A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

 

Director Kogonada

Kogonada with Colin Ferrell

Kogonada and Ferrell with Margot Robbie

A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY                 B+                                                      Ireland  USA  (108 mi)  2025  d: Kogonada

This is the first day of my life
Swear I was born right in the doorway
I went out in the rain, suddenly everything changed
They’re spreading blankets on the beach

Yours was the first face that I saw
I think I was blind before I met you
And I don’t know where I am, I don’t know where I’ve been
But I know where I want to go

Bright Eyes, First Day of My Life, 2005, Bright Eyes - First Day of My Life [Official Music Video] YouTube (3:06)

The most hilariously playful of the essayist-turned-filmmaker Kogonada films, which would include the ravishingly beautiful naturalism of 2017 Top Ten List #5 Columbus and the sci-fi world of artificial intelligence in After Yang (2021), where the tagline of this film is:  What if you could open a doorway and walk through it to re-live a defining moment from your past?  While the release has been postponed several times, the first film Kogonada neither wrote nor edited, it has taken an avalanche of negative criticism, with some suggesting it’s among the worst films of the year, even described as a bomb, yet this is nothing as they describe, instead it’s actually a weirdly fascinating, fun experience, clever and insightful, absurdist in its own way, where it takes us down a rabbit hole, much like Jacques Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont en bateau) (1974), while it also recalls the romantic time traveling escapades of Bertrand Bonello’s 2024 Top Ten List #9 The Beast (La Bête), Charlie Kaufman’s I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020), or Robert Schwentke’s The Time Traveler's Wife (2009), while also reminiscent of the quirky romantic journey of Marc Webb’s (500) Days of Summer (2009), a throwback to the whimsical comedy of Zach Braff’s GARDEN STATE (2004), or even the disoriented editing structure of Charlie Kaufmann and Michel Gondry’s ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004).  In other words, despite what disparaging critics have suggested, this is not a waste of time, but a bonanza of riches, a romantic fantasy filled with moments of joy, but also major disappointments, as it excruciatingly examines the flawed lives of two people who are single, filled with regrets, missed opportunities, and the trauma of bad relationships, which is part of the baggage we all carry and what makes us who we are, magically making them come together through a kind of ingeniously clever, futuristic matchmaking service, where there’s a humanizing beauty to be had in their shared moments together.  Korean-American filmmaker Kogonada’s birth name is Park Joong Eun, where his professional name was derived from renowned Japanese auteur Yasujirō Ozu’s longtime screenwriter Kogo Noda, and what we know is that he’s developed a reputation for the unconventional.  Perhaps the biggest surprise is the film’s musical score is written by Joe Hisaishi, who is best known for his collaborations with Studio Ghibli Japanese anime director Hayao Miyazaki, the maker of such enchanting films like MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (1988), PRINCESS MONONOKE (1997), SPIRITED AWAY (2001), HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE (2004), and more recently The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu) (2014) and The Boy and the Heron (Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka) (2023), where this marks the celebrated composer's first score outside of Japan, adding a touch of magic to the experience.  There’s nothing quite like this in any of the year’s movie releases, where the uniqueness of the subject matter, beautifully realized by screenwriter Seth Reiss, a former head writer for the irreverent, satirical publication The Onion and on the staff of Late Night with Seth Meyers, becomes a cause for celebration.  While deeply felt and understated, this may not be as intellectually challenging as the filmmaker’s earlier work, but it is lighter and infinitely more entertaining, revealing a side we haven’t really seen before, literally swooning with romanticism, where these big name Hollywood actors are an absolute delight in something less mainstream and more offbeat, and while the protagonist’s problems aren’t exactly so earthshaking that it requires divine intervention, like George Bailey in Frank Capra’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946), the solution does appear to be driven by the transformative power of love. 

