Before Tomorrow is only the second Inuit-language film I've ever seen, after Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner from 2001. I really liked that movie a lot; this one falls in a distant second to that - making it either the worst Inuit-language movie or the second best, depending on how you want to frame it.
The story here is very simple and straight forward. An Inuit clan in Northern Canada sits around their summer hunting grounds in the 18th or 19th century telling stories and sharing family history. The patriarch of the group tells a tale of how European explorers arrived by boat and traded metal tools, including sewing needles, with the group in exchange for sex with the women. The contact with these white men leads to disease in the family who are ultimately wiped out by small pox. The story follows a young teenage boy who is possibly the future of his people, if he can survive the death that surrounds him.
Just as with Atanarjuat, this film has a lot of talking around fires inside tents. Whatever does not take place outside on the ice floes hunting seals takes place in the cramped quarters of tents, with people huddled closely together for warmth. This leads to some rather hard-to-follow visual scenes, where it's not totally clear who is speaking or where their seal-skin wrapped bodies end and the tent begins. In addition, much of the film is shot with available light - which in a tent is the small fire of burning seal fat amidst the darkness - making a really beautiful, if sometimes hard to decipher, chiaroscuro effect. Most of these scenes are shot in close-up - with the two interlocutors' faces and the fire filling the whole frame.
The strangest - and, I would argue, most damaging - decision of directors Marie-Helene Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu is the usage of two Kate and Anna McGarrigal songs in English and French in the opening and end titles and early on in the film. The songs are nice but feel totally out of place for the movie. It is hard to go from an opening title sequence with two women singing in English about 'we are men of constant sorrow', to an Inuit scene from 200-300 years ago. Is there no Inuit music they could have used? I think the lyrics in these songs (there's one in French about 10 minutes into the film) are too direct and tell too much of the background, rather than showing it to us.
I really like many elements from this film, but I feel like the story is not totally cohesive and that the transition moments are a bit awkward. It gets pretty slow and boring in the middle as we hear yet another family legend and see yet another location for a winter camp. What is hard is that I recognize that it is my Euro-American sensibilities that make me agitated in such an intimate, slow-moving setting - that the film is really set within an Inuit understanding of time - but I can't easily change my attention span for this movie. It is a beautiful work, but not totally fulfilling.
Stars: 2 of 4
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