This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week's theme is movies with non-linear storytelling, which I have to admit was a bit of a toughie. The first movie came immediately, and I won't be surprised to see several other people select it, but the other two took a bit longer. And amazingly, there's nothing before 1960:
Two for the Road (1967). Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney play a married couple whose marriage is on the rocks after ten years. On a car trip from England to the south of France, we learn what's gone wrong in their marriage. The story is linear in terms of going from London to the Riviera, but along that journey the movie jumps back and forth between various points in the marriage, qualifying it for this week's theme.
Before the Rain (1994). Three vignettes tell the story of that part of the breakup of the former Yugoslavia as it affected what is now (Northern) Macedonia. (The country has long been in a dispute with Greece which thinks Macedonia is only Greek, with the resolution being that the country is bein renamed the Republic of Northern Macedonia.) Dialogue early in the first vignette tells us a bit about the nature of time ("Time never dies. The circle is never round."), and to be honest my using the movie in this theme gives away a bit about the movie. Anyhow, the first vignette involves a monk with a vow of silence who's taken in an ethnic Albanian child, not quite by choice; the second story is about a magazine in London that's published photographs from the war; finally, in the third story, one of those photojournalists goes home to Macedonia.
La jetée (1962). A man in post-World War III Paris has a very distinct memory of being at Orly airport and seeing somebody murdered, and the scientists use that in their experiments to send the guy backwards in time for their own purposes. The man eventually falls in love with a woman he meets there, complicating things. The story is told almost exclusively in photographs. Terry Gilliam has stated that this movie was the basis for his 12 Monkeys.
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3 comments:
I haven't seen any of your picks but I've been meaning to watch Two for the Road as I love Audrey Hepburn
Haven't seen any of these, La jetée has been on my radar for a while. I'm terrible about getting around to a lot of movies.
I almost used Two for the Road but I thought I would go more modern. Route. This film is such a well done film about love and the difficulties during marriage. It makes it all the more great knowing that Hepburn and Finley had an affair during this time. I have not seen the other 2 films but I know of the 3rd one because of 12 Monkeys. Thanks for reminding me about this film.
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