Carrying over the married couple actors from his previous film, including the artistically stunning, visually dazzling cinematography by Benjamin Loeb, employing a vivid color palette, while adding a few new surprises, the unusually versatile Colin Ferrell stars as David, a single man with a perpetually lonely soul, yet he’s completely relatable as someone we might have known, smart, imaginative, yet not exactly socially engaging, typically keeping to himself, where he doesn’t easily make connections.  When his car is booted for parking issues, in desperation he turns to a rental car agency specializing in emergencies since 1994, whose homemade flyer advertisement is seen posted on a wall directly in front of his car, including a phone number and a mysterious broken heart.  Arriving in this immense warehouse that is completely dark except for an illuminated card table on the far side, like a football field away, where two people sit under a giant sign that says The Rental Car Agency – none other than Kevin Kline (you have to do a double take to realize that’s him) and a German-accented Phoebe Waller-Bridge who relishes the use of the word “fuck,” whose surreal personalities are oddly eccentric, characters you might find in a Monty Python movie, not at all what he expects, as it plays out like an audition, where they already have a professional headshot photo of him, a picture David has never seen before, informing him “Sometimes we have to perform to get to the truth,” so none of this makes sense.  He’s also a bit surprised that the only cars offered are two identical 1994 Saturn SL’s, which are no longer in operation, yet there they are, and while he’s flummoxed by the bizarre way the car agent’s communicate, almost like robotic AI versions of themselves, insisting there’s only one right answer to all his inquiries, nonetheless he’s persuaded to purchase the accompanying GPS, which the car didn’t originally have in the pre-internet era, with no outlets for a phone, complete with an animated screen.  As it turns out, that GPS is a major character in the film, seemingly omniscient and all-knowing, with a cryptic voice offering advice that goes well beyond navigational directions, voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith, with David seen in the car on the road happily belting out one of the songs from the musical A Chorus Line while he drives to a wedding, A Chorus Line (1985) - One Scene (8/8) | Movieclips YouTube (4:09), not the norm, for sure, yet it exudes pizzazz from the hidden regions of his less than dynamic personality.  Upon arrival at the wedding in the pouring rain, taking place in a hotel called La Strada (after the Fellini film), all the guests are handed Jacques Demy The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) umbrellas for an outdoor service (just a few of the many cinematic cues referenced), where David looks across the aisle to see a woman looking back at him, Margot Robbie as Sarah, where the pair briefly engages in conversation afterwards.  He’s more reserved and shy, quietly haunted by regrets and unresolved relationships, while she’s more of a free spirit, where her cheerful exterior hides the vulnerability and deep turmoil within, as both are unhappily single, where neither is the person they would like to be, but they are so emotionally guarded that they’d rather ignore any obvious attraction to avoid the risk of getting hurt, so the encounter ends awkwardly, seemingly built on self-deprecating declarations, but nothing becomes of it before going their separate ways.  Instead, on the road afterwards, the GPS informs him of an upcoming spot to stop for a fast food burger.  Incredulously, Sarah is there as well, coming over to share a table with David, where they realize each is driving the exact same vintage Saturn, quickly assessing that this is more than mere coincidence.  Confessing a few personal secrets about themselves, their fears, their insecurities, and their fear of commitment, discovering both have been disappointed in relationships, they decide to continue the journey together, but only after Sarah’s car fails to start, so they really have no other choice, turning into a road trip that is partly a journey down memory lane and partly a spiritual awakening.   

