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Rating:
The similarity of the insoluble final question with "Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana" by engineer Gadda runs down my spine, a discomfort at the solar plexus level of a micro-second lapse to stay with "feet on the ground," a roller-coaster drop of suspended certainties, a gutless feeling of not reaching the thread of the skein seasoned with an aseptic anguish of a momentary absence of contact with the lies we call reality.
There is timeless narration in the film, one can stay in the future, in the past, here, there... It's the same thing. The immediate is the peeling wallpaper of the ghost hotel making that mellifluous noise, where "the writer" and his discomfort reside.
Apart from the not-so-easy blood of the beginnings, the Coen brothers immediately with all their other films have cultivated a style that made that mass of radical chic cinephiles salivate, adopting bowling-like situations to fill their empty aesthetics of biennials in silver nitrate of a suburb that reflects itself refined, spying with a raised pinky when it drinks its tea.
But with Barton Fink, distancing from this wink triggered with the public, the brothers unleash an unreachable psychic modernism suitable for the good living room instruments of a reverent Battiato-like bourgeoisie. "La Cura" that the brothers unwind does not hide behind luciferian promises like in the national Franco, which deceive by exploiting the stimulation of good feelings.
Caustic is the rendition with that "fire walk with me" that burns everything, even revising lynchian occult sensationalism. Let's not even talk about the ridiculous and sterile little box of Seven with that comic face of Brad Pitt doing his utmost to be not credible in his despair.
There are other "breaking" boxes here. There's a piercing solitude, an ancestral solitude that through Hollywood events makes us simultaneously stay with beak closed and mouth agape from the revealed surprise that the Californian hill was made in the image and likeness of the lake of Nemi.
There is splendidly a lack of multiplex proselytism due to cynical resignation in not projecting either end or beginning. There is a sacredness in all this where clever shortcuts are annulled by that deflected halo of John Goodman which confuses and withdraws from being judged because there is a mystification of reality that does not delegate the leaning of our comfort towards material concreteness, which shatters in the concatenation of universes that the directors enlighten from a vision of Saint Thomas.
And pulling the rope on the wrestling incipit becomes a fascinating and distressing diversion to propose inner battles towards those possessions that truly ground us, far from easy capital sins and cardboard devils.
"LOOK AT ME! I WILL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND!"
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Other reviews
By ilfreddo
Two dimensions, dream/reality, seem to progressively mix and almost merge until the final leap into our Barton's muse.
The Coen brothers paint Hollywood as a chaotic, drunken, whoring, undulating, and unpredictable rollercoaster.
By stargazer
‘If Barton is a God who creates masterpieces, Charlie/Karl is his antagonist, with whom he must confront and thanks to whom he can write his masterpiece.’
‘Hollywood's gears have already crushed the writer, who will find himself trapped in his fantasies, in a surreal ending that truly leaves one astounded.’
