Sitges Dispatch. 2.

The Competition begins. Kilometer zero - MirrorMask, the long-awaited collaboration of Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman with the Jim Henson Company (which is receiving a tribute in Sitges on the occasion of its 50th anniversary). Following a rather slight narrative line (on the eve of her mother's surgery, young Helena finds herself in a dreamy but conflicted world where she must find the so-called MirrorMask to restore order), this is little more than a series of visual events which may irritate anyone looking for more than static panels of goth delirium. The beginning is intriguing and even moving, especially that scene on the terrace in which Helena (the great Stephanie Leonidas) talks with her father about the bad news of her mother's health. But once she's inside the imaginary world inside her brain, everything becomes slow, boring and reiterative and sometimes difficult to get through - as in Vidocq, the overuse of saturated colors and heightened textures can become a torture. Not to say that the actors feel as lost as the latest Jedis in those static panels of CGI. Bill the Bubble Guy, where are you?

Blame it on the cuts (the original version lasts four hours, while the one we saw runs for "only" two and a half), but it was easy to get lost amidst the multiple narrative intricacies of Tsui Hark's Seven Swords, a variation on Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. The edits are so wild and so free that some flashbacks at the end make reference to scenes we hadn't seen before - that was a laugh. This wasn't the only point that made it difficult to relate to this kung-fu epic in the line of Hark's martial arts classics such as Swordsman and Once Upon a Time in China, only with an extra dash of flesh and blood. Where he has usually shown a deft hand for action, his style here is confusing and contrived, as if he had lost the golden touch magnificently on display in films such as Time and Tide. Take the first action scene - the abuse of slight slow motion and fades to white don't suggest a master of musical action but of a devoted follower of late-era Ridley Scott. So this was the second dissapointment for an Official Section which also presented yesterday the French-Belgian thriller Trouble, a movie on twins with Benoît Magimel as main character(s).

Posted by dwhudson at October 11, 2005 3:18 PM