The idea could have been to ask for forgiveness in public from a daughter (and perhaps an ex-wife) who had been very betrayed in the past, playing the role of an absent and unreliable father, but the ways in which he stages this confession are so predictable and predictable to erase every emotion and every truth. In Flag Day (Flag Day, in remembrance of June 14, 1777, when the future American flag was adopted), Sean Penn plays the unlikely parent of Jennifer (Dylan, which Sean had from Robin Wright), a champion of subterfuge and leaps destined to end badly. Nothing particularly new but told with the most obvious clichés of the homage to the family genre, made up of slow motion, expanses of fields, backlighting and time leaps (from 1992 back to ’65), between drinking, lies and of course various remorse. And to think that this actor-director once knew how to direct films like Three Days for the Truth or The Promise.
Fortunately, Hytti n. 6 (Compartment n.6) by the Finnish Juho Kuosmanen, apparently banal story of a Finnish woman, Laura (Seidi Haarla), who by train from Moscow to Murmanks (to see unlikely petroglyphs) shares the compartment with the intrusive Ljoha (Jurij Borisov) . Everyone carries knots and fears inside (Laura fears that the companion who remained in Moscow wants to forget her, Ljoha wants to close with a mysterious past) and during the journey we will discover few or insignificant truths about the two, not even the ending will tell us anything, but we will finish captured by a camera who knows how to grasp the hesitations and impulses of real life. And for once you thank that cinema forgets iron scripts and gender rules and instead pursues the same freedom, the same vitality and the same contradictory randomness that are typical of real life, managing to capture it by force of style and not of ideology.
July 10, 2021 (change July 11, 2021 | 07:29)
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