Film Review: Inception (Director: Christopher Nolan)

What is real and what is not? How do we perceive reality and what is reality anyway? Can we ever really know it and if so, how? If one wants to summarizes what drives Christopher Nolans film, these questions may provide a starting point. Nolan is a master of playing with levels of reality, of unsettling certainties, shattering beliefs, dissolving what we call facts. Deconstruting time and memory in Memento, disassociating fact from perception in The Prestige, even reinventing the Batman franchise as a study in roleplay, perception and interpreting reality, recreating it in the process: Nolan, like no other director of his generation, uses film, the ultimate medium of illusion and make-belief to question as well as challenge our relationship with reality.

Inception is just a logical next step in this adventure. It is the story of a man whose job it is to invade other people's dreams, even create them, in order to extract their secrets or, hardest of all, to plant ideas in their subconscious. A story that is ideal to test the limits of reality and to wonder where it starts and ends. The dream, that mighty illusionist, that pretender of reality and truth - is there a better subject for somebody like Nolan.

It is not the first time, sleep plays a role in Nolan's cosmos. In Insomnia ist was sleeplessness that alters the protagonist's experience of the world and blurs reality so much that in the end it is hardly recognisable as such. This time, we follow the protagonist and his crew into one dream level after the other in order to plant the idea that may free him from his own demons. The way Nolan stages this is much more straightforward and less surprising than in previous films. The viewer always knows where he is, or thinks he does. Even the conclusion is not too surprising but the certainty is treacherous as so often in Nolan's films. Because the film does not end when the credits are rolling, it continues in the viewer's head where suddenly what seemed straightforward and clear dissolves into vagueness. How many layers of dream and reality are there? Is there a level of 'reality' and if so which is it? And who is dreaming anyway?

So what seemed simpler and more logical than Memento and The Prestige turns out to provide even less certainty than those who at least offer a satisfying conclusion in the very end. Nolan is a master in creating false certainties and then removing the ground from under the viewer's feet.

The visual cosmos of the film plays its part. The world of the different reality levels looks like ours but with a twist. Gravity can disappear, a city unfold on itself, ordinary houses appear in strange surroundings. The combination of what is real, what is remembered, what exists and what is purely imagined, what does not and cannot exist, this peculiar logic of the dream - Nolan finds the perfect images for this, for this unstable, fantastic and frightening state dreams can be.

So if this review is a little less structured, more meandering and possible less logical than others, the reason may not lie in the incompetence of the reviewer alone but maybe also in the shaky ground and ever changing environment the film creates. And isn't this, this play with illusions and imagination, this creation of worlds entirely their own, what cinema was created for?

Film review: Micmacs (Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

Jean-Pierre Jeunet is a masterful creator of universes, or rather parallel universes. The world of his film is recognizable but it i'nt just the same we live our everyday lives in. Jeunet takes our world and adds another dimension. Or takes one away as you like. Jeunet's world is a version of ours, ascending into fairy-tale (Amélie), descending into nightmare (Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children) or transcending into something more general and timeless (A Very Long Engagement).

Micmacs is no different. And at the same time it is: Never before has Jeunet's universe been so close to our modern world, never before his visual languge so close to realism. And not even in A Very Long Engagement has Jeunet commented so directly on the world we live in.

The story is simple: A man whose father was killed by a land mine gets shot in the head by a stray bullet and is joined by a group of rather eccentric people most of which have a special talent to take revenge on the bosses of the companies who produced the land mine and the bullet.

Unlike his earlier films, Micmacs takes a long time to find both its rhythma and its distinctive look. This has two basic reasons: Jeunet seems to feel he has a lot to explain before he gets into the middle of things. The second is new French comedy superstar Danny Boon. He has a hard time adapting to the special Jeunet style of acting and stumbles through miuch of the film's first half like a clown lost in the wrong circus.

But it would not be a Jeunet film if it dis not find its rhythm before long. And much of this is to do with what is probably the key Jeunet quality: imagination. The film is so rich with fantastic, surprising, funny, bizarre ideas that boredom has no chance. Another strength: Jeunet creates and depicts his characters with so much love that the viewer has no chance but to be moved.

And so the film gathers speed evolving into a wild, strange, funny and often grotesque hunt in which the roles of the hunters and the hunted change sometimes but which grips the viewer with its high energy, great ideas and fascinating characters. The world of Micmacs may look a lot like ours but it follows its own rules, its own values, its own logic.

In the end, this is vintage Jeunet: a gripping story, absurd, visually unique, warm-hearted and hilariously funny. Micmacs may not be on the same level as Jeunet's best films which fascinate from the first second to the last but it is still a fascinating and thoroughly unique piece of cinema - and highly entertaining, too.