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Grey Matter
Balthazar is a young African filmmaker on the brink of directing his first project, The Cycle of the Cockroach, a fictional story about a young woman who survived unspeakable atrocities only to find herself committed to the same mental institution as a man driven insane by the crimes he perpetrated during the war. Potential funders for the film insist the themes are too bleak and pessimistic-they encourage Balthazar to make a "message" film that raises awareness about gender-based violence or HIV/AIDS instead. But he refuses to give up. Instead of telling his production team the news, Balthazar continues preparations for the film without financing or equipment. After rehearsing a scene with each of the characters, reality blurs and scenes from the script materialize, provoking the question: Can a film like this exist only in the director's dreams? Armed with a daring and creative visual language...
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Reviews
Just what I expected
Highly Overrated But Still Good
As Good As It Gets
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
Grey Matter is a beautifully made and acted film that is subverted by a script that seems to have cobbled together in order to get the film a release. The write up in the Tribeca Film Festival guide talks about the film as the story of filmmaker who loses his funding but presses on ward only to find the script coming to life. The reality of the film is that we watch as the filmmaker getting ready to make his film but finds that the funding isn't there. He then goes to bed and we see the film. It's about 20 minutes of the filmmaker and an hour and twenty minutes of the film before we get one last shot of the filmmaker shooting a woman playing an instrument and singing.The filmmaker stuff is okay, even if it seems to be referencing things we don't know (yet). The trouble happens when we see the film (The Life Cycle of the Cockroach) which deals with people abusing cockroaches and dealing with the terrors of the Rwandan massacres. It's pretentious twaddle with people having visions, long real time takes and the pain of living with terrible things that happened.(I won't get into the cockroach nonsense).It's really well done, but to what end? I don't know. It has the feel of the work of an overly clever film student who loved the surrealists and avant garde and threw everything he ever knew into it. The result is a film that means something to the director but confuses everyone else. Worse, it looks like the filmmaker sections that bookend the cockroach part was added because no one would buy his bull other wise. I know what he was getting at, but how it's done it's mess. One of the absolutely must miss films of the year. (I passed the press screening on the way out to go to lunch and I wanted to stop in and tell them to runaway and not lose an hour and a half of their life, but I left figuring that they could always walk out on on their own)
