It's hard to review this film without mentioning 'Taxi Driver'. Both films are about disillusioned war veterans, moving through the urban jungle, loathing the decadence of modern society, and rescuing a young girl from a brothel. Also, both films feature an aspiring politician during an election campaign. It's simply impossible to ignore so many similarities. But it's extremely difficult, not to say impossible, to make a film that can stand up to the iconic Scorsese classic.
Joe, a silent war veteran played by Joaquin Phoenix, specializes in difficult operations like rescuing young girls who have run into trouble. So he doesn't hesitate when an influential politician asks him to search for his daughter. The man doesn't want to involve the police, because he fears for his reputation.
Finding the girl turns out to be remarkably simple. But after having saved her by violently eliminating everyone standing in the way, things go wrong. There is more violence, more blood and more killing. In the end, Joe seems to emerge victoriously, but there is nothing to be happy about. 'Where do you want to go?', he asks the saved girl. 'I don't know', she says. 'I don't know either', is the desperate sounding answer.
Lynn Ramsay explains Joe's state of mind by inserting lots of short flashes, sometimes almost subliminal. It adds to the general mood of darkness and looming danger. All kinds of unpleasant things are going on, but Joe nor the viewer know exactly what. The only way to deal with it, is with ruthless violence.
But is this one man rescue mission enough to carry a whole film? I have my doubts. The first time Joe rescues the girl, the action is filmed in a very original way. We see everything happening through the images of the surveillance cameras in the building. This is exciting cinema. But at the end, Joe is filmed in a conventional way while slowly moving through a large villa, suspecting danger around every corner. This is a scene like so many similar scenes from other movies.
After leaving the cinema, I felt I had seen a bit too much violence and too little storytelling. But without doubt, this is a personal feeling: perhaps the lack of story elements is what makes this film stand out from others.
See more:
You were never really here and I've never been to me, either!
Fourth feature from the button-pushing Lynne Ramsay, YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE pits Joaquin Phoenix's emotionally blocked veteran Joe against a sordid child prostitution ring, meanwhile he is also seeking an outlet from the besetting trauma of his checkered past.
It is a gut-wrenching story on paper, but Ramsay configures sundry conceits to present a "reductive" diorama of the events, and the most prominent one is the viewpoint, which never deflects from Joe, hence signifies that there will be no lengthy flashback sequences to inform us what he has experienced (as a child, a soldier, etc.), only through the transient fragments of memory incessantly penetrating into Joe's heads, audience can piece it together proximately, but never the full picture, because for once, we don't need to know it, what is at stake here is its traumatic after effect.
Secondly, Lamsay flags up a bloated/beefed-up Phoenix's body metamorphosis, which brings about the corporeal testimony of what he has been suffering from, transferred through Ramsay's hyper-real observation (scars, bruise, etc.). Joe's knee-jerking coping mechanism towards the bane is self-suffocation, a leitmotif repeatedly wielded to induce our own gasping response, resounds hauntingly with the self-initiated count-down of Nina (Samsonov), the girl whom Joe is hellbent on rescuing from her pedophiliac abusers. Phoenix won BEST ACTOR is Cannes (along with Ramsay's script win), deservedly, his performance is arrestingly measured, profoundly unaffected but deeply affecting, because he invites us to care for Joe, a laconic, middle-aged, mom's boy, a damaged good whose weapon of choice is a hammer, he makes good as a brutal enforcer, using violence to repress his disturbed state, which is caused by violence/abuse itself, it is a vicious circle he cannot outrun, and we can pour out our sympathy to him when a bereft Joe decides to end his life in the lake (with the sublimely beauteous underwater stillness) before thinks better of it or near the denouement, a startled figment of his imagination prompts a perversely comical/shocking combo.
Last but not the least, it is about how Ramsay choose to present its action of brutality, and she ingeniously points up its "aftermath" instead of showing the actual execution (during his first rescuing attempt inside a high-end New York apartment building, Joe's action is entirely captured by the fuzzy security camera), violence itself is ephemeral, what lingers behind is its aftermath, tangible, grisly and immutable. When Joe finally loses it after seeing what Nina has done (a big letdown to fans of Alessandro Nivola though), it is a scathing brickbat towards the state of affairs without the help of conventional verbosity, and inaugurates Joe's mental ablutions of his own existence.
