Life on loan The London of today is flooded with our visionary trips, nostalgia for the non-existent figures in long scarves, Christmas, cylinders, cabs and hoofs on the cobblestone, steps that disappeared in the void, dreams, delights and sighs for medieval darkness, executions and adventures, from Guy Fox to Lady Jane, from Prince and Beggar to Nowhere, and, like a fog, impregnated by Imbrek, with the Panthers of Oss, and the Blackheads, in the world, with the Blackheads, and the Blackheads, and the Blackheads, and the Blackheads of Charles, in the world, and the Blackheads, and the Blackheads, and the Blackheads of the Blackheads, in the world, and the Blackheads, in the world, and the Blackheads, in the world, and the Blackheads, and the Blackheads of the Blackheads, and the Blackheads, and the Blackheads of the Blackheads of the Blackheads, and the Blackman, in the world, And we read all these abyss of London in the eyes of both main characters, so sensually filled with the tandem of an Englishman and an Australian: Harry Treadaway and Emma Booth, and what is read in them, we are both horrified and admired at the same time.
If Dickens were alive today, he would write this story. The story told by almost unknown screenwriters Chris Cole and Chris Freddie and director Carl Golden. The mystery of these authors is discouraging, because the film itself, and the script, and the acting, and especially the camera work of Darran Tiernan seemed to me phenomena that are considered to be cultural codes for modern man.
... If you ever want to write like a classic, don’t listen to your many advisors, even if they were your university professors or had a reptilian career in television. Experience this painful world through your own experience or through independent, non-mass youth cinema, which is probably the same for us moviegoers.
If you ever want to kill yourself, don’t believe anyone who has been a good example to you, don’t join suicide clubs, don’t pull out a peak ace, don’t participate in dark online projects, but believe this world, all the things that happen to you every day, and try to see its beauty in every moment, and one of them will definitely tell you whether your decision is right or wrong. Only then do what you intend to do or do not do it.
We don’t meet the directors whose work has amazed us, on social media or at parties full of boring and similar characters. We are deprived of reality and immersed in inactivity, but call it inaction or even positive. But have we not bought by our loneliness a true experience for this movie, so reliable and authentic? Feel his truth, live it with so many young people today, like Golden Hallfield or Douglas Spalding, live it with this film, with films like it, live it with them, always, now, never, ever, like the artist Damien Hirst. Trust your soul, its visionary insights, and believe only yourself and nothing else.
I'll see this bird, I'll see it!
- She's not worth it!
- Worth it.
You think it's about the bird? No, it's about the decision to accept your own death. You think this is a guy movie? No, it is about a girl - strange, unpredictable, able to love, but so ... not given in hands, in a cage, in rules, like a bird ... like the same Bird that will become five hundredth, and predetermine not death, but the life and resurrection of the main character ... After all, the very moment Stevie sacrifices himself for Nikki, he gets a second chance, soars up, disappears into a free flock of birds and begins to live. For the sake of this girl, for herself, for the sake of all the tortured animals, on whose guard these young people stand.
I was told about the case of a girl artist who lost her arm, chained to fences that prevented excavators from disfiguring another reserve. It happened in our country the year this film was made. And it happens every day in all countries where people don't want to be slaves. If our life is the black background, the underbelly of the consumer society, eaten up by worms and sins, then that artist girl painted all our cursed, suffering and righteous souls on it in white strokes, as Stevie painted her Pelican.
Anyone who can feel someone else’s pain as their own, human or animal, is a Pelican. Anyone who can give his life for another is a Pelican. Anyone who is able to save the innocent, be it whales, badgers or dolphins, to save the planet from the abomination into which it has been plunged by the degradation needs of society is a Pelican.
And this film is about his Blood and how it sheds.
And this is the love that is truly revealed only in death, because only both of them are sincere, true and concrete, like grasses, trees, birds, dreams and reality, and this is what the world runs from, not wanting to share you with the real reality, ripping you out of it by the lying worries of cowardly parents, cowardly presidents, cowardly poachers, cowardly scum who devour nature for their miserable profit, meat-eating, poaching, meanness.
Nikko and Stevie will pass to the end; they were born in this bacchanal mahamaya of shopping centers and TV curves already with a higher consciousness, with no perception of the difference between life and death, and therefore, paradoxically, for the sake of the triumph of life, they will bring this illusion to the lying world on its own head: "one scumbag killed another scum, that's all," - says Nikko about the accidentally shot bird killer, and do it with dignity.
The indifferent world and indifferent friends around us in reality, the loneliness in the crowd, the absurdity of everything, leading to panic attacks - what can break through this wall? Kissing flowers and facing the leaves of a tree, feeling its sacredness with all your body and whole soul, kissing a love letter from a dead girl in front of a square investigator - this is Nikko's way of life - and ... killing the executioner of chicks - and all this is appropriate only next to the truth that you say at confession to God, at confession of Being and the Higher Principle - the Heaven above the River, the beloved, his notebook, the Bird Packs, and the chicks who received the chance to be born. About this truth you will be silent and mother, and father, and sister, and friend, because they understand you much less than even the police officer in the interrogation.
And it remains only to turn on the intuition, to remember what was experienced and changed in order to realize at least a little how much meaning is invested in this story, how it is presented by the camera, music and only by the eyes of the main characters, how many plans of being, awareness of life and death fail one in another, how everything is woven together by the Moebius tape, and it is not possible to get to the end.
Dedicated to Albina Lemberg
10 out of 10