Piers1

Some excellent individual and ensemble acting. The ending can be forgiven: you could say it was an ending with a 'twist', albeit a silly one involving absent-mindedness. Resourceful location shooting around a priory on Anglesey, Wales, and some iconic Scots character actors really gave a sense of a Hebridean setting.

..then people would understand it in its full beauty. It seems many reviewers condemn it for the particular - such as a poor example of scifi cinema robot or alien (the latter competing with that of Dark Star), or a sequence where a villain is found to be ticklish, which sets them oblivious as to the signifiance thereof and the movie's meta-narrative. For me, this film is of the school which performs a deftly deceptive lightness of touch around profound issues. But here, uniquely, we see utilised measured and studied absurdist interludes, and a romantic dreamlike dynamic. I write 'deceptive', because at its core, if you care to look deeper into the pool, there is a story which is a subtle yet quite profound exposition of and meditation on the nature of isolation; the yearning inherent in loneliness (who in their heart didn't hope for Neeya to be comforted with kisses and held in a loving embrace by Stepan before the end?) the transitory nature of being; how great beauty can exist alongside great tragedy; the whole wrapped in an environmental parable. Oh, and the soundtrack is powerfully evocative, like a fleeting nimbus of forgotten childhoods around quotidian adulthood; the shimmering whimsical harpsichord figure alternating with tone-poems and Kraftwerkian industrial-electro grooves on analogue synth are utterly fitting.

I recorded this from UK TV about 3 years after it was released and I would like to confess that I really enjoyed this production. I only wish it were available on DVD with subs.

I'm not familiar with Lelouch's body of work but have taken note of some critical appraisals certain of which mark him as somewhat polished, perhaps suggesting affectedness and/or superficiality.

IMO, underneath the main and supporting story lines here (which almost self-identify as yarns) which play like anecdotes of dubious veracity such as a bibulous fabulist at a bar might recount, there can be discovered a revelatory satire on the human condition (needless to say, the best commendation one could make for a work of art). This is commonly translated as a journey, a search for something nameless (because you don't know what it is yet), but you do know is of inestimable value - like some phantom treasure (cf. the tramp with the world-quieting singing voice), and which might be discovered anywhere.

Is it enlightenment? Love? I hesitate to name it. One thing that this film communicates very enjoyably and with resounding verve characterised in a very French, gaily philosophical way, is the common cinematic narrative that we all are linked by those seemingly random, chaotic, journeys or rather, it is our journeys which are interlinked which confers on us all the status of fellow-travellers, pilgrims dancing and singing our several ways, all of which ultimately -and without exception- lead in one direction: toward the place on the other side of the horizon.