Ethan Hawke is creative in the right conditions

Michael Almerida fails to deliver electrical current to Tesla

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Two things emerge after watching Michael Almerida's Tesla movie about the life of the famous electrical engineer and American inventor of Serbian origin Nikola Tesla.

The first is that the director is not interested in making a direct autobiographical film, by employing the collage or collage method, meaning that the film is composed of different-tone parts and mixes history with drama, imagination and documentation in a crude way.

The point is that Almyrida wants his characters to interact with the audience because he knows that the interaction factor will not be possible in the traditional way many people like Wikipedia.

And the result did not necessarily bear fruit as required.

The second thing is that the filmmaker chose not to present "Tesla" in a caricature way to an eccentric character who has been employed in other works.

Instead, with the help of his hero, Ethan Hawke, he created a somewhat tragic figure that no one would agree on.

Unconventional elements aside, Tesla is about an inventor who lived in the late 19th century and early 20th with a greater focus on the years between 1884, when he immigrated to the United States and started working for Thomas Edison, and 1905 when his project collapsed and the Wardin Cliff Tower, who financed him Partially millionaire JP Morgan.

Although this work covers material for the film The Current War itself last year, in which Nicholas Holt plays Tesla, the tone is different.

The film focuses on the character more than the inventor because it adds a fictional aspect in which Tesla (Hawke) deals with Addison (Kyle McLachlan), George Westinghouse (Jim Gavigan), JP Morgan (Donnie Keshawarz) and Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan).

If you took any scene from Tesla, it might sound like an ordinary biographical movie, but there are several stimulating doses that Almerida injects into the film to renew its tone from time to time.

Ann Morgan (Yves Hewson) narrates the movie and is the daughter of the said millionaire.

Anne is a small character in the film who occasionally appears in the inventor's pronoun.

In fact, she was said to be in love with him, but he did not reciprocate her feelings.

In the film, Ann tells the story from the future, as she searches for Tesla through Google and corrects the film's path for the viewer by talking to him directly.

She says that Tesla maintained its popularity even in the 21st century, citing a number of Google search results.

The movie also contains imaginary scenes closer to surreal, in which we see Tesla and Addison smearing each other's faces with ice cream!

We see them reconciling at the Chicago International Fair.

Anne maintains a solemn tone when she appears after those scenes to say that this hasn't really happened.

Perhaps the strangest of these surreal scenes is when Tesla is shown holding a loudspeaker and singing "Everyone Wants to Rul the World" by the famous Tears of Fears from the 1980s.

Hook - who collaborated with Almereida and McLachlan 20 years ago on Hamlet, a William Shakespeare play that brought its characters and events to New York in modern times - has created a character who is uncomfortable with herself.

He is overflowing with ideas and inventions, some of them wonderful, others inapplicable or crazy, and as a result, he does not have time to be a social person.

Often times during the movie Hooke plays the character sluggishly or as confused, not understanding why things seem obvious to him and not to others.

His reaction to Morgan's final rejection of his funding, which takes place on the tennis court before the singing scene, is painful, which reminds of Hawke's inimitable talent in performance, especially if the appropriate text was given.

When Almyrida wrote the first screening for the film in 1982 by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, the world was different.

At the time, the wireless communications that Tesla believed in were not widespread.

Even the name Tesla was unknown at the time, and it only became a trademark when Elon Musk launched his iconic car.

Although Almerida found it difficult to market the text for four decades, the movie comes today at a time when wireless communications have become a symbol of this golden era, and given the beginnings of the director's attempt to market the text, the comparison becomes amazing when we see that the world has been turned upside down and people become scarce about communication. Wired.

Biographical films are a mystery in cinema, as there is no clear formula for making or succeeding in them.

The debate in Hollywood about it is summed up in this question: How does a person in this century know another person who lived 200 years ago?

Or how does a director make a movie about a character from a bygone age whom he has never met?

Answer: CVs are just a guess in the cinema!

The success or failure of a movie depends on more than just the talent of an actor or the statesmanship of a director.

Yes, there is ambiguity in the equation, didn’t a seasoned like Clint Eastwood fail in "J. Edgar" despite the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio?

The secret of success is mysterious, there is magic in the process, didn’t the late Milosh Foreman succeed with Tom Hulse in the musical masterpiece Amadeus and kidnapped Oscar 1984 for the best movie?

Hulse then disappeared the legendary performance and never returned to the facade.

Didn't Foreman repeat it with Jim Kerry in "Man on the Moon" in 1999?

But the attempt was unsuccessful!

This is what we mean and what is meant to be said here is that "Tesla" is good in parts only, but it lacks the magic factor or is far from the "electrical current" necessary for the film to start as required.

Tesla in general seems as if the director filmed his notes on the movie instead of filming the movie itself.

Those who prefer autobiographical films that narrate like history books may not like Tesla, who uses unusual cinema tactics to put facts in an entertaining context instead of telling them in the context of a tedious lecture.

But he will admire those who are obsessed with watching any movie in which Hook appears, especially since this man spends most of his time in independent films and avoids as much as possible from the studio system.

This is primarily an artistic film made for a small slice and not for the public's consumption.

• Autobiographical films are considered a mystery in cinema, as there is no clear formula for making them or for success in them.

• The filmmaker chose not to present "Tesla" in a caricatured way to an eccentric character, and was able to create a tragic character.

• «Tesla» is good in parts, but it lacks the magic factor .. It seems as if the director filmed his observations on the film instead of filming the film itself.

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