The Threat

tedg

Spoilers herein.

Most films aren't dangerous. You watch them, they live and die, and you walk away into the next experience carrying a memory instead of a burden.

But some films are designed not for watching, but for carrying long after the lights return. In these films, nothing really happens. Nothing new is created, in fact. Instead, the images guide you to a place within you that is undiscovered. The film awakens that corner by giving it images, allowing you to `see' it. The most effective of these films - naturally - are discomfiting and therefore not popular. But they are quiet little gems hidden in the cacophonous pile of stimulation we normally inhabit.

`Aguirre' is one; here is another. Everything in it until the last two minutes are a walk through vaguely familiar back yards, leading up to the one image of Helen encountering herself with what we know are thin buzzwords. Because we know the new age blather is vacuous, this image is multidimensional: under the superficial yearning of Helen is a REAL encounter of ourselves but bereft of all those crutches. By her grasping at them, she deprives us of them. Pretty powerful stuff.

Julianne had just come off the `Vanya' project, whose goal was the creation of general multidimensional folding. It was for her what `Streetcar' was for Brando, a way of developing more than one simultaneous communication with the viewer.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 4: Worth watching.

score /10

tedg 14 May 2003

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0370146/