Gurov & Anna

Another bleak film, Rafaël Ouellet's Gurov & Anna, not as bleak as Chorus, which seems to have set out to create the most depressing film ever, nevertheless, quite bleak, desolate.

Post-Oscar season.

No sign of a Grand Budapest Hotel this March.

Gurov & Anna examines the line where literature intersects with reality, where imaginary creations try to fit within a quotidian schematic, this particular schematic slowly becoming increasingly more desperate as the realistic variables which haven't been taken into account significantly diverge from their literary counterpoints.

I couldn't generate sympathy for Ben (Andreas Apergis) as he sacrifices his near perfect life for an impromptu affair, an impromptu affair which maniacally consumes him, causing him to lose all sense of decorum.

You see that he's a jerk to begin with, critical when he should be supportive, neglectful of the luxuries life has granted him, more concerned with control than cooperation, a success, but still quite empty inside.

He thinks an affair will somehow revitalize his lost youth, or romantically overcome his overwhelming sense of aged futility, as it does occasionally in books, without taking into consideration the price such sensualists often pay.

He doesn't even try to get to know young Mercedes (Sophie Desmarais), just purely objectifies her, slowly becoming more and more brutal as an individual accustomed to the dictates of reason succumbs to hedonistic madness.

He's made all the right moves throughout his life and doesn't have the historicopsychological makeup to formalize being a complete and utter screw-up.

If that's possible.

When it becomes obvious that he can't control the affair in the same way he controls everything else in his life, not realizing that his ecstasy is the product of the affair's lack of limitations, which can't be controlled without being effaced, entropy sets in, with its accompanying focus on destruction.

Contentment.

There's something to be said for contentment.

Not in the sense that you let it prevent you from changing or let it cause you to stop innovating within the boundaries established by your marriage, in the sense that, from time to time, like Dale Cooper's daily present, without letting it neuter you, you appreciate the wonderful situation you find yourself within, and thereby seek to find new ways to enhance its diversity, through the art of conversation and the love of difference, through youthfully embracing the maturity of the role.

I know it doesn't work out that way a lot of the time.

It does in Kierkegaard's Aesthetic Validity of Marriage however; so easy to write, so difficult to realize.

Mercedes is as full of life and beauty as Ben is full of reserve and banality.

Her presence saves the film.

A complicated look at relationships and their shortcomings, the wonders of the imagination, and realism's abyss.