Projected during Halloween evening at Luxor with The Wicker Man, other film with chautted destiny, The Adjustment has a missed appointment: that of a cursed film which took almost forty years to be available, after having suffered the frascs of laborious production and commercial failure. In his inability to attend his daughter's violin recital, Johanne, his father Ian (Edward Woodward) must take the road after having a series of prophetic nightmares. Back to this miraculous film which is finally available in a version restored in Blu-ray as in cinema!
Lindsey breaks down the family cell
By an anecdote that many children born in the last century will recognize as the distant time when we went to the video club to choose the Saturday night film, Vic Pratt, film archivist tells how he discovered this film by chance: « One night my uncle had chosen the film directed in 1981 by Lindsey C. Vickers. A strange choice because it wasn't the kind of things he usually brought. Most of the time we were watching an old Hammer movie. ». Experimental film, for viewing The Adjustment Until now, we had to find an old dusty VHS from a collector or find the holy relic in an attic vacuum.
To understand the myth surrounding this unique British film by Lindsey C.Vickers, we must return to the initial promise of a series of films to be sold to television stations around the world under the title « A Step in the Wrong Destination ». The distribution of the film will have been condemned by rough relations with the production. The Adjustment disappeared from radars with few exceptions of rare television passages. Lost in the limbos of oblivion and a cult nourished by the fetish of the cursed tape, Lindsey C.Vickers' film starts with a cottony atmosphere that already prefigures its nightmare capacitydesque and other films to come from the 1980s that cultivate the same atmosphere suspended from the fantastic and the fear of the unsaid. The original murder has a dream all the more in its long version, more powerful than the one we share with you.
Counterpoint of the nightmare
The first part of The Adjustment rushes us into a bottomless well from which we will not escape unscathed to the generic. Like an elliptical fall, like an endless spiral staircase from which one would fall untaken, the work continues to respond with almost obsessive emotions. The Adjustment shows the invisible, the one behind the ambiguity of family relations. First of all in the remarkable sequence that makes us measure the extent of Johanne's Electre complex vis-à-vis her father: with prodigious ideas of staging and three pieces of string, Lindsey C.Vickers electrifies each of his plans of an unhealthy atmosphere.
Johanne is terribly angry with his father for not being able to attend his violin recital. For mysterious reasons, the latter must be absent, but the initial exchange with one of his colleagues suggests other, more perverse motivations. Is it about breaking his daughter or getting away from her to protect her? Ambiguity hovers throughout the film. The power of Johanne's gaze penetrates the soul. As an ephemeral tear slides along his face, one can see the hatred, the hatred that springs from betrayal and the fruit of toxic love. Fascinating ability to talk to the spectator through body play.
On his knees, slowly touching his father's arm sitting on the couch, Johanne immediately catapults the film in a disturbing psychoanalytic dimension. OST of Trevor Jones (to whom one owes in particular the music of incredible Dark Crystal, Labyrinth or The Last of the Mohicans) refers to childhood neurosis with notes of violins that maintain emotional blackmail on screen. Summum of malaise, mother in the background, silent. Johanne is indifferent to her own mother and will not look at her.
The mourning of Electre
Slow plane sequences draw the child's fascination for his father, whose portrait does not leave the bedside table and even the dresser. Lindsey C.Vickers manages to make us feel a palpable tension: that of an impossible relationship. Behind Johanne's bedroom door, Ian sets the trigger, he hesitates to join his daughter in the middle of the night. From her bed, Johanne jubilee as if she felt her father's presence and that a mysterious force only asked to satisfy their forbidden union.
« In death, the subject becomes a diagonal between space and time » wrote Austrian writer and engraver Alfred Kubin in Other side, fantastic book where a cartoonist is invited to join « The Empire of Dream », twilight utopia that turns into a nightmare collapse. The support managed to decouple the residual action of time. Indeed, do not expect cascade turns and other twists. Lindsey C. Vickers offers a cinema of psychic anguish through loop repetition and everyday banality.
One day without end
A nightmare that can no longer be extirpated and takes an endless turn in the second part of the film where Ian leads. The more he moves away from the family unit, the more tension rises and the plans respond, until we let ourselves imagine the anxieties that go through the character. Less percussive than this crazy introduction and his unsolved initial murder, we must adhere to the most summary minimalism and the inevitable tragedy announced. By its slowness and elliptical rhythm, The Adjustment recalls the biases displayed in modern films like Enter The Void Gaspard Noah, where sensory experience is inseparable from lengths without which immersion would paradoxically be impossible. It is not so surprising that the French director used to polemics congratulated the release of the title:
« An unknown masterpiece, The Appointment is a very large film [...] maze [which] creates a kind of hypnotic state, both terrifying and liberating. It is time for French spectators to discover this singular and profound premonitory dream of a contemporary, unjustly unknown, by Nicolas Roeg.» »
The Adjustment is a matter of signs in the image of this silent pack of rottweilers that roam at night. Without transforming the essay, it remains a fascinating film for its ability to hypnotize the spectator even gets bored on its epilogue with a slowness peculiar to sleep paralysis. Sometimes, however, it is necessary to accept a little boredom to switch from one state to another. A curiosity to be reserved for fans of fantastic cinema, even for its first part without equivalent. In a logic of courageous heritage, we thank the distributor The Films of Camelia and the movie fosseur Marc Olry, without which this cursed feature would definitely be buried.
Subscribe
Connection
0 Remarks
oldest