Literally thrown in each other’s laps, it all seems designed by a higher power, embarking on a fantastical, magical mystery tour together, where the GPS leads them to a series of mysterious doors in the middle of nowhere as open portals to another dimension that allows them to revisit key moments of their past, like a lighthouse in Canada that may or may not have led to a personal epiphany for David, or an art museum that Sarah used to visit with her equally free spirited mother, developing a trusting relationship with the guard who let them in after hours when the museum is completely dark, so these are memorable places, holding a very special significance in their lives, perhaps the source of their negative views of themselves.  They connect on an existential level, both very self-aware, digging into who they are and how they got to be that way, happier alone than in the company of others, yet that is equally frustrating, challenged by their own unique limitations, as a dark cloud seems to hover over each of them, stymied by an inability to connect with others, yet visiting these doors is a bit like dating, as the accumulation of knowledge and the discovery of new possibilities is essential.  When another door leads to David’s high school, seeing him as a teenager while viewers see him as an adult, the film explodes into a full-blown musical, as David has the role of J. Pierrepont Finch in the Pulitzer prize-winning musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, suddenly finding himself performing onstage just after the girl of his dreams rejects him, breaking out into a song and dance, with Sarah, who is a musical junkie, howling with delight in the audience, A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY – Exclusive 6 Minute Scene YouTube (6:24).  It all feels cathartic, like this has a chance to change their future in some mysterious way, but neither one seems able to find that key, still locked in the past with no way out, where there’s a beautiful balance between cynicism and hope, as each one gets stuck in their own personal trauma, trying to reach out, but get blocked by their preconceptions, which has a way of bulldozing their hopes and dreams.  The filmmaker has a blast just visualizing this succession of doors, like one of their destinations where Sarah and David climb a hill that incredulously offers them a view of Earth from space.  With each passing door comes new revelations about a crucial event in each other’s lives that provides greater understanding into their character.  There’s an Alice in Wonderland innocence and naïveté about this, as these kinds of literary efforts are usually young people or teenagers passing through a phase into adulthood, but these are adults reverting back to their childhoods, seemingly rewiring the circuitry, but neither one is brave enough to reach out to the other, as they seem to need an extra boost to appreciate their own lives.  Perhaps the most therapeutic sequences are surreal and intoxicating moments where David is transported back to a hospital in Ireland on the day he was born where he’s anonymously able to encourage his own reticent father as a younger man (Hamish Linklater), while Sarah visits her ailing mother (Lily Rabe, daughter of actress Jill Clayburgh - - cool how the parents are partners in real life) in the hospital on the day she dies of cancer, a woman who sacrificed everything to give her daughter a good life, finally sharing that poignant moment together that they were never able to actually experience, offering some kind of corrective.  There’s a weirdly amusing, phantasmagorical nature to the entire experience, beautifully rendered, with just a touch of the right serious note, but as soon as we hear the sounds of Bright Eyes - First Day of My Life [Official Music Video] YouTube (3:06), we know we’re immersed in a whimsical theatrical journey brimming with optimism, given that distinct indie film vibe.   Kogonada is known for his distinctive style and philosophical themes, as the film explores the possibility of restoring belief in love and the potential to overcome cynicism as one gets older, overcoming that creeping doubt that lingers, where there’s a wonderful turn in one of the more dramatic scenes with Mitski’s rendition of Peter Townsend’s seminal song, Let My Love Open the Door | A Big Bold Beautiful Journey ... YouTube (2:43), which seems to be the missing key of the entire film, allowing them to begin anew, their lives forever altered, offering just a hint of hope that despite all obstacles, there is a pathway to a brighter future.  If you stay until the end of the closing credits, which features a breakthrough dance sequence, the last sound we hear are feet approaching a door that closes shut, suggesting the journey is now complete.  While it may not be what some people have come to expect, it does exude charm, feeling like the perfect antidote for these politically chaotic and overly traumatic times.      

La Jetée

 

Marker (left) with Alain Resnais

Writer/director Chris Marker

LA JETÉE         A                                                                                                                          aka: Death on the Pier                                                                                                           France  (28 mi)  1962  d: Chris Marker

Under the orders of Jean-Luc, I’ve said for a long time that films should be seen first in theaters, and that television and video are only there to refresh your memory. Now that I no longer have any time at all to go to the cinema, I’ve started seeing films by lowering my eyes [on a television or computer screen], with an ever increasing sense of sinfulness.                —Chris Marker Film Comment interview, 2003

