The Fountain (Movie 2006)

     (Image courtesy:slantmagazine.com)

Direction: Darren Aronofsky

Duration: 1hr 36min

Genre: Sci-Fic;Drama

Cast: Hugh Jackman
          Rachel Weisz
          Ellen Burstyn
          Mark Margolis
          Cliff Curtis

Synopsis:

The Fountain manages to unite three stories intertwined five hundred years apart on a single axis. The first story takes place in Spain in the 16th century, the second story today and the third story in space five hundred years later. The common ground of each story can be summarized as ways to achieve immortality.

Tommy, a scientist who is the backbone of the film, is experimenting with monkeys to find a cure for the brain disease that slowly kills his wife Izzy. In one of these experiments, he sees that he stops aging when he injects a liquid from a tree in Central America that has not been calculated. Although this is a revolutionary discovery, it will not heal Izzy. Izzy, on the other hand, is writing a 16th-century novel Ağ The Tree of Life li called The Fountain. But he seems to have already realized that he can't finish this novel. Then we go to the future, when Tom (Tommy's future state) travels through a sphere of space with that possible tree of life. Here, Tom is looking for ways to be together forever with his beloved wife. And there comes a moment that today, past and future are intertwined. As if there was one truth, one wanted at all times.

There is no long life and many experiences in this film, although the search is immortality. So there are no complicated events. There are concepts that can be generalized to every age. Everything can fit easily like pieces of a puzzle. And in the end, it makes the movie say; If the past is Izzy's book, and what Tom has done today in the implicit today is actually a single story, and Izzy writes it.

Incendies (Movie 2010)

                         (image Courtesy:imdb)

        

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Duration: 2hr 11min

Genres: Mystery Drama 

Starring:  Mustafa Kamel

                  Remi Girard

                  Hussein Sami

                

Synopsis:

An equation or perhaps a mathematical, precise, relentless, fascinating and inevitable theorem. This is the feeling that gives the vision of The woman who sings by Denis Villeneuve (Quebec French-speaking Canadian), a real big surprise at the Venice Film Festival which confirms the growth of an author who with Polytechnique (unpublished by us) had proved a talent Interesting. The film is the adaptation of a hit play by Wajdi Mouawad.
We are nowadays in Canada. Brother and sister (twins) find out from the will of the mother that the father they believed to be dead is actually alive and of the existence of a brother they knew nothing about. The mother, of Middle Eastern origin, has in fact lived an incredible, tragic life, of which they will discover and which we will know through a parallel journey, she in the 80s and her daughter today (who is not a researcher of pure mathematics). They will go through the same places, the same streets, in an endless cycle that is that of history and of the family, of stones and lands that are always the same, illuminated by the same sun, but bathed in ever new blood.
Childhood marks, here even branded, so strongly that, to put it in the protagonist's words, "it is a knife planted in the throat". It will take a whole life (and a testamentary will) to become truly adult, to erase the rage of a childhood of violence and to be able to rest in peace.
The film behind a fake name hides the Lebanon of the 1980s with its civil war between Christians and Muslims. Through the vicissitudes of a family, it succeeds very well in representing the religious, family, land and world division.
The woman who sings is a film that admirably succeeds in combining a mathematical rhythm, with explosions, fires of violence, which arrive almost inevitable, managing to excite us while leaving us petrified. For example, in the most beautiful moment of the film, a scene in which a bus is stopped by the Lebanese Christian Phalangists in search of Muslims. A scene that we won't reveal to you, but which is an excellent synthesis of the qualities of La donna che singing, one of the best films of the last few months.

A note of merit for the functional soundtrack and for the two women protagonists (Lubna Azabal and Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) who are intense and fragile in their complex roles.
The film, full of events and adventures, reaches an end where the unknowns of the equation begin to be clarified, in which the mother will no longer be an unknown variable, in which an unacceptable catharsis, but in the end inevitable, remains etched in the memory along with many stages of this magnificent journey.