Sunday 2nd of January 2022: My first immersion. All that insecurity underneath machismo or toxic masculinity, to put it in today’s narrative. All that pain fuelling sibling rivalry. All that vulnerability of just being. A cast driven by Phil with Daniel Day-Lewis-style intensity. Beautifully filmed, crafted with boundless empathy by Jane Campion. Whenever you feel like escaping the bolly-hollywood zeitgeist or global saturation in gloom for that matter. Rating: 4.5/5
A few days later: Watched over again, now rating tops 5/5. This is stunning cinema, not just another movie. The multilayeredness can put the viewer off. But please don’t give up. This is a depiction of our own reality with endless nuances that is so hard to capture. Yet so telling. Just like with a text that seems like an avalanche of perspectives, too dense, all mixed and thrown at you, such a movie is an invitation to connect, to aspire to tame our prejudices.
Once the gist sinks in, you realise that it has been a soulful as much as a mindful trip that is also to be repeated again and again, here and in other contexts, to keep exploring and discovering. Here emotions merely flow, they are not imposed upon you. Riveting musical score too. The sort of experience that in this era few stellar film directors like Jane Campion can deliver in similar vein with Michael Haneke, Pedro Almodóvar, Asghar Farhadi, Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Wong Kar-wai….