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..is Charlie (being John Malkovitch, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine) Kaufman's directoral debut and an impressive one at that. Stellar cast including Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton and Emily Watson.
Plot would take a lot of explanation. Essentially it's about how we spin our life narrative as a defense against recognition of death and in so doing experience reality as an inauthentic facsimile of the real thing. How this is illustrated; the Hoffman character spends 40 years rehearsing his own unfolding life as a play with a Hoffman character and parallel ensemble cast in a vast warehouse containing a life-sized New York facsimile. The dialogue is densely-textured and characterisation is finely-tuned and sometimes deliberately hammed and artificial (pulled off nicely given Hoffman's abilities). The plot is neither character- nor action-driven; rather it is driven by an unfolding existential drama of ever-more-keenly-sensed-dread-and-disillusionment as Hoffman ages closer to the moment of his death.
The title, a word meaning 'part masquerading as the whole' is a pun on the place in which the film is set which is Scechtanady in NY (have I spelt that right?). It's not set in New York City itself. Synechdoche/Schechtanady…..there's a lot of misheard words in the film's first 45 minutes adding to the near-subliminal senses of substitution and facimile which saturate the film's fabric.
Fantastic postmodern film which no doubt will have theses written on it. Which will stand-in for the film itself.
Not.
Or maybe….?
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