Stories We Tell

Beguilingly intermingling the dubious and the customary, synthesizing various direct and interpretive recollections while modestly integrating her own position's anti-overarching take, Sarah Polley subtly (and accidentally?) mythologizes an incident from her family's past, to quaintly and indirectly interrogate memory, narrative construction, the facts, and urban legends, in a familial paragenealogical account of the origins of decentralized identity.

It's so 21st century National Film Board of Canada.*

Her investigation leads a principal participant to whimsically actualize that whose literary character was encouraged by his deceased spouse decades previously, this actualization 'stomping' through a gentle creek of sorts from which the additional commentaries reflexively break off and return (the format reminding me of Jacob Richmond's Ride the Cyclone).

(There are various loosely interoperational domains which possess their own consequent features whose rhetorical/technological/meteorological transmissions can coalesce to fabricate distinguished conceptions of value, which, when re/acting with the complementary/contradictory features of their fellow inter/national/regional/local/individual agents, and the constant imposition of random occurrences whose unforeseen interjections conduct concrete theoretical abstractions, before and after the fact, team-up to market sundry identities, who are nonetheless reliant upon historical events, and their consequent/subsequent interactions, themselves).

There's a sly intertextual reversal built into the film's flow as well.

Impressive.

*Kermode hasn't seen enough 21st century National Film Board of Canada films to be able to objectively make this claim, but couldn't resist due to the ways in which Stories We Tell reminded him of the many NFBC films he enjoyed watching during his youth. He also lives within the 21st century.

Take this Waltz

Disorientingly positioned between two socio-cultural persuasions (traditional vs. open marriage), one, familiar, cozy, predictable and solid, option 2, unknown, spicy, spontaneous and in inspirational flux, Take this Waltz's Margot (Michelle Williams) struggles to choose a specific gravitational counterpart, their contradictory forces amorously messin' with her mind.

Associated risks and issues of comfort are respectfully juxtaposed with daring intoxicating improvisational interest. 

As if a beautiful funny intelligent woman rediscovers that sensuous spark that unrecognizably redefined her as she let herself go in the arms of another, and it becomes increasingly difficult to dialectically distinguish her two suitors.

Until earthly realities draw attention to the responsibilities of the symbolic and the imaginary must be qualified by a degree of practicality. 

An escape, a happy place, something blissful, is required, where, perhaps, when emotionally tied to demanding conflicting relational engagements, one can reassert a transcendent sense of self while existentially weighing their details against their general affects, one which functions as a secret personalized counterpoint to that generated by the partner's enigmatic propulsive particle, from which balance can be dependently realized.   

Having interiorized and subjectively promulgated the gaze of her subjects of desire.

And negotiated a flexible impervious pact.