Capo
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Post by Capo on Dec 28, 2006 13:22:09 GMT
21 Grams Alejandro González Iñárritu 2003 USA A heart transplant patient searches for his donor's widow, who is haunted by the release of the man who killed her husband and daughters. Narratively complex and emotionally intense; the story is something which might be found in a soap opera, but it is presented with such creative and intimate immediacy (a hand-held camera and short little snippets, or fragments, of scenes which are jumbled up and brought in and out of context throughout) that it packs a powerful and convincing punch. It emphasises the coincidences which connect people, and how relationships end and begin, rather than the actual relationships themselves. To do this, it takes otherwise meaningless moments from scenes and isolates them, to shed new light on their 'worth' as emotional pivots or markers within the film's own narrative; the most telling of these is when Iñárritu, long after telling us of a family being killed in a car crash, shows somebody mowing their lawn, talking to a family, which might be - and is, we assume - any other family, and then, after they walk off screen, the camera lingers, we see a jeep race past, and then a screech is heard moments after.
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