RICKRUCKER.COM
2/9/05
Open Masterpiece? Open Water
|
Dancer in the Dark Bleakness Rating: 8.8 |
I'm fond of saying there's no film made yet bleak enough for me. Not that I consider bleakness in itself the best gauge for a film's quality. But bleakness is a kind of genre, due to people's inherently soft-headed nature, that's underexplored. While the Europeans are renowned for this, most European movies I see are about fucking.
These movies do not interest me. Either you're celibate, in which case the movie is like some horribly nonexistent cock-harpy teasing you, ridiculing your impotence. Or you're involved with someone, in which case the sex you're having is probably not up to the European art-house standard, or if so, bless you, at least cruelly reminds you and your soulmate of your uncontrollable desire to fuck other people. Give me a three minute porn clip and I'll temporarily remove the source of the pain, no thanks to the European cinema. And no, infedelity is not at all profound. I'm too poor for Netflix right now, but Email me if you know of any really bleak foreign films and I will fellate you. I'm probably just underexposed.
|
Stalingrad Bleakness Rating: 8.4 |
Anyway some months ago I was excited to hear about Open Water, an American movie about yuppies floating in the water waiting for sharks to eat them to death. Like most American movies, it had a high concept, and boy is it something. Wailing and gnashing of teeth are implied, sharks will circle, the yuppies will blubber and cry, and finally, as doom must for all of us one day, the sharks will attack, tearing the once plushly living couple to pieces. Hopefully slowly, so we the audience can savor all that bleakness and learn to accept, or taunt, I'm not sure, death itself from the comfort of our armchairs eating delicious popcorn.
I finally rented the film. What I found was a movie that wanted to be bleak. A film that had all the right circumstances--I mean, what better circumstances are there? Being shot in the groin and taking two hours to die? Crawling out of a heap of bodies to be tortured by the VC, castrated, bound and decapitated? The sharks thing is high up there, anyway. And it's a husband and wife, too, no mere random strangers. How could it fail?
|
Safe Bleakness Rating: 8.8 |
Frankly the whole thing seems like a fairly boring allegory of marriage. You go on "vacation," meaning "get married." At first you enjoy it, and do fun things. But then right away your wife doesn't want to sleep with you, like in the movie. You travel out on a boat with a bunch of other couples and "dive in," but when you emerge, there's no one there, just extremely distant boats and your spouse. You can't be that far out, and the boats look reasonably close, but you argue, and can't decide which direction to swim, so you just float. Out of loneliness you try to make conversation with this one person you're stuck with alone forever, you play maybe stupid trivia games. You keep talking and trying to make sure the other person's happy, and you start to get irritated. Then fucking electric eels sting you, which is an actualization maybe of children, annoying you.
|
2001: A Space Odyssey Bleakness Rating: 9.7 |
Then the couple in the movie goes to sleep for some reason. But we see a lot of footage of the ocean. Hypothetically a good move, showing all the immensity and meaningless, right? And when they wake up, they're ready to start fighting and blaming each other. Alone in the sea, they know there are sharks all around them, and they have one of the most ordinary couple fights I've ever seen. Surrounded by the vast nothingness all they can do is squabble futilely. Spoilers ahead?
Then the guy gets cancer (bitten by shark) and dies, and the woman dies soon after, and no one comes to save them. It's pretty much my parent's lifescript without the TV.
|
The Seventh Seal Bleakness Rating: 9.0 |
There's a bit of wailing and some gnashing. The DV shots sometimes work. The final shot of the film is fairly haunting and afterwards, the credits are subdued and even darkly humorous. But there's something sterile about the movie, even here. It's certainly not scary, if that's what they were going for. It's something about the characters. They're dull yuppies, but shouldn't I like it even more because of this? I mean, not like I enjoy seeing Nazis die, but insofar as witnessing their shallow cosmology and weak, contingent egos shattered by the proximity of doom. Right?
|
Open Water Bleakness Rating: 8.2 |
Maybe this is where the film fails. The characters are never really sympathetic. They do cry a bit and say "I love you," but this ain't Chekhov. They're blank even when contemplating death. Circumstances are not bleak in themselves. We have to know that the characters are aware of the bleakness. We have to feel their acceptance of death. They wailing should not be merely terrified, but express the horror and hollowness of life itself. And we have to dwell there, for minute after minute, as this miserable self-awareness is explored. In this, Open Water fails.
Although I'd like to see it again. It sort of lands with a dull thump upon one's consciousness, it is remotely possible the thing has more merit than I grant it yet.
Trivia: Rick spent over twenty minutes adjusting the bleakness ratings of the photos to ensure accuracy!
Go Home