santanche Reviews

Marie's Story (2014)

A movie to the heart above all

[9/10 · 27 March 2016]

This movie portrays a fantastic and moving experience with great beauty and sensibility. When I saw the trailer I figured out the greatness of this movie, but it went further, exceeding expectations. It not only a great story, but it is full of surprises from the beginning to the end.

A life reflection. To which confines can a human heart go looking for the other. Which barriers can a human mind surpass in the most lost place. It is touching to follow Marie and Marguerite groping for dark paths to meet and understand each other. The fury, the despair, the discouragement, the resumption, resumption, resumption. This is a movie for the heart above all.

Before Midnight (2013)

Before Midnight – Once you're Happy

[10/10 · 23 December 2014]

In the end of a class the little Joana asks to her teacher: "I'd like to know: once you're happy what happens? What comes next?" Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart, 1998

Whenever I see those "easy" happy endings I ask myself what comes next. And the Joana's question can be considered the summary of this movie: what happens after a happy ending. In some sense, several romantic movies create a mythology of quick and highly intense love, able to fulfill every space and solve any difference, simplifying the real long term challenges that will appear in the long road.

When the director faced the challenge of telling what comes next in Before Midnight, he decided to follow the same and successful approach of the previous chapter: make the movie nine years after the last one, both in the movie and in the real world. This technique enables not only to have truly older characters, but also to exploit their maturity, life experience and world view.

This movie shows us the real beauty of love, challenging the long road of the life; the friction and wear in the relations; the balance between our expectations and egoism against our generosity and impulse to share the experience of life. There is no final answer, no absolute right position and this leads to the question of acceptance or resignation, as well placed by Tim Lott.

How love fights in the shades of human poverty is the beauty of this movie. This is much greater than bursts of intense passion in paradise moments. This perception deeply touches me and makes me to believe that there is something in love that transcends the human condition.

Boyhood (I) (2014)

Boyhood - A family in real time

[9/10 · 30 November 2014]

Until now, all movies I have seen use different actors to show people growing along their lives. But I recognize persons by their stare. Even though you could find a second actor nearly similar to the first one, they will never have the same stare. And this is a fabulous movie if you consider only this technique of following people "really" growing. Specially Mason, whose stare and disquiet are outstanding, while he grows in front of our eyes from his childhood to his youth.

A movie showing the beauty, the fight, the joy and the drama of a family that is recomposed in multiple facets. The director invests in the sensibility of the daily lives instead of big events. A wonderful project, it is definitively worth seeing.