First Viewing Reflections:
I want to say it's an exceptionally odd film, but in some ways it seems like one of a string of films about quirky and ostensibly broken people trying to find connection. It's not generally the kind of thing I like. I mean, I can't stand most of Wes Anderson's stuff, which I would place in this same milieu.
By the end of the film however, I grew to appreciate this reflection on fragmentation, isolation, and the desperate need to connect with someone without any of the skills or guidance needed to do so gracefully.
This isn't a film about plot, but about portraits.
A man floundering after a divorce, unable to communicate meaningfully with his children and ultimately reduced to a misguided self-immolation in his panic.
A woman who spends most of her time looking at photos of other people's lives, narrating the words she would want to hear if she was the one living in the snapshots.
A son who moves zombie like through the film, only showing any trace of personality when talking to his baby brother, and in the end with the much younger girl who lives next door.
A wide eyed child, being raised by everyone and no one.
Two girls, driven by vanity and curiosity as they explore their own sexuality. Ultimately willing to lose their virginity to a man they don't find attractive "because it won't matter" ... or because her best friend tells her to.
A man who can only communicate his desires, which he knows to be highly inappropriate, via extremely public signs taped to his window, but when confronted with actually committing to performing them (or being confronted with the reality of what he has written) cowers in fear.
The art curator who dismisses work out of hand, until she finally begins to recognize her own loneliness in the artists work.
A elderly man who finds love so very late in life, with a woman who is about to die.
The film meanders back and forth between these people and their interconnections. They are all tied together by tenuous threads, usually without being aware of it. Real contact between them is frequently anonymized. Cell phones display unlisted numbers, or the numbers of workplaces. Sexual exploration takes behind a screen, or with a couch cushion over the face.
Disfigurement is another repeated theme. The burned hand. The scrawled upon photograph. The work FUCK emblazoned across a car window. The photo of the AIDS patient and the verbal response "email wouldn't exist without AIDS... without fear of contamination."
In the end, the young are forced to find meaning for themselves. The young girl looks at the chaos of the world and orders her own private space with a hotel-like precision. The young boy walks home through a dangerous part of town and has sexually explicit chats online. The father begs his children to ask him questions, and is met with silence. When he himself asks them a question, he discovers talents he knew nothing about.
And above all, there is fear. Fear of discovery. Fear of loneliness. Fear of connection. Fear of being rejected. Fear of being wrong.
Is this a hopeful film? Perhaps. The two teen girls, on the brink of doing something they would most likely regret, escape and run down the street, laughing and smiling with relief and true happiness. The art dealer affirms not the multimedia piece about isolation, but a new piece about love and connection (the artists only work done WITH someone else). The same dealer confronts the person who she feels most understands her and finds a child who gazes on her with curiosity, and ultimately acceptance. The defaced photo of the bird is placed in a tree, as if placed in it's natural habitat (although it is not a bird, but a photo of a bird and so the illusion of finding a home is subverted). The youngest of the cast explores the curious impersonal sound at sunrise (and again, the child is wandering around his neighborhood in his sleep clothes, unattended) to find that it is the Morse Code of another human being... simply passing the time.
In the end, the characters are set free from isolation to varying degrees. But the question of illusion remains. Will any of these more human connections grow? Are they more or less ephemeral or real then the fractured and disconnected acts we've seen earlier?
Ultimately, are all we doing is passing the time?
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