Salinger and Gunda

It is probably realistic that after the first initial excitement over cinemas being open again and all these super-serious subjects I have seen, the rest will not be comparable to such heights. There are simply not enough quality new movies being promoted on the market. True, I could have turned to some tried old classics like "The Third Man" but I have seen most of them already and stupidly I made a mistake of going rather for something new. Well, I got what I deserve.

"My Salinger Year" had Sigourney Weaver and I thought, well I loved her previous roles, she wouldn't be in a bad movie. Wrong. It is a obvious re-hash of "Devil wears Prada" and its so derivative that I could hardly keep still in the cinema. Except that "Devil wears Prada" was witty, campy, sharp and funny - everything this one is not. It is so half-baked that after the movie one wonders, was that supposed to be a comedy or drama or what? And who is the main character here? It could be that the movie suffers simply because its made of a real-life memoirs so damn reverence might have spoil everything. Just like in "Devil wears Prada" here we have a young, frumpy provincial girl arriving in New York and following her dreams - in this case its not a fashion but literary agency and she has to answer the phones and tiptoe around famous writers, the biggest being J. D. Salinger who must never ever be disturbed with any communications or God forbid media - he famously despises journalists and does not do interviews. Joanna (Margaret Qualley) even has to read his fan letters and reply with a formulaic copy & paste answer - this is all quite silly as she has never read Salinger and has no emotional connection with the agency's biggest star. Salinger is never actually shown, which is a effective idea - unfortunately Joanna is and I find her immensely irritating because she basically mooches around imagining herself to be a real artist and authoress but she is not doing anything about it except being nasty to the other people (like her boyfriend) who actually write and at the end of the movie, just as Sigourney congratulates her on a good job, she victoriously quits and show them all. Since all this time she was not writing at all, I almost gleefully wanted her to be jobless and homeless. It was not funny, it was not dramatic, it was just touching the characters but not really going in any depth about them and the worst of all, I found young & fresh faced Margaret Qualley extremely irritating because her character does not really do anything except answering the phone and read other people's letters + most of the time she is just miserable, smoking and pretending to be serious artiste but there is absolutely zero proof she has any talent except imaginary. Its kind of silly girl's idea of how to be a writer - move to New York and annoy other people around you who have concrete life going on. 

"Gunda" was something else completely and still not exactly a success: I kinda knew what I am getting myself into because I saw a trailer, but still it came as a surprise. It is a black & white documentary (I guess) about life of the animals on the farm - it is completely without a narrative and no music, the only sounds we hear are the natural sounds of flies, wind rustling, cows mooing. It starts with a big sow (presumably the title character) gets new baby piglets, than they squeak and follow her around - than there are some chicken prancing around, cows going playfully out in the fields before camera returns back to the pigsty where the sound of the track signalise the farmer is here to collect the piglets - we never see this, only hear it, which makes it even more effective - Gunda don't understand where are the piglets and frantically searches all over for them, there is desperation and shock in her eyes. The End. 

It is extremely slow - yes, very artsy but if we decide to follow animals rhythm and present it as a movie for humans, it does not work because as a species we are in a completely different plane now. We move fast, we think fast, our entertainment is much faster so when chicken start walking gingerly around, both me and my cinema buddy fell asleep immediately. I mean there is nothing to stay awake for, because the flies are buzzing, the cows are mooing and everything is almost meditative. It is strangely moving and haunting because we knew the piglets from the very start to the end, so its horrible to think they are raised to be somebody's food. We desperately try to infuse them with a human characteristics but it does not really work because they don't really behave like humans - mother sow grunts and almost kill the piglets with her clumsiness  (she actually steps on one and kills him)  but there is a moment just before the truck comes, where we witness something like gentleness between mother and her piglets as she lies at the door of pigsty and her children are sniffing at her affectionately. As a movie it does not really work because its too slow and too unusual - it is more of an experiment , being black & white and scriptless - but it does work as a message that says "look, they are sentient beings who have their own feelings and what we do to them is horrible".