Mike Mills
C'mon C'mon

It attracts and at the same time repels me, a film like this. Beautiful cinematography, excellent actors. It belongs to that cinema that tries to describe human relationships by piling up a series of dialogues, even partially contradictory, which go on to paint a complex, multifaceted picture, not necessarily edifying or one that doesn’t want to arrive at a single univocal message, but rather loses itself in the vastness of feelings that is characteristic of the human race.

An almost literary cinema, very written, which however, in this case, knows how to use the specific and peculiar tools of the seventh art. A splendid black and white film that from the very start gives the story a slightly sorrowful tone, the long-shot frames in the diverse settings of an America that is never just a background (from Los Angeles to New York, to New Orleans). Even the ambient noises take on a meaning, thanks to the "diegetic" use of the protagonist's radio journalist tools.

Rarely have I seen such an accurate and varied use of proxemics between characters as in this film: each moment has its pose, a posture that is always a posture of the soul as well as the body.

But, in these cases, we know, the risk is that of speaking pretentiously, of appearing a bit too sophisticated, well-off Americans masturbating over the small big issues of everyday life, about the fact that the child (son of a somewhat problematic couple, consigned for a few days to Uncle Joaquin Phoenix) reacted badly to a reprimand, got offended about something, thinks his mother is somewhat chaotic, etc.

If on the one hand, I don't criticize the content, which, even though I don’t particularly love, I understand can concern many families of bourgeois society, I am less lenient towards certain stale dialogues. The classic "I'm fine" repeated emphatically and so on, this exasperated pomposity of feelings, yet it seems almost necessary to go and look for them, the problems. Otherwise, you aren’t interesting. This is the fundamental flaw of the film, for me: it speaks the language of a world that is simply winding up on itself.