christmas holiday blog : focus on 4 months 3 weeks and 2 days.

i think unsurprisingly i have begun a love affair with all things eastern european, it began when i revisited "last resort" by Pawel Pawlikkowski and last night ( one night in the holidays- i wrote this on paper first. ) i watched - completely captivated from start to finish - the most wonderful piece of cinema called 4m3w2d. The film focuses on two girls and how they cope with their extremely unpleasant experience of an illegal abortion. Set in the twilight years of commy-era Romania the film in appearance remains a beauty to watch even thought the setting seems to scream decay and poverty, " directed with quite astonishing flair. " these kind words are know overstatement as this poignant 'masterpiece' really did leave me speechless and exited. thinking about the idea of authorship this film is really hard to tell, the direction is really amazing and there is a definite flare and style to it but the cinematography is stunning as well and above all this there is a beautiful script so the authorship is a real collaboration here .

Yes there is a difference between cinema and movies , Avatar this certainly was not but o'my god this blew my socks of just as much and got a whole different set of emotions tingling, this film had me and my two best friends literally shouting at the screen! that's a student studying medicine at Edinburgh and one studying english at Oxford plus a film student, all emotionally involved in the same film - this does not happen allot with us!

The acting in this could not have been more spot on - you feel the tension between the girls throughout the entire film and they hardly say a sentence to each other , any has since told us this is sometimes called finding the lens and these actresses certainly have mastered that technique.

i really enjoyed the maisoncen created in the film , the composition of every shot because every shot was stunning. My favorite being one were the main protagonist is in this gaudy bathroom , the shot is of the back of her head framed by these horrible blue tiles for about 4-5 seconds. Beautifully and very brilliantly thought out hots. Which however, slow these 'pause' moments may have been made the film work - in the silence it is for the audience to take in no words but thoughts and feelings the characters are going through.

To some extent an antithesis if you like would be my friend Eleanor who did enjoy the film yes but in the last 'pause' moment of the film spoke up and said , " why the boring silence " Well at that point in time i was to involved in the film to reply but later in discussion i had to say , because there were no words needed. it could have finished with some sort of closing sentence or remark but this film did not need it in fact i saw the final 'pause' as its own quiet applause and pat on the back because clearly it knew that it still had every audience member watching intently. i could not choose any words to finish it more poignantly. this harks back to the question asked of us by the infamous 'liz Lockhead' when she remarked that it was the audiences culture and you decide what the ; art, poetry, film , means for you . For Eleanor the silence didn't resonate she wanted something more - a definite ending - but ho can you have an ending when the film in essence was an experience, a beautifully observed character study.