In the event, Ramsay's clean-cut, existential thriller owns to a lucid consciousness of its sensitive material, brilliant aptitude in its visual and sound literacy, also the film allows humor (a sprightly Judith Roberts as Joe's dotage-afflicted mother, sharing meta-PSYCHO joke in communion), and psychic vision (that moment when Joe realizes who is the culprit in his mind-scape) into the play, the main takeaway for me is the unexpected tendresse between Joe and a hit-man he has mortally injured (Price), lying together on the floor, humming along Charlene's '80s one-hit-wonder I'VE NEVER BEEN TO ME on the radio, and holding their hands, is the song really the answer to the film's English title? You were never really here and I've never been to me, either. Touché!
Joe, a silent war veteran played by Joaquin Phoenix, specializes in difficult operations like rescuing young girls who have run into trouble. So he doesn't hesitate when an influential politician asks him to search for his daughter. The man doesn't want to involve the police, because he fears for his reputation.
Lynn Ramsay explains Joe's state of mind by inserting lots of short flashes, sometimes almost subliminal. It adds to the general mood of darkness and looming danger. All kinds of unpleasant things are going on, but Joe nor the viewer know exactly what. The only way to deal with it, is with ruthless violence.
But is this one man rescue mission enough to carry a whole film? I have my doubts. The first time Joe rescues the girl, the action is filmed in a very original way. We see everything happening through the images of the surveillance cameras in the building. This is exciting cinema. But at the end, Joe is filmed in a conventional way while slowly moving through a large villa, suspecting danger around every corner. This is a scene like so many similar scenes from other movies.
After leaving the cinema, I felt I had seen a bit too much violence and too little storytelling. But without doubt, this is a personal feeling: perhaps the lack of story elements is what makes this film stand out from others.
See more:
You were never really here and I've never been to me, either!
Fourth feature from the button-pushing Lynne Ramsay, YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE pits Joaquin Phoenix's emotionally blocked veteran Joe against a sordid child prostitution ring, meanwhile he is also seeking an outlet from the besetting trauma of his checkered past.
It is a gut-wrenching story on paper, but Ramsay configures sundry conceits to present a "reductive" diorama of the events, and the most prominent one is the viewpoint, which never deflects from Joe, hence signifies that there will be no lengthy flashback sequences to inform us what he has experienced (as a child, a soldier, etc.), only through the transient fragments of memory incessantly penetrating into Joe's heads, audience can piece it together proximately, but never the full picture, because for once, we don't need to know it, what is at stake here is its traumatic after effect.
Last but not the least, it is about how Ramsay choose to present its action of brutality, and she ingeniously points up its "aftermath" instead of showing the actual execution (during his first rescuing attempt inside a high-end New York apartment building, Joe's action is entirely captured by the fuzzy security camera), violence itself is ephemeral, what lingers behind is its aftermath, tangible, grisly and immutable. When Joe finally loses it after seeing what Nina has done (a big letdown to fans of Alessandro Nivola though), it is a scathing brickbat towards the state of affairs without the help of conventional verbosity, and inaugurates Joe's mental ablutions of his own existence.
In the event, Ramsay's clean-cut, existential thriller owns to a lucid consciousness of its sensitive material, brilliant aptitude in its visual and sound literacy, also the film allows humor (a sprightly Judith Roberts as Joe's dotage-afflicted mother, sharing meta-PSYCHO joke in communion), and psychic vision (that moment when Joe realizes who is the culprit in his mind-scape) into the play, the main takeaway for me is the unexpected tendresse between Joe and a hit-man he has mortally injured (Price), lying together on the floor, humming along Charlene's '80s one-hit-wonder I'VE NEVER BEEN TO ME on the radio, and holding their hands, is the song really the answer to the film's English title? You were never really here and I've never been to me, either. Touché!
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