Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993), based on Raymond Carver's short stories, employs many very famous actors, and the action lasts over three hours, during which we observe a wide variety of stories from the lives of 22 characters, who from time to time randomly intersect with each other. If at first you think that we are dealing with a satirical comedy, in which the author shows us very strange actions of the characters, then over time, tragic notes appear. It all starts with a squadron of helicopters circling over Los Angeles, spraying some kind of repellent to fight a Mediterranean fly. Whether from this toxic chemical, or just by themselves, some heroes begin to go crazy and commit strange acts. First, the waitress knocks down a boy in her car, carelessly running out onto the road, at first everything seems to be fine with the boy, he gets up and goes home himself, she seems to be also worried, at least she always remembers this incident and talks about him, but she never thinks of going to the police, especially since her alcoholic husband, who works as a limo driver, is constantly spinning under her feet. The most seemingly normal couple are the boy’s parents, who are naturally hard-pressed because the boy first falls into a coma and then dies. The doctor who treats him in the hospital is considered a very good specialist, but his head is clearly not occupied with what we see in his home in conversation with his artist wife. The husband of the sister of this artist is an avid fisherman who goes fishing for a weekend with friends, where they find the corpse of a young woman in the water, the only thing they have enough “mind” is to tie the corpse to the shore so that it does not take off, and photograph, do not stop fishing, she is still dead, police say only on Monday. His wife is much more concerned about it and even goes to church for the funeral of this young woman. Another couple is a helicopter husband who is kicked out by his wife and decided to take revenge on her in the wildest way when she left with a friend and son for the weekend. Another couple - he cleans the pools, she earns sex on the phone, not at all shy of the presence of children and saying all these texts on the phone in front of them, leading even his sloppy husband to bewilderment, maybe because of this, or maybe because of something else ripened in his obviously not quite normal head, he also commits a completely wild act, killing a stone young girl with whom he and his friend wanted to have fun while their wives were waiting for them nearby. And a bunch of all sorts of actions committed by other characters, from which we can draw quite definite conclusions about the absence of these people any moral principles and attitudes, they do not think about anything at all, they are guided by their momentary whims. We watch them and get sick at heart, how many people are there around us? And what can you expect from them that a normal person will not come to mind? The film is shot in a typical Altman manner, it is not the first time he uses this technique of editing unrelated stories, but some connection is traced, the world is small, the characters clash with each other. The actors, of course, play well, because it is not for nothing that he collected such an acting ensemble - here even Jack Lemmon appears in a small role, as well as Julianne Moore, Tom Waits, Francis McDormand, Andy McDowell, a very young Robert Downey Jr. and many others. The film is very interesting, I think it is worth watching, if you do not tune in to an easy spectacle, because comedy is indicated as one of the genres, but this is a very peculiar comedy, which does not pull you to laugh at all.
At first, it is difficult to concentrate, collect yourself and your attention in principle ... interest, as something ephemeral, constantly eludes ... there is a “cape” for each story where there is He and She ... the character of the characters is pounced leisurely ... and, the decisive strokes are possible only to the finale of the picture, and the details can surprise the Viewer ... there are many characters, but the authors do not linger for a long time on anyone’s story and you need to be ready for a constant change of the “pic”
I don’t know much about director Robert Altman. For example, the film Gosford Park (2001) I really liked and was clear in everything ... I watched and enjoyed every scene, the acting ... In general, the morality of “this fable” is not difficult to catch, but! I confess that I did not manage to fully understand, in all senses and subtleties, to understand... So the three-hour marathon was pretty exhausting to me.
I tried to call it an almanac, but the threads with which the novels are sewn are transparent and the seams do not stick out. So there will be a movie. In the process of viewing, the brain directly asks for intersections and twists. Who will meet with whom and how will life turn out?
I got pleasure from the fact that the team of authors does not try to whitewash, aggravate or zapiendendenie narration.
There won't be anything definitive. The whole film breaks through layers of deals with conscience into the light of absurdity and injustice. The quintessence of mood lies in the laughter of the artist and model. The emotional geyser was pumped up by women's secrets and her husband who came from work, and is released by a meaningful and understandable laugh without words.
