My Cannes is officially on.
The new Pixar film, Pete Docter's Up, is about to have its premiere, formally kicking off the 62nd festival de Cannes.
I just saw it, and my immediate impressions are mostly positive. Some of the early Pixar movies were fun, but somewhat exhaustive and too eager to please. After a while they felt too soulless and merchandised.
As the company has matured, so have its ideas and preoccupations. Up goes after more plangent, difficult to grasp feelings and mostly pulls them off. The most astonishing sequence is an early Wellesian montage that beautifully delineates the emotional and physical interaction of a couple, moving from their early meeting, their falling in love,a wedding to heartbreaking passages of regret and sadness to a final act of rupture.
That rupture sets the plot in motion. As it wants to tell a more traditional story, one bridging the past and future, framed through the relationship of a now grown man and a young, socially adroit boy, Up losses some of the lyrical dynamics of the opening. The need to tell a story, with conflict and drama, mucks up the movie's rhythm during the middle stretches.
Up is being shown here in stereoscopic 3D. Some of the imagery is spellbinding, particularly Docter's recurrent motifs of flight and movement, and the thrilling, vertiginously ways he captures objects, people and activity falling, floating and retreating into the frame.
The imaginative opening suggests a mélange of Citizen Kane and Rules of the Game. I like the bounce and freedom of the ideas. Up tries to appropriate the abstracted, purely visual silent film syntax that WALL-E grasped more intuitively and naturally. The last third gets a little hectic and busy for my taste.
But in the moments it slows down, again dealing in more emotionally grounded ideas, a man's love for his wife, Up is a resonant experience.
Given that much of the official programming is hard core art cinema, my sweet spot, I do like the inclusion of some of the more popular based work as well.
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