After viewing the trailer, I was hopeful that Broken Flowers might prove to be a subtly humorous and sweet film such as Lost in Translation, which I very much liked. But by the end I, and my family, couldn't believe we had been made to sit through two hours of excruciatingly slow pacing for no seeming reason.
I am not a film buff, but am a theater person. Though I don't know all of Jarmusch's previous films, tactics, or techniques, I do understand some basic principles of storytelling, and I feel that this did not meet them satisfactorily. It is a beautiful and satisfying thing for the writer to leave something to the audiences' imagination, making them engage their imaginations to complete the story rather than remain passive viewers who are spoon fed answers and entertainment.But this can be taken too far, and I felt that the film left too much to the audience, without providing enough meat to sink our imaginations into.
The one really touching moment came,I thought, when at the end of his list of former girlfriends, he visits a graveyard and the gravestone of a former flame. A close shot catches Murray with tears welling in his eyes. This would have been a terrific moment...if we hadn't been made to wait so long that we didn't even care.
I agree with other comments that I saw little to no trace of the Don Juan that could have attracted so many women (including the four women in the film whom he supposedly bedded the same year). Even if he had had an incredible vigor in the past, why would he have a gorgeous girlfriend apparently 20 years his junior at present? And what does he want? I was never able to discover that. Without any seeming motivation and without the development of relationships or any type of build that culminated in anything significant, I felt cheated by the end. Any point that could be made in the film feels like it could have been made in the first 30 minutes. After that it was just more of the same. Whereas Lost in Translation made a statement about the loneliness of two people in a foreign country by its slow pace, it also interwove the pacing with a touching and unconventional relationship that gave the audience something to engage in and watch develop. Nothing seemed to develop here. Which raises the question, Why should we care?
I am not a film buff, but am a theater person. Though I don't know all of Jarmusch's previous films, tactics, or techniques, I do understand some basic principles of storytelling, and I feel that this did not meet them satisfactorily. It is a beautiful and satisfying thing for the writer to leave something to the audiences' imagination, making them engage their imaginations to complete the story rather than remain passive viewers who are spoon fed answers and entertainment.But this can be taken too far, and I felt that the film left too much to the audience, without providing enough meat to sink our imaginations into.
The one really touching moment came,I thought, when at the end of his list of former girlfriends, he visits a graveyard and the gravestone of a former flame. A close shot catches Murray with tears welling in his eyes. This would have been a terrific moment...if we hadn't been made to wait so long that we didn't even care.
I agree with other comments that I saw little to no trace of the Don Juan that could have attracted so many women (including the four women in the film whom he supposedly bedded the same year). Even if he had had an incredible vigor in the past, why would he have a gorgeous girlfriend apparently 20 years his junior at present? And what does he want? I was never able to discover that. Without any seeming motivation and without the development of relationships or any type of build that culminated in anything significant, I felt cheated by the end. Any point that could be made in the film feels like it could have been made in the first 30 minutes. After that it was just more of the same. Whereas Lost in Translation made a statement about the loneliness of two people in a foreign country by its slow pace, it also interwove the pacing with a touching and unconventional relationship that gave the audience something to engage in and watch develop. Nothing seemed to develop here. Which raises the question, Why should we care?