The characters are divorced perfectly, given the fact that I watched the film in two sets, I did not get confused in them. I remember them all.
Now, without revision, I doubt only whether the husband of the artist was a surgeon who was recommended to the presenter or appeared.
This movie is as shocking as talking about blowjob in front of kids. It is remembered as accidentally seen photos in someone else's envelope.
Without context, we're all a little crazy and crazy. And we all may have an excuse to cut in half all the furniture in the house, but only those guys from the movie in which the flies were poisoned can afford it.
Now you need to look at 'Magnolia'.
After an unexpected creative revival in The Gambler (1992), in which Altman carved Hollywood to the nut, he seemed to find a second wind and on the eve of his 70th birthday made his most stellar and most youthful film. This time, he dared to take an even more radical step, deciding to draw a multi-figure canvas about the everyday life of the very inhabitants for whom the American dream became a reality. The project, hatched by the director for many years, was based on a series of stories by Raymond Carver. The resulting three-hour film does not have a clearly expressed, in the usual sense, plot and is a large-scale fresco with many characters, the close interaction of which forms a collective model of society on the eve of the earthquake of 1992, which plays here the allegorical role of punishment of God.
Short Cuts is a group portrait of America in the interior of Los Angeles sets. Getting to know him is as intriguing as group sex. In the sense that, on the one hand, it is tempting to be inside this diverse middle-class party, on the other, there is no desire to expose yourself to such masochistic pleasure – the good-natured mockery of the wise “royal jester”. Using the example of a dozen Los Angeles families, Swift American Cinema manages to show what mutations occurred by the end of the century in the main social unit of society. The most rationalized relationship between husbands and wives, moreover, built on lies and omissions, led to the fact that the multimillion-dollar city turned into one big commune, in which everyone is connected to each other by invisible threads.
Despite the unity of place (Los Angeles) and time (several summer days), the film is an epic canvas, the key philosophy and basic formula of which is kaleidoscopic. With each turn of the “scene”, the characters not only face each other, but form new patterns of ornate author’s mosaic. Each of their interactions evokes a resonance, sometimes light, and sometimes capable of turning and destroying fate. 22 main characters - a doctor, a pool cleaner, a TV presenter, an artist, a taxi driver, a waitress of a cafe ... - are the heroes of a dozen stories, each of which is to varying degrees embedded in the other, like themes in a jazz composition.
But, despite the apparent spontaneity of the installation, you can see how carefully thought out each joint. Sometimes in the connection of two neighboring frames manifests the true and for the time invisible meaning of what is happening. A young mother is forced to work at home with phone sex, despite the presence of her husband and children: “I’m all so wet,” she tells the client, while wiping the butt of her peeled baby. The family policeman, who visits his mistress every other day, explains his absence to his wife by carrying out operational measures. A single mother warmed up to them not only sleeps with a cop, but thus ensures their safety. Three fishermen find the corpse of a raped girl in the river, but, nevertheless, do not abandon their favorite occupation: what sense does it fuss, after all, she is still dead, and the weekend is a holy one.
Altman started short cuts in the mid-1970s in Nashville (1975). Then, for the first time, a model of the whole microcosm was built through the successive connection of many short episodes, seemingly incoherent with each other. After 18 years, he again (once again) resorts to this know-how: in passing situations and insignificant actions reflects the most characteristic features of the behavior of “the healthiest and most optimistic nation in the world.” Perfectly aware of the cultural significance of Altman’s creations, Hollywood stars are readily removed for pennies. According to their general representation, Short Cuts is a record-breaking film: none of the invited actors resisted the temptation to enter their name (and face) into a multi-figure “anthology of American life of the late twentieth century.”
But even despite the star rain and the fact that Altman’s picture, called in the United States “the encyclopedia of post-industrial society”, won the festival in Venice (sharing “the Golden lion” with the film Keslevsky “Three colors: blue”), ordinary Americans usually did not want to look in front of them in the mirror: the box office of the film was depressingly modest.
