She doesn’t defend an exclusive religious or political stance like her peers and even mocks them or stands by them depending on the situation. Madeleine in Malmkrog, like the Lady in War and Christianity, functions mostly as a moderator, a catalyst that keeps the conversations moving. The players are not so much characters, but the embodiments of thesis and antithesis, battling each other until something new arises as a consequence of their ideas. This doesn’t necessarily solve any conflict related to a protagonic figure. Contrary to the narrative syntaxis that tries to further a conflict to the point of resolution in a regular dramatic conversation, I would say the purpose of these forms of dialogue is to further an argument instead. Socratic dialogue has been staged on film many times before, either by revered French filmmakers like Louis Malle ( My Dinner with Andre, ) or Éric Rohmer (the Pascal debate in My Night at Maud’s ), radical historicists like Lav Diaz (see how he introduces the Filipino Raskolnikov in Norte, the End of History ) or even more mainstream directors like Steve McQueen (that famous exchange between Michael Fassbender and Liam Cunningham in Hunger ). The Prince is almost an extremist, a firm believer in the purity of the Gospel. Though each speaker seems to have a different standpoint, it’s clear from the start that the Prince’s point of view is the one that truly antagonizes the rest. They have three conversations one about war, one about European colonialism, and one about the Antichrist. Most of what we hear is Bernard Marchadier’s French adaptation of Solovyov’s War and Christianity, a Socratic dialogue between five Russian aristocrats: the General, the Politician, the Lady, the Prince and Mr. Dowd’s behalf, Malmkrog does take something out of the very basics of Philosophy and structures its filmmaking around it: dialectic discourse. And if we’re not listening to something that relies on speech almost exclusively, of course it’s going to get boring pretty soon. The problem comes when we decide to report on something without even attempting to internalize what it says. I heard very similar things from some of my friends after the screenings (“I’ve gone to uni, I don’t need a lecture when I go to the movies”), but dismissing such a big part of a film’s structure in a casual conversation is no matter.
Club as a film criticism outlet (coming from abroad, I’m not familiar enough to comment on the matter), but more with how “Philosophy 101” poorly conveys more than three hours’ worth of dialogue in an almost exclusively spoken film. Just to be clear: my annoyance had nothing to do with Mr. Dowd’s quick dismissal of Malmkrog’s discourse as “Philosophy 101”. One of those reviews annoyed me just enough that I decided to go back to my notes and finally finish my draft, even if I had to struggle with the limits of my own remembrance: A.A. Reviews from the New York Film Festival suddenly showed up in my Twitter feed and, with them, the realization that summer had just ended and I was still locked in my apartment (for the most part).
Not long after these first tries, however, I started to deal with the consequences of a lengthy quarantine in different aspects of my life and began to forget what I had seen. Then I thought it would be better to focus on mise-en-scène and the thoughtful support of dialogue that intertwines the characters through its fluid panning shots. At first, I wanted to compare some of Vladimir Solovyov’s original passages from War and Christianity with its counterparts in Puiu’s film to try to reveal a modern reading of an old moral debate.
I started to work on this piece soon after. My confinement began a week after the screening. As of now, Malmkrog is also the last film I’ve seen at a movie theater (who knows how long that record will hold), as COVID-19 cases increased considerably around those days. A few days after missing Cristi Puiu’s latest feature at Berlinale 2020 (and hearing some of the ambivalent buzz it made over there), I was able to watch it back home at FICUNAM, a contemporary film festival that, in the course of ten years, has built a strong cinephile community in Mexico City.
I guess it makes sense that one of the films that stuck the most with me last year is about a group of people confined to a single house for an endless amount of time. Philosophy 101 in Cristi Puiu’s Malmkrog (2020)
0 kommentar(er)
