mysterious depths of human beings through what concerns them, their hurts and failings as well as their hopes.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 08:23:29 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015