Reviews

You could be content with "great" pictures and touching "How time flies and everything develops" romance, but somehow it is not enough to make such an end in itself.

Malick wants to explain everything again, where there is nothing to explain. And between the spherical corners of the film, there is a bumpy social study of children being destroyed by their two parents, the stern and punitive father and the loving mother, who make every terrible event as a divine sacrifice and themselves Bearing machine considered in the cosmic whole.

To quote from the foreword to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason on the question of what Enlightenment is: "I had to limit knowledge to make room for faith."

Malick, on the other hand, does not limit his statements and therefore can not believe anything because he somehow derives everything and "recognizes". Pity!

The film fits into a time when people call everything that does not suit them "fake news" and the big world explorers come back into fashion, even if the world is inexplicable.

The tree and the life are a martyrdom, if you take yourself as seriously as Malick. After Brett Pitt had to play Bach and Beethoven on the piano, I got the frightening assumption that even Mozart could follow. And indeed: then, in all seriousness, even Mozart will come. Malick creates the only comic moment, albeit involuntarily.

The minute-long scene with "child-waving helicopter parents in slow motion on the beach" to touching music at the end of the film, announce the end of the individual and the artistic content, the unanswerable (!) Question of the reason of our existence: The creator of the film has lost faith ,

highest hazard class - therefore 1 star

Unfortunately, the film is rather schematic and a bit flat from the story. Both main characters are over the top. The good and the bad, the victim of falling in love and the icy power-man. You do not need to watch a movie about that, you can do social research ...

The intention to understand Kirkegaard as an invitation to kill, I think also very questionable.

Unfortunately, the film also has problems with the music and the cuts. It is told by Mozart and at the same time you hear romantic music, not by Mozart. Rachmaninov borrows the female protagonist from the library and then listens to Mozart (clarinet concerto). Also, pieces of music are interrupted to the pictures.

Overall, this film is not a challenge and suffers from some essential shortcomings.

A good implementation of the novel by Turgeniev.

However, it is problematic to use the music completely to Bach.

Of course, Bach's music is wonderful, but difficult to integrate in the film because of its high degree of autonomy and density.

Therein lies the problem of the film: the music opens up a parallel world of art.

The boy strolling in love home does this to the entry chorus of the Bach Cantata BWV 8: Dear God, when will I die ..

Based on real cases from Gothenburg, the director has created an almost documentary-looking study of a youth gangs of black immigrant children who exclude younger white children with all sorts of tricks and "games". The younger children do not fight back and - perfectly educated politically - only symbolically set signs that they want to escape from the subtle captivity of the gang. Of course, adults do not help. After all, you do not want to be a "racist" ..

The film creates an oppressive mood through the static wide-angle camera with simultaneous subtle violence. Unwittingly, attitudes, macho, lack of imagination and threats of violence are also shown against adults who threaten politically correct with the police, what the gang kids (10-15 years) smile only tired.

Here, the original Swedish openness and Christian expectation developed over centuries meet totally disintegrated immigrant children who are unlikely to be integrated in the next three generations and, as Kant would say, work only with slyness, not reason: love and Being nice means being a weakling - just like the police in Sweden. Because authority means in the context of the gang: violence. So you know it from his tradition.

If Östlund's current big movie "the Square" is the grand exposure and dismantling of politically correct comfort, one can see the same direction in "Play", only from the perspective of the street: what is going wrong in a society of total anti-discrimination, in which is only abstracted without examining the facts?

The end is unbelievably apt and represents the verdict on the concrete facts: A reverse racism breaks down, destroys society and the quality of culture. The last music scenes of the film leave the audience dejected ...

Sweden has a new Ingmar Bergman who can display the individual human relationship at the same time oppressive from a political point of view.