Lima

Alan Pakula's All the President's Men is one of my favourite political investigative dramas, and this film, two years younger, takes a slightly different approach. The investigative journalism is still there, but the investigation is more straightforward, more of a life-and-death levitation, the solo of one embattled journalist who gets himself in mortal danger a few times. The paranoia of a conspiracy by a major corporation and its connected government circles is palpable, two years after the Watergate affair, and it culminates in an ending so provocative that I wouldn't hesitate to call it as bold an auteurist vision as, say, Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation. For me, the unexpected highlight is the psychological acceptance test at the Parallax headquarters halfway through the film, a five-minute (!!) sequence of images, categorised as 'dad-mom-god-home' etc., designed to evoke certain associations in the protagonist. I have to say, I haven't seen anything stranger in a movie in a long time.

At times it reminded me of the last two seasons of Lost with its cluelessness, including the hatches that also lead somewhere. There are mysteries, unpredictable situations, but it doesn't lead to anything meaningful. For about half an hour or so, I was amused to see how dumb the whole thing was, like watching some exotic animal in a zoo that nature had "done" to in a way that would make Richard Attenborough weep. The characters behave irrationally, they have unnatural dialogues, and at the end, it builds up so stupidly and with such a futile point that it gives you a headache. The only thing that made me happy was the yellow Aratinga, because I love parrots. And in the case of Ishana Shyamalan, I can only think that the apple rolled far away from the tree and was never found. Meh.

It could almost be called "Two Musketeers and Eva", because everything revolves around D'Artagnan and his efforts to save his beloved and then Athos (a magnificent Vincent Cassel) and his "skeleton in the closet"; the other two are neither interesting nor essential to the plot at all, apart from their awkward jokes at the end. The enchantment of the flawless production design, as in the 1st episode, stayed with me here though, the guys are properly dirty again, it has a fine unpolished patina of the 17th century, beautiful cinematography, beautiful castles, but I, having been bitten by Richard Lester's version and a pretty decent overview of the content of Dumas' novel, was surprised by the sidelining of Richelieu and unpleasantly shocked by how the political correctness pushed on me left an unpleasant aftertaste. I am referring to the character of the black prince Hannibal, who always appears at the right moment and helps the Musketeers out of their predicament with his selfless intervention. Dumas, who never once mentioned this character in his novels, must have been spinning like a propeller in a blender, but mostly it was given to the current quota, and now that I mention it, a person who has never addressed the woke agenda in films, that's really saying something. Sometimes you really don't need to push so hard, filmmakers. PS: The ending in the burning building is spectacular, but too "Hollywood" for me.