I'm Not There in the UK.

The Observer's Philip French calls I'm Not There "a challenging film, but a rewarding one. It demands patience from the viewer and invites exegesis of a sort that was once thought obligatory for the understanding of Eliot, Pound and their contemporaries. Back in 1963, someone wrote dauntingly of Thomas Pynchon's first novel, V, that you shouldn't open the book unless you were prepared to read it twice. There's something like that about I'm Not There, but you've always got the music."

"True to Rimbaud, [Todd] Haynes the director is never remotely 'himself' in the film," writes Jonathan Romney. "Just as the film resembles an oddly selective Dylan compilation set on shuffle, tentatively gesturing at linear biography while scrambling and distorting it, Haynes's own style zips around crazily: one moment he's pastiching DA Pennebaker's Dylan documentary Don't Look Back, with additional splashes of Fellini, Godard and Richard Lester (there's a lovely Beatles-as-Chipmunks gag here); the next he's illustrating 'Ballad of a Thin Man' in disconcertingly literal MTV style. As for Robbie and Claire's divorce, it's set in a domestic-realism mode that may or may not be deliberately evoking the banality of Kramer vs Kramer."

Also in the Independent, Kaleem Aftab interviews Haynes; so does Howard Feinstein, but for the Guardian.

And so does David Gritten in the Telegraph, where Sukhdev Sandhu writes that "this is as much a film about Haynes's obsessions as it is an obsessive film about Dylan: his very first picture was Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud (1985), about the poet whose line 'Je suis un autre' prefigures the title and conceit of this one.... Dylan may not always be visible in I'm Not There, but Haynes's distinctive vision clearly is."

"It's a crazy film which shouldn't work, but for most of the time does," writes Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard, where it's Larushka Ivan-Zadeh who interviews Haynes.

Posted by dwhudson at December 24, 2007 4:41 AM