This post-apocalyptic science fiction drama was released in 1962, immersed in the doomsday, nuclear disaster mindset of the era, when there was an alarmist aspect of the culture in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, when Cold War tensions and a threat of nuclear war convinced government leaders in the United States that millions of lives could be saved by the construction of bomb shelters (Nuclear Fallout Shelters Were Never Going to Work), with Life magazine, at the behest of President Kennedy, spurring a nationwide trend to build backyard bomb shelters, (LIFE Magazine “How You Can Survive Fallout”).  Among the most popular films of the day was Stanley Kramer’s bleak depiction of the aftermath of a nuclear war in ON THE BEACH (1959), listed among the Top-Grossing Movies of 1959, while Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon in 1959 was one of the first apocalyptic novels of the nuclear age, and Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s Fail-Safe, depicting a nightmarish military nuclear fiasco, became a bestselling American novel in 1962, initially released during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  And how could we forget Stanley Kubrick’s hilariously subversive Cold War satire, DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)?  Yet one of the most radical films of the era is simply a compilation of still photographs beautifully edited together in a 28-minute montage that film critic Pauline Kael described as “very possibly the greatest science-fiction movie yet made.”  While this is his only foray into fictional narrative filmmaking, Marker is the undisputed master of the film essay, as evidenced by films like Le Joli Mai (1963), The Grin Without a Cat (Le Fond de L’Air Est Rouge) (1977), and Sans Soleil (1982), where his experimental style creates layers of dramatic intrigue that viewers are required to sift through in order to make sense of this disturbing WWIII scenario where the world is wiped out from nuclear annihilation, yet it ponders whether the past and future can possibly rescue the present. Much of this unravels through the power of suggestion, where a disembodied voice becomes a recurring narrative device in Marker films, reminding us of the importance of memories, existing in two versions, one in French and the other in English (Jean Négroni in French, James Kirk in English), walking us through a series of baffling events that continuously challenge the viewer.  Even after more than half a century, viewers are still unsure of just what they’ve seen, as there’s an enigmatic quality to this film that is part of its enduring legacy, where so much is compressed into a brief window of time.  By the early 60’s, Marker had already established himself as one of the major artistic figures in France, having fought in the Resistance during the war, he published his only novel, Le Coeur Net (The Forthright Spirit), in 1949, which is about aviation, followed in 1952 by an illustrated essay on French writer Jean Giraudoux, Giraudoux Par Lui-Même.  He worked as an assistant director for Alain Resnais on his devastating Holocaust documentary NIGHT AND FOG (1955), and was also a prolific film critic, writing for the left-wing Catholic journal Esprit (magazine) and Cahiers du Cinéma.  He was a tireless traveler, editing the innovative guidebook series Petite Planète for Éditions de Seuil, (Isabel Stevens on Chris Marker's "Petite Planète"), contributing his own photographs, playfully exploring the people and terrain of Siberia four years after the death of Stalin in LETTER FROM SIBERIA (1957), while in 1959, he published Coréennes, a photographic study of Korea.  Making upwards of 70 films, many of them collaborations, Marker directed 20 or so feature films, becoming known as a filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer, editor, and even a videographer and digital multimedia artist who has been challenging audiences for years with his complex ruminations on time, memory, and the rapid advancement of life on this planet.  Many of his earliest films are personal travelogues, making trips to China, North Korea, Israel, the Soviet Union, and Cuba, with Marker assuming the role of a foreign correspondent in the intimate documentary ¡CUBA SÍ! (1961), chronicling the island’s transition from the dictatorship of Batista to the Cuban Revolution under Fidel Castro, including several interviews with him, ending with the Bay of Bigs incident, but the film was banned for two years for remaining largely sympathetic to Castro and the making of a revolution.  But he became known internationally for making this film, made simultaneously with Le Joli Mai (1963), composed entirely of photographs by cinematographer Jean Chiabaud except for one startling 5-second shot of a mysterious woman lazily opening her eyes from a slumber as she blinks at the viewers.  Our perception of a photograph is that it captures the present moment, yet it instantly becomes the past, as a photograph will always remain a memory. 