The recipe for this Movie cocktail is very simple: take a long “soap” series, or better a few, compress everything up to 3 hours, cut, stir, glue, add famous actors, household erotica and household humor with pieces of sarcasm and voila. After all, everything that happens on the screen, i.e. scandals, disputes, the whims of children and adults, all this we have seen in life and on the screen many times. The originality of this film lies in the stunning acting ensemble, as well as in the peculiar cutting of individual situations.
A separate word can be said about Tim Robbins. After all, before this film I watched the same director with Tim in the title role. It was an amazing film with a special atmosphere behind the scenes of Hollywood. And this, although it has some originality, still has a strong smell of ordinary. But Tim Robbins' game is good here.
If you look at the trend of fast, exactly night express, modern life, you can see that human life is entirely composed of stories of different degrees of interest and mediocrity. Tragic and funny, depressed and triumphant, dreary and loving. It is necessary to feel the lack of our own, as we suddenly turn our ears to friends and acquaintances, and our eyes and minds to writers whose works could fill the vacant niche of life. In this regard, the work of George Carver, potentially the best literary worker in the genre of dirty realism, in two accounts will make up for the lack of any everyday situations. Possession as sharp as a maniac knife, a syllable earned him a flattering comparison with Hemingway and Chekhov, and extremely shortened prose has long been recorded in the catalogs of electronic books (yes, this is a protest against deforestation) from American readers. It was his stories, taking as a basis, woven together in the lights of late-night Los Angeles of the early 90s, director Robert Altman, christening them with the concise title “Short Editing”.
Under the noise of helicopters spraying insecticides against fruit flies in the district, we are introduced to the inhabitants of houses sparkling with shimmering pearls of artificial stars. An impoverished pool cleaner and arrogant surgeon, an ever-drunk limousine driver and an avid parasite fisherman with a sports past, an unrecognized artist and clown, a TV presenter and police dog with bouts of tyranny, a professional make-up artist and an explosive confectioner, a submissive housewife and a sloppy party girl, an elderly jazz singer and a teenager with suicidal tendencies ...
With short cuts, the director introduces the life of each of them, carefully convincing the viewer that the heroes of different classes have no more in common than the world champion in boxing with the champion of the welding shop of plant N in literball. However, this is a deliberate device, as a distraction of the magician before the demonstration of another magic trick. In the “Short Editing” the role of tricks is assigned to very prosaic, therefore no less interesting, circumstances through which the intersection of the life lines of the protagonists is carried out. Complex family relationships, trials of love that do not stand life, and a jumping general mood ... Closer to the finale, exactly mixed multi-colored flora on the glade of Los Angeles, the worlds of the heroes are assimilated into a single blooming, bubbling contrast world, where in each protagonist, read a flower, see and feel a special, characteristic shade of personality with their prejudices and thoughts.
Contributes to such mental intimacy magnificent, more accurately not to describe, the selection of actors. Robert Altman already had a reputation as a director who knew how to find mutual understanding with any actors, which is why the last African children who saw a white tourist with a camera zealously rushed to get into the Altman film. But here, it seems, the director outdid himself, which marked the “authoritative jury” of the Venice Film Festival with a victory in the nomination “For the best acting ensemble”. For statistics and PR is nice, but much more important is that this ensemble really came to be a musical, not forging a single note or a single instrument. And it seemed after all, the presence of such mastodons of Hollywood hills as Robert Downey Jr. (due to the hairstyle similar to George Clooney’s times “from dusk to dawn”), the Oscar-winning Tim Robbins with the charming Chris Penn a priori should set them apart against the background of a less eminent galaxy of stars as excellent students on the school lineup. But that's not happening. It is a polygamous approach to storytelling. In the best traditions of socialism, the three-hour parable is divided equally among the 22 characters involved. And if we add to this the misanthropic inclinations of the literary sample and film director, it will not be possible to predict the prepared fate of “particles” of stories with all desire.
That’s the beauty of “Short Editing.” The integrity and seamlessness of the built world, which is not disturbed even after a three-hour tangle of events, taken out of the context of time without beginning and without end. Just ordinary human madness, lasting a few screen days. It's life, it's history. She is.