NYFF. Bullet in the Head.

"It may seem a bit hackneyed to start a review with a question, but this film undoubtedly requires it: can there be movies that are only good after they are seen and not while watching them?" Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook: "Bullet in the Head is nothing but a frustrated viewing, an experiment for the spectator, but one without a point. But afterwards there is an appeal to it, I admit, its sneakiness - irritating in execution - becomes conceptual and more stunt-like in retrospect, the viewing all done with and forgotten in its dullness, and mostly just the curious idea surviving."

"There's virtually no dialogue (two words are spoken towards the end) and almost all the sound we hear is ambient: traffic noise, birdsong, background chatter," explains Evan Kindley at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "The film is shot like surveillance footage, recording the movements of an unnamed man around the Spanish city of San Sebastian."

Updated.

"[Director Jaime] Rosales has described his film as being shot 'like a wildlife documentary,'" notes IFC's Alison Willmore, "except that wildlife documentaries cut to the exciting bits, while Bullet in the Head sets out deliberately to bore you with the mundane details of the life of what at first seems to be a normal guy. You wouldn't know it from the film, but the events are based on an actual incident in which three ETA members shot two policemen in an unplanned encounter."

"We see characters talking behind windows, across the street, at the other end of a restaurant, and at pay phones," adds Ed Champion. Strangely enough, nobody in this movie seems to own a set of blinds or drapes. Which strikes me as damn curious and damn convenient... [T]here was an audible hiss from the critics when the credits rolled. And while I'm not a guy who likes to fall into critical consensus, I will admit that the hissers had a good point."

"Are they talking about money? Love? Murder?" wonders Jürgen Fauth. "It's bound to sorely test the patience of anyone who isn't willing to supply their own answers."

"To be sure, Rosales forces us to take a closer look at the everyday and to reconsider the nature and provenance of filmed images," writes Leo Goldsmith in Reverse Shot. "His means of provoking such thought, however, brings nothing new to the table - indeed, his is a painfully old-fashioned trick, a game played many times before, by far more thoughtful filmmakers with greater commands of and ideas about their medium."

"[I]t's hard to see Bullet in the Head as anything more than a choose-your-own-adventure exercise which - by so completely, and ineffectively, placing the storytelling onus on viewers (fill in the blanks however you like, any explanation applies!) - makes one urgently crave what its title promises," writes Nick Schager.

"This shit ain't deep, essentially the equivalent of a news story where the facts are still forthcoming, and if you think Rosales is seriously out to toy with the movie-going audience's need to know the truth, I'm guessing you probably have a taste for Russian Roulette," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

James Van Maanen talks with Rosales about the different ways Bullet has been received in different countries and about the director's very ambitious plans for his next project.

For Vadim Rizov, writing at the House Next Door, this was "the first movie I've walked out on in five years."

Updates: The film "effectively negates the idea of fostering dialogue on domestic terrorism, creating instead a murky and underformed correlation between silent witness and moral complicity," writes Acquarello.

Online listening tip. Evan Davis talks with Rosales at the filmlinc blog.

Posted by dwhudson at October 20, 2008 2:34 AM