- Criticism: the virtue of wonder
Tenet isn't just Christopher Nolan's latest film. If we stick to the most obvious ideology of his proposal, it is also the first. Reversible palindromes thing . The film does nothing more than repeat the more or less common places of a spy intrigue spread throughout the wide world in the manner of James Bond. But the other way around. Suddenly, everything that is seen results in its common and reiterated rigorously unique, new evidence. And tremendously spectacular.
Starring John David Washington assisted by Robert Pattinson as a makeshift assistant and Elizabeth Debicki as the master key (and with Kenneth Branagh disguised as a villain to the Apocalypse and beyond), the film possesses the perennial virtue of wonder. On Wednesday, August 26, the curtain opens in Europe for a film destined to save everything: to theaters, to the film season and, already, to the planet itself.
Last week, pandemic through, the director served as master of ceremonies at a planetary press conference. It could not be otherwise. There, once again, he made explicit the ideas of a man who long ago decided to turn his signature not so much into the arabesque of a comme il faut author as into a simple and resounding din. It sounds and resonates exaggerated and that, indeed, is the second surname of the only man in the world who speaks with an echo. "The first James Bond film that I remember going to the cinema was The Spy Who Loved Me , with Roger Moore," he says as an introduction and perhaps to mark distances. And he continues: «And it's still one of my favorites. I recently saw it with my children and in a way it takes you back to that original experience. I must have been seven when I went with my father. And what I remember from the experience is that it felt like you could walk across the screen, appear anywhere in the world and witness incredible things. It was an experience of pure escapism and with an excellent fantasy component : like the car that turns into a submarine. I think I have spent a good part of my career trying to make the public feel that way, to give them back that fascination for fleeing to places they had never dreamed of.
Let's say that basically the statement traces word for word the one he made at the penultimate Cannes festival on the occasion of 2001: a space odyssey . So, he was just the restorer and brightener for the original 1968 tape, but no one would tell. “If I learned anything from Kubrick,” he said then, “it's that movies can change reality. There are no limits to cinema and he proved it by taking his rules to the extreme. He put others and, in some way, it can be said that he reinvented it. My goal in this profession is to be able to make someone feel in front of a film of mine the same thing that I felt when I saw 2001 ». It is clear.
Now, with Tenet filmed in up to seven countries, each one in a corner of the Earth, and with a budget of 225 million dollars , the sensation of travel, or simple flight, presides over everything and multiplies. Even exasperation perhaps. “When you create entertainment on a large scale, you very quickly run into the limitations of what you can build. The real world is so huge and so extraordinary and offers so many possibilities ... On the one hand, as I said, it is pure escapism, but, on the other, it also gives a greater scope to the story. Tenet is a classic spy story in which the threat is global. And that is the key right now: right now, any threat is global. All pandemic and apocalyptic.
If you look closely, or not so closely, Tenet does nothing more than condense and expand each of the obsessions that have dominated the director's filmography. The filmmaker recognizes this after admitting that he has been spinning this film discontinuously since he began directing and almost full time for seven years. “There are some images and resources that I have been thinking about for a long time, decades to tell the truth. And those who know my first works will recognize some of the motifs, tropes, like the bullet that comes out of the wall and goes back into the gun . It is something that is used metaphorically in Memento , but here we try to make it real. And so it is. The entire film rests on the oldest of cinema's tricks: the one caused by the projector's handle that simply returns the La Ciotat train to its origin, which is also its destination. And what goes for the firearm, works for everything else. As the trailer for the movies already announces, each action scene is a strange dance, violent and graceful at the same time in at least two senses. “To prepare these scenes we used various choreographers. The sensation we were pursuing is that of a dance, ”he says. A reversible dance, one might add.
If you ask him about his literary, philosophical or, if applicable, ideological references, the only name he pronounces is that of the Dutch cartoonist of specular and infinite topographies Maurits Cornelis Escher . "Honestly," he starts modest, "many minds greater than mine have explored these ideas for a long time. Actually, I drink a lot from visual sources. Escher, the Penrose Eternal Ladder and things like that are what I've used. What I do is transform them into diagrams for my writing. I'm trying to capture the directions of time and how they might fold over each other ... Escher, no doubt. After watching the film, one of the texts that may well spring to mind is Gödel, Escher, Bach: an eternal and graceful loop, the book at the Hofstadter spoke of an X phonograph that is destroyed when it plays a recording entitled I cannot be played on player X. Basically, that's what happens in this graceful, timeless, and why, exaggeratedly violent loop that is Tenet; a film that falls apart before the spectator's eyes at the precise moment in which it ends to begin again. The last film from the exaggerated and ravenous Christopher Nolan is definitely the first.
THE LOOP PARTS
MUSIC
Nolan says that he understands music as an indistinguishable part of the sound mix. For the first time since 2005, when he shot 'Batman Begins', he dispenses with the composer Hans Zimmer and has the one who is undoubtedly the star of the moment: the Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson. He was responsible for 'Black Panther' and to his credit has the soundtrack of 'Mandalorian'.
all the countries
The United Kingdom, Italy, India, Denmark, Norway, the United States and, above all, Estonia are the seven countries in which the film was shot. In the last of them, the so-called Pärnu route was closed where one of the most incredible and incomprehensible car chases in history takes place.
always celluloid
Again, as in 'Dunkirk' and before in 'The Dark Knight', the film alternates wide format celluloid (this time 70mm) with IMAX cameras.
budget
The film boasts a budget of $ 225 million. Only in 'The Dark Knight. The legend is reborn 'first surpassed the 200 million mark. 'Origin', 'Interstellar' and 'The Dark Knight' were between 150 and 180 million.
photography and the rest
Hoyte van Hoytema collaborates with Nolan again after having completed the photography of 'Interstellar' and 'Dunkerque'. Nobody portrays space like him. The proof is 'Ad astra', by James Gray. In the montage, Jennifer Lame replaces Lee Smith who has been with the director all her life. She, who comes from the more 'indie' world, is responsible for 'Hereditary', by Aris Aster, as well as a regular collaborator of Noah Baumbach.
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