My cultural week

This week, I have mainly been watching films on DVD: Three Colours: White, and Requiem for a Dream.

I think White is the slightest of the Kieslowski's trilogy, but there's enough in there to satisfy and entertain: luminescent cinematography, lovely depictions of mood and place, and the concreteness of the everyday, re-illumined in new ways by the context and the action. The lead actor was excellent, and Julie Delpy -- a pale porcelain muse -- was beautiful and engaging in an unsympathetic role. It's more of a 'caper' than the other two films, and there was something a bit unsatisfying for me in the way that I never really got a sense of where the intensity of their love came from in the back story. It's still a film that I'll watch repeatedly, though, because of the world of light and image that it conveys: there's lots of cool reflections, snow, and steaming breath.

Requiem is a much more harrowing, downbeat, piece: a relentless nose-rubbing in the pleasures, pains, and banality of addiction, be it TV, drugs, affection or slimming. Excellent ensemble acting by all four leads (Leto, Bursteyn, Wayans and Connelly), and a great sense of conviction and anger. The conviction only wavered for me when the Ellen Bursteyn character is undergoing her hallucination-rich breakdown -- the TV studio material didn't feel as authentic as what surrounded it. Aranofsky has a really original eye, and I particularly like the way he had those repeated flash-cut (terminology?) sequences of addiction to stress its habitual, comforting nature -- the TV onswitch, the diet pills popped, the drugs hit.

Tomorrow I'm off to see Hotel Rwanda in Oxford, and on Saturday I'm going to see a Beethoven/Tippett double bill at the Sheldonian. I'm a bit of a culture tart at the moment.