These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.
This movie starts out with Madeo dancing in a field, fading to her working in her shop, watching her mentally retarded son Yoon Do-joon playing with a dog near the street. The son is about 18 years old and is with a friend. They are nearly hit by a Mercedes that accelerated into Do-joon—and they grab a cab to follow it to the local golf course. They find the car, break off a mirror, then break into the golf course and hunt down the owners. They inexpertly do battle with the older men and the next scene shows them all in the police station, resolving the dispute.
The broken car mirror is pinned on Do-joon whereas Jin-tae gets off scot-free. Do-joon is simple, so he believes the story himself. His mother must come up with the money to pay for the damage. Do-joon spends the night drinking, waiting for Jin-tae to show up, but he never does. It’s possible that Do-joon was just confused about Jin-tae having promised him he’d show up.
On the way home from the bar—and after having hit on the owner’s daughter, who responded positively, since Do-joon is, despite his feebleness, quite good-looking—Do-joon staggers home. On the way, he sees a pretty girl and follows her up a hill, scaring her. She throws a rock at him and we see him walk away. He gets home and crawls into bed with his mother.
The next morning, we see mother at work and Do-joon being talked at by some people. They turn out to be police officers and arrest him for the murder of the girl he’d seen the night before. He signs the confession, but mother doesn’t believe it. It looks for all the world like the police are railroading Do-joon just to close the case.
Mother goes on a mission to clear her son’s name. First, she tries to dig up evidence on Jin-tae, who she suspects—and then knows—did the crime. The evidence she produces is not even close to conclusive and the police laugh her out of the station. She is further convinced, though, and continues her search. It is here that we see that she is nearly at least as disturbed as her son, as incapable of seeing reality.
She goes to a lot of work to find the dead girl’s cell phone, which has a lot of incriminating photos of local men on it. Jin-tae helps her a lot here, seemingly not the bad guy he was at first. She uses these pictures to tickle Do-joon’s memory and gets a lead on a local junk collector who he says he saw there.
She heads to his home and offers to give him acupuncture to help him forget the “terrible sight” he claims to have seen. She knows a special spot on the thigh that affects memory. She thinks it is his desire to confess, but he in fact tells her the story of how her son killed the girl because she called him a retard. He was only doing what his mother always taught him to do—fight when insulted.
His mother kills the old man to prevent him ever telling his story. She burns down his house.
Soon after, she is visited by the police because they’ve found the real killer, a former boyfriend of the murdered girl. She insists on visiting the young man in prison—she knows he didn’t do it. He turns out to be even more mentally handicapped than her own son.
She nearly breaks down, but says nothing. Do-joon comes home. He discusses the girl with his mother, seemingly more devious than his condition would allow. The mother swallows her horror.
Next we see her preparing for a bus trip for mothers of grateful children. Do-joon buys her a big bag of food and supplies, then slips her the acupuncture kit that he found in the ashes of the junk-collector’s house. Does he know? Does he understand? She is shattered all over again. Both she and her son are murderers.
She boards the bus and we see the other women dancing in the aisle on the bus ride while mother broods out the window. She takes out her acupuncture kit and pricks her leg, smiles, stands up and melds into the crowd on the bus, dancing.
This movie is about Adéle, a young (15) French girl still in high school at the beginning of the movie. She’s naturally pretty but not especially outgoing and struggling with all of the same things that all teenagers struggle with. We join her in school, where it seems that French high-schoolers learn much different material than I remember from my own days in school. They really read their literature and they really get into the philosophy of it.
That’s part of the reason why this film is 3 hours long. The other is the languorous storytelling and lovely, lingering scenes. The camera lingers on Adéle a lot. The director seems a voyeur—reminiscent of Kubrick with Lolita.
Adéle spies Emma while crossing the street one day. She thinks nothing of it, but Emma stays fixed in her mind. Adéle has a failed quickie with a male friend and begins to realize that she may be more interested in women. There are large parts of the school that are OK with it. Her small circle of friends is not OK with it. They are nearly shockingly small-minded and bully her mercilessly, loudly and rudely.
Adéle seeks out Emma at a gay bar and they begin to see more of each other. Their passion is well-documented, tastefully if a bit lengthily. They visit each other’s parents’ homes—Emma’s parents are more accepting while Adéle’s parents are far more traditional and cannot be trusted with their secret.
The film follows their relationship over years, with Adéle graduating and becoming a nursery-school teacher and Emma’s painting career still in the starting blocks. They throw a party at their shared home, with only Emma’s friends there—it’s not clear that Adéle has any friends other than Emma. It’s clear that this is just fine with Emma.
Emma is a crueler person, more judgmental , insecure and frustrated. Her career doesn’t go anywhere because she can’t adapt, she can’t distinguish criticism from critique. She assumes the stronger role, with Adéle so much younger. She thinks she’s being encouraging when she tells Adéle to write more, but she’s really just trying to impose her own goals on her.
Emma is more controlling and Adéle chafes, eventually cheating on her with a work colleague (a man). We find this out in a shouting match in which Emma analytically interrogates a nearly guileless Adéle, who has been cheating but is too naïve to even lie gracefully about it. She cries and is thrown out on her ass. Emma can’t brook disobedience and Adéle is still a young fool who never had a real youth.
It’s a pretty great movie about a love affair, edited nearly perfectly, even at 3 hours. It’s just long enough to make you feel you know the characters and the gaps are long enough to provide real drive in the story. The only exception is the 30-minute coda: it felt a bit long. Emma and Adéle met for a drink, where Adéle tries to get Emma back, but she doesn’t love her anymore. She still wants her, but she doesn’t love her. Next, we see Adéle at Emma’s gallery opening—where there is awkwardness and discomfort galore.
The movie ends on Adéle leaving the gallery, frustrated but resigned, with a young man chasing her, to no avail.
This is a lovely and interesting and intriguing science-fiction movie about an inscrutable alien force that lands on Earth, occupying a lighthouse and emanating an ever-advancing shimmer. Years of observation have yielded only casualties and very little information. The shimmer doesn’t advance very quickly but it’s inexorable. It transforms everything it touches, refracting it not just visually but intrinsically, genetically.
The mood is somewhat like Stalker but more prosaic, more explanatory, more wordy. The cast is almost exclusively female, but it doesn’t parade it about. it just works. Natalie Portman is excellent, as are the others. Oscar Isaac, as one of the few male actors, is enigmatic and delivers a solid performance. There are long stretches of unexplained weirdness, where the viewer is allowed to come to his own conclusions.
The ending is somewhat ambiguous, although there are more than enough clues. Lena (Portman) makes it to the lighthouse, but does she return? Where did that tattoo come from? From one of her compatriots? How?
I think this was an all-around excellent science-fiction movie and it says a lot about Hollywood that it was distributed via Netflix in the rest of the world while it was strangled in the crib in the States.