[With Wai Ka-fai's joyfully Wtf film Written By screening at Fantasia today, here is Ben's Nyaff review bumped up for your reading pleasure]
By reading the plot synopsis on the fest's website, one would assume Written By is entering some surreal Kaufman-esque territory; a girl who has lost her father in a car accident begins to write a novel in which he survives and she dies, and he in turn writes a novel etc. etc Yet what we get is a meta-physical family melodrama with multiple novels within novels, ghosts, reincarnations, spirit planes, doorways into parallel universes... and... and... It sounds complex but it isn't, it is just confusing.
In the Q&A afterwards even Wai admitted he didn't know exactly what was going on at times in the film, saying he spent a year editing, cycling through nearly dozens of versions till he felt this one was the best. Everything becomes so scattered but without a base of ideas to rein it in (even in a controlled chaos sorta way) that the...
By reading the plot synopsis on the fest's website, one would assume Written By is entering some surreal Kaufman-esque territory; a girl who has lost her father in a car accident begins to write a novel in which he survives and she dies, and he in turn writes a novel etc. etc Yet what we get is a meta-physical family melodrama with multiple novels within novels, ghosts, reincarnations, spirit planes, doorways into parallel universes... and... and... It sounds complex but it isn't, it is just confusing.
In the Q&A afterwards even Wai admitted he didn't know exactly what was going on at times in the film, saying he spent a year editing, cycling through nearly dozens of versions till he felt this one was the best. Everything becomes so scattered but without a base of ideas to rein it in (even in a controlled chaos sorta way) that the...
- 7/19/2010
- Screen Anarchy
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