Marker is part of the Left Bank Group spearheaded by Alain Resnais, who were more experimental and politically conscious than the French New Wave, fiercely defying convention, viewing cinema more as an art form, inhabiting the same mysterious realm as the nearly incomprehensible Alain Resnais puzzle film Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienbad) (1961), where this is among Marker’s more stylish and innovative films, an existentialist tale of doomed existence, and a parable of our modern fate, exuding a penetrating intelligence, and may represent cinema’s closest approach to poetry.  Using a fragmented structure to show how brief the most impactful moments in our life can be, having an unforgettable gravity, as those memories shape our lives and make us who we are, yet this is only apparent when the film takes an astonishing turn into time travel, taking us into the realm of science fiction to examine what it is that truly makes us human.  The opening of the film is strange enough, full of mysterious implications, yet what’s immediately clear is that something very precise and concrete has happened, as the sounds of a jet engine quickly become swallowed up by the voices of the Saint Alexander Nevsky Cathedral choir singing a Liturgy of the Good Saturday announcing the start of a nuclear war, LA JETÉE (1962) Dir. Chris Marker - YouTube (2:20), with the rest of the film delving into the hidden recesses of the imagination to explore the profound ramifications, The First Minute | La Jetée (1962) YouTube (1:21). Reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut’s seminal time traveling novel Slaughterhouse-Five, where the horrors of war leave behind a catastrophic impact on the survivors, continually revisiting the trauma, where only science fiction allows him to explain what he witnessed, or THE LATHE OF HEAVEN (1980), a remarkable made-for-television adaptation of the Ursula K. Le Guin apocalyptic sci-fi novel, but instead of time traveling, the central protagonist has the power to alter the entire world through dreams.  While the premise is similar in each of these films, using the fantastic to better understand the ordinary, it is achieved in radically different ways, becoming a story of trauma, memory, longing, and loss in a quiet and understated format.  Marker doesn’t even have names for his characters, instead they are who they appear to be, a man, a woman, a prisoner, a doctor, who seem to exist only in the imagination, where what’s important are the ideas they generate, as that’s what sticks with us.  In the aftermath of a nuclear war that has left the world in utter annihilation, a group of mysterious scientists (with the faint sound of untranslated German) test their experimental time travel program, which becomes a key instrument in the fate of the human race, in hopes that traveling to both the past and the future may find the resources needed to save the dismal present.  Experimenting on prisoners, much like the Nazi’s did in WWII, their initial tests are all unsuccessful, insinuating some may have died in the process, or gone mad, leading to a prisoner (Davos Hanich), chosen for his strong attachment to a childhood memory, the image of a man shot dead on the observation pier at Paris-Orly airport, yet what captivated him was the shocked look on a woman’s face (Hélène Châtelain, only appearing in two short films), where he inevitably returns back to that moment searching for her, replaying it over and over in his head.  His journey is structured by the memory of the woman’s face, as he is driven by his desire to reunite with the beauty of that face, the image that preceded the nuclear blast.  A narrator dryly informs us, “Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments.  It is only later that they claim remembrance, when they show their scars.”  Other than retreating into tunnels underneath the Palais de Chaillot, resembling Fritz Lang’s underground world in METROPOLIS (1927), there is no explanation for how any of them have survived for so many years, though clearly there are one set of victorious oppressors and one of oppressed prisoners, with a stream of images of destroyed ruins left behind offering viewers a glimpse of a destroyed world, left trapped underneath the ground by a contaminating radioactivity, necessitating a need to seek out unimaginable solutions that don’t exist today, with suggestions that this is their only hope.  While the film suggests he actually time travels, that is the nature of storytelling leaving that impression, as the prisoner never seems to leave his state of captivity, but may be encouraged to think so, where it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s imagined, but this entire film may be a drug-induced dream happening inside his head.  

