Media Shy

Although this movie does a fairly good job (warning: told in flashbacks) of Isadora Duncan's life as a dance revolutionary, it focuses a bit too much of her love affairs and not enough on how innovative her dance techniques and teaching curriculum were - Duncan essentially created modern dance, rebelling against traditional dances and the ballet. Her insistence on flowing robes and the importance of feeling the body move broke with all kinds of social codes and taboos - women were still wearing corsets! So it is a shame that her lasting legacy of modern dance is not mentioned - her lurid life is not why she is revered.

This film is very atmospheric, with undertones of Bergman. Set in an isolated town in the cold, bleak north, the ambience is gloomy and unsettling, but the viewer is intrigued by a mystery - strangers are appearing, but they never talk with or interact in any other way with the townspeople. I am avoiding spoilers here - suffice to say the story unfolds slowly but carefully. I felt as if I were reading a well-written story of the supernatural, or watching a particularly good Twilight Zone episode, where everything is "normal" and explainable, except for one thing . . . .

This movie, though well-acted and convincingly filmed, owes too much to other films. Hints of Tarantino movies such as "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservoir Dogs", and also of "Bonnie and Clyde", kept distracting me. And I think the main character's amorality (thefts, betrayals, and killings) was not explained. In Camus's novel "The Stranger", the main character's amorality is foreshadowed by his reaction to his mother's death, which is, basically, a numbness, a sense of nothing. You immediately understood that this character was unfeeling and uncaring. His later action of randomly killing someone made sense. In this film, the character's amorality was explained as that he was just "born that way", but he goes from being a thief to a murderer really fast! There was also an implication/blame cast on a repressive and corrupt police force as a rationale for his crime spree, which I didn't buy into. In "Bonnie and Clyde", you got the feeling that the main characters enjoyed the bank robberies and killings because it excited them and made them feel like a unit. In this film, the "angel"'s partner in crime is casually murdered by the angel on an apparent whim. He doesn't enjoy killing. The only thing he seemed to enjoy was stealing stuff to give to people (a hint of Robin Hood), but this concept was quickly dropped when he picked up a gun. So, the question is, is an amoral character fully explained by an amoral film?