Notes on a film: A Ghost Story (2017)
That feeling when you see a film and it hits you in
such a way that you need to run through the streets in the middle of the night
so you can tell all your friends about it. Then you remember you don't have any
friends, so your blog has to suffice...
I've wanted to watch A Ghost Story (2017) since I
saw the earliest publicity images for it over a year ago. At first I was a bit
alienated by it. I'd heard it described as a film about death - about grief specifically - but I found the earlier scenes
fatally underdeveloped. The stilted, drawn-out, almost 'pornographic' depiction
of mourning felt unnecessarily laboured. Without a strong connection developed between
its two initial protagonists during the short scenes before Casey Affleck's
character dies in a car accident, it was difficult to feign interest in the
story, and the subsequent scenes of Rooney Mara's extended grief spiral seemed
unearned.
Then Mara's character reaches a kind of catharsis
and leaves, but the film doesn't end
with it. Affleck's ghost remains in the house, and witnesses years of life and
solitude, birth and decay unfold all around him. Scene after scene, the film
kept unfolding, revealing new depths, new secrets, like a succession of Chinese
boxes; each new sequence broadening and enriching the story and the themes of
loss, death, time, meaning, purpose, commitment, etc. Moving between moments of
past, present and future, as civilisations fall and are rebuilt; as dead stars
go out, only to be replaced by new ones that burn just as bright, and just as
briefly.
A Ghost Story [David Lowery, 2017]:
Then the film eventually comes full circle;
returning to scenes from the earlier domestic life between Mara and Affleck,
showing shades and variations of their relationship that tell a different, no
less tragic story; one not necessarily about grief and death, but nonetheless centred
on loss and the inability to move-on. The connection to all of these various events,
the futility, the hope for something greater, the desire to move the stars so
as to carve our own names (and others) in the night sky, or to say "I was
here; I existed!", was so beautifully realised that I actually cried.
I loved that the house became a metaphor and that
the ghost became a witness to the human condition. I loved that it uses the old
Academy film ratio (1.37:1), even if certain shots were a bit kitsch, and
others too closely resembled "Instagram chic." I love that Will
Oldham's in it, and appears just at the precise moment when the film makes its
leap from 'interesting curio' to 'genuine masterwork.'
