FILM REVIEW
Review Scoring Chart - 10:
Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above
Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1:
Reprehensible; 0: Non- Functional.
360
Dir: Fernando Meirelles
Stars: Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, Anthony Hopkins, Ben Foster
Running Time: 115mins
[This article was first published on Flixist as part of my London Film Festival coverage. It is republished to coincide with the movie's US and UK release.]
My coverage of this year's London Film Festival kicks off with the
latest movie from Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles, whom many of
you may know from his outstanding 2002 crime thriller, City Of God, or perhaps his 2005 adaptation of John Le Carré's The Constant Gardner.
Meirelles takes his time choosing the right project, with a three or
four year gap quite common between his movies. It is difficult to pin
down exactly what he looks for, but common among his best known works
are scathing looks at social and international problems - the influence
of the favela gangs in City Of God, the West's use of Africa as a medical testing ground in Constant Gardner - seen through the eyes of vividly depicted central characters.
In that respect, it is easy to see what must have attracted him to 360, Peter Morgan's script (very loosely inspired by Arthur Schnitzel's play, La Ronde)
about the connections people make in life and love. Like Meirelles, it
has an international sensibility, spanning across the globe, and a
strong romantic streak behind the central conflicts. Unfortunately, its
storytelling is rather too mechanical and contrived to connect on the
human level it so desperately aspires to.
The film's central gimmick is that it offers a multitude of
inter-connected stories which eventually all come back to where they
started, hence the title. In the Q&A that followed the screening,
both Meirelles and Morgan stated their desire to avoid the film coming
across as a 'short film collection' in a too-perfect circle, meaning
that they wanted the structure to appear authentic (unlike Schnitzel's
play, which Morgan said he felt was too 'Germanic' in its strictly
ordered narrative beats) and connected on a level deeper than random
story crossovers.
The harsh truth is that they failed. For a film ostensibly about
making connections, there is little substance to the manner in which the
characters come across each other or are linked together. For this kind
of story to work, it is important that it seems a completely natural
occurrence every time two paths cross: here, a character attends a
therapy group meeting in America (trying to come to terms with his
daughter having gone missing some years before), which just so happens
to be attended by another character, who is supposed to be visiting her
sister from Paris - except that the sole purpose of the journey is
obviously just to put her in that place at that time. Next time we see
her, she's back in Paris, where she needs to be for the next step of her
story to progress.
By attempting to make the story 'circle' less obvious, Morgan muddied
his own thematic waters. Because the linking points between one
character's story and another are so engineered, the fundamental idea
underpinning the film - that big realisations tend to come through being
open to random encounters, rather than sticking with what we know - is
undermined by the encounters not seeming random at all. Big realisations
instead come about when a cosmic screenwriter makes them so. Even the
film seems to acknowledge how poorly it conveys this idea, choosing to
repeatedly sum it up in blunt montages and monologues in the final act.
There is little point in trying to deny a gimmick when it is the
lynchpin of how your narrative operates. Despite having never read or
seen the play, my suspicion is that Schnitzel's play came across to
Morgan as precisely ordered in terms of how each character crossed
another not necessarily because of any innate German-ness, but because
it was the best way of telling the story in the manner that the
playwright wanted to tell it. Morgan admitted that at least two
characters remained in the film for no other reason than he liked them,
even if their actual purpose was questionable at best.
Keeping the
structure to a stricter 'character A meets character B, who meets
character C, who meets character D, etc.' would have eliminated the
myriad loose ends (and discouraged viewer predictions of who will next
be linked to who and how, which are all too easy to guess) that crop up
as a result of Morgan's constant hopping between stories and beds, since
Morgan said he was compelled to write an story of people linked
internationally by sex. In La Ronde, the reasons for sex being
the uniting factor was because it was something common among rich and
poor in a society divided by class. Given how much the modern world is
already connected, in shared cultures and widespread communication, the
need for the sexual angle is tenuous at best.
All this results in the film coming across every bit as the short
film anthology that Meirelles wanted to avoid. It is pointless to try
and judge the film on its big picture, because it is so unclear about
what that is. Fortunately, the component parts are, for the most part,
adequate. The most engaging story is that of a sex offender who gets
lured to a girl's hotel room when their flight is stranded by bad
weather: Ben Foster gives a performance both sympathetic and scary as a
man trying desperately to avoid giving into his violent urges, leading
to the sort of emotional conflict and tension so lacking elsewhere.
By contrast, the story involving Jude Law and Rachel Weisz is too
familiar and has characters existing only to serve the problem, rather
than the problem deriving from the nature of the characters. Excepting
Foster, the lesser known actors do significantly better work than the
headline names, in no small part because it is easier to engage with
characters when your first reaction to them is more enigmatic than 'Oh
hey, it's Jude Law! Doesn't his hair look strange?' or 'I wonder when
was the last time was that Anthony Hopkins didn't sleepwalk through a
performance?'
360 is not a dislikeable picture, just one that seems to be
constantly working against itself. The soundtrack (selected by
Meirelles' wife) is appropriately varied and funky, the pace kept
reasonably brisk, and Meirelles captures just enough of the flavour of
each location to make the film feel properly international. (The overuse
of the same CGI plane was a lousy decision, though). A shame, then,
that no-one involved seemed entirely sure of what they wanted to say - I
asked Morgan and Meirelles how difficult it was to unify their visions,
and they responded by saying that a lot of the editing was done via
email, sending chunks of the film for each another to download and
assess. Though their answer was to emphasize their constant contact and
discussion, it made a sad kind of sense in relation to how my question
was inspired by the film coming across as assembled from disparate
parts.
Meirelles and Morgan were warm and generous with their answers -
including laughing off one chap who began his question with 'I thought
it was too long, but...' - but sometimes accidentally hinted that not
even they were entirely certain of what they wanted from the finished
film. For a story about people connecting, 360's biggest struggle was to do precisely that. [ 5 ]
FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER AND FACEBOOK IF YOU ENJOYED THIS ARTICLE!
OTHER ARTICLES YOU MAY ENJOY