Described as a photo-novel, in effect this is a blend of photography and cinema into a unique artform that is unlike any other film in the history of cinema, especially considering the depths of the experience, drawing upon the subconscious imagination and turning impossibilities into an existing reality.  Marker completed the film while the Cuban Missile Crisis was unfolding in real time, where the imagined dystopian future mirrors the global fears of the Cold War, as the film’s bleak tones and dark pessimism must be contextualized as part of a larger story of post-War Europe, which was left helpless as the United States and the Soviet Union pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war.  What’s also interesting is that the time travel journeys are not voluntary, but are forced, with subjects lying in a hammock with bandages over their eyes, with wires connected to a monitoring device, accompanied by the sound of his heartbeat, which is indistinguishable from the sound of marching feet, where one of the nefarious masterminds standing over him is Jacques Ledoux, curator of the Royal Film Archive of Belgium, using stimulants of some kind, perhaps a combination of drugs and hypnosis, and the prisoner is not sent into his own memory, but his memories are utilized as he’s first sent first into the past, and then the future, which opens up his eyes into what might be possible.  One of the first signs that the experiment is working is his recognition of a pastoral landscape, and gardens, memories of peacetime, offering a moment of serenity amidst the draining psychological stress of the experience.  This initial success leads to more, yet a driving interest may be his obsession to find this enigmatic “ghost woman,” who has often been compared to Madeleine in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), as Marker was a fervent devotee of that picture.  It’s also important to realize that what we see onscreen is not reality, but an artificial reconstruction of an alternate reality, where a common element is still shots of immovable objects, yet the rhythmic editing technique of shifting stills offers the suggestion of motion, as viewers are watching a “motion picture” even if the objects do not move.  From the very start, the prisoner is not sure if the object of his desire even exists, or if she is a product of his imagination.  Through subsequent sessions, they meet more frequently, spending a day walking through a park, showing close-ups of the woman’s face at rest, feeling the sun on her face, yet he comes and goes, before mysteriously vanishing, only to return again, as she waits for him, becoming attached, like lost lovers at the end of a dying world, always surrounded by static objects, even visiting a surreal museum of stuffed animals, accompanied by otherworldly music, La Jetée - A Museum Filled with Ageless Animals - YouTube (3:34).  The images are initially silent, but soon we begin to hear the sound of birds, which only grow louder, leading to a bedroom scene, where he watches the woman sleep peacefully before she awakes to find him at her side, and blinks, as the movement of the camera becomes the only real moment in the protagonist’s life.  Then suddenly he is pulled back to the underground camp, a prisoner directed by people whose motives he can only guess about, eventually realizing that he’s been duped, used as a guinea pig for their own purposes before likely being eliminated, stuck in a state of paralysis where he has no freedom of movement.  As we might suspect, that one moment changes things, wondering whether her moving may be a dream, but it’s a dream associated with the freedom of escaping from the stillness, wondering if they could escape together into a world that could move, where the possibility of love might exist.  This suggests a longing for a time he never thought he could revisit, one where he never actually belongs, associated with a longing for a women he could never really know, yet the mere possibility is an emotional jolt that is tremendously affecting to watch.  What follows is a reverie of a different order, as he dreams of escape, but can he really escape the prison confinement, where every act is determined, any more than he can escape from his own consciousness, which has its own mortal limits.  Memory forever connects us to the past, providing a sense of stability, yet loss is a central component to the film, providing a traumatic reference, as man is ultimately unable to extricate himself from his own historical circumstances.  While this may be an essay on politics and transcendence, it also questions whether love can exist during times of war, where one attempts to reclaim their own sanity in the face of controlling and destructive forces.  Marker challenges our sense of free will by telling a story where none of the characters possess it, where in this film the only freedom that really exists is the one within.  

La Jetée (La Jetee 1962)FULL FILM - YouTube  Criterion French version with English subtitles (28:06)