User Comments:
3 out of 3 people found the following comment useful:-
Masterpiece of the Absurd., 6 October 1999
Author:
Darragh O' Donoghue ([email protected]) from Dublin, Ireland
This has to be one of the strangest, most daring films ever made by a major
Hollywood studio, and surely the funniest and most perceptive study of
madness in all cinema. The first ten minutes are a breathtaking display of
bewildering surrealist magic. Buster Keaton buys a ticket for a variety
show. Buster Keaton conducts an orchestra of Buster Keatons, defeated by
their hostile instruments. An art-deco line of Buster Keaton minstrels have
a calm discussion, while pairs of male and female Buster Keatons make up the
audience, restless, spiteful and belligerant.
This is stunning cinema in any language (arf), and a supreme visualisation
of mental breakdown, distorted personality, megalomania, and the most
terrifying anxieties. It is also an hilarious pre-empting of the auteur
theory - the elaborate playbill reveals Buster Keaton to be responsible for
EVERYTHING, from scenario to lighting - this monopoly of creativity leads to
chaos, madness, fragmentation and estrangement.
As in so many of Keaton's films, this remarkable fantasy is shown to be the
dream of a lowly, bullied man, this time a theatrical hand. Far from
diminishing the film's dreamlike structure, this revelation intensifies it.
An astonishing series of variations on the line between art and life, dream
and reality ensues, an argument which descends into ever-increasing spirals
of confusion and disintegration.
Some of Keaton's best comic set-pieces follow, all hilarious in themselves,
yet underlining the melancholy and fears of Buster himself - be he ordinary
man or isolated genius. Life can never remain stable for him, his
personality is shot to pieces - whether through existential crises or booze
is unclear; like Gulliver in Houyhnhm land, his humanity is stripped to the
level of bestiality - a very funny, subversive sequence, which is as
despairing as the end of NIGHTMARE ALLEY.
The supposedly redemptive love interest is a bewildering, tormenting game on
Buster, as he repeatedly fails to remember which twin is his fiancee. The
continually collapsing sets are a thematically rich, Usher(playhouse,
geddit?)-like representation of Buster's fragile mind. To universalise the
genius of Buster Keaton is to belittle and emasculate him. He is like us
only because his trauma is so particular.
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