It is difficult to review such politically charged movies. Both Notre Musique and The Conformist are quite good.
The end. How does someone like me review art? I decide not to read as many books as I end up reading. Even if I could come up with a witty rejoinder to “Death is the impossibility of possibility, or the possibility of impossibility”, I would think it infinitely silly since life is still life and death is still death and what are you going to do about it? Yet, I so enjoy these little films. Do they appeal to the snob in me? Do they stroke the ego of the pretentious vacuous philosopher? Are they really so profound that even though I miss most of the references, the references that I did get make a mark?
What struck me is that it would be a full time job to get this movie, even just on the face level. For starters, the first segment was a series of cuts from other films and newsreels. I hadn’t recognised a single one of them though a film student probably would have. The second segment is the most difficult one consisting of bits and pieces of wise words and images. French was the only language thought worthy of subtitling (this is probably not director’s fault, but who knows). Lucky for me, I understand Bosnian, but Spanish, Russian and choice Middle Eastern languages were lost on me. Bridge in Mostar and Library in Sarajevo were known symbols to me, but I wonder if these were lost on the rest of the audience. I recognised the library from a before-and-after picture in a magazine and from a friend telling me many years ago how the Sarajevo library has been bombed and how upset she was about it. These two events in my life were accidental, yet without them, my interpretation of the Library scenes would have been quite different.
In conclusion, I don’t know much about art but I know what I like. Pretentious, beautiful films, of intellectual content make me think, or at least think that I think, and in my little privileged middle class world that feels nice.
