[CRITICAL] QUEEN OF EARTH – Penelopethemovie

Q UEEN OF EARTH , the fourth feature ofAlex Ross Perry is more of an exercise in ambitious style at the result is uneven and is a real fiction, whatever its genre : thriller, drama, teen-movie…

If the completion and commissioning stage, give the film a certain interest, it is unfortunately crushed by the weakness of the script and the surprising lack of plot.

QUEEN OF EARTH seems to want to register in the register requiring the “cinema of author”, the form in the service of the bottom. But the film does only partially. There is a movie in which the drama fragile and almost non-existent attempts to serve as an alibi for a formal proof that the limits are quickly visible.

After Listen up Philip, the developer is interested in the portraits of women écorchées and tries to dive into the heart of the murky waters of their emotions through the duo Elisabeth Moss – Katherine Waterson.

The film starts with a promise of control. It opens with a sequence shot on the face disheveled Catherine in tears. She replied sobbing, James leaves. His face is white, his lips red and his eyes blackened reek. The wholesale plan sets filmed without the foot. This figure looks like a clown villain is not interrupted a single time by a very short-against-the-fields, an insert of a few seconds the face of James, the element of time which will allow for the scenes of the film in chronological order. The director has chosen to use to flash back to evoke the genesis of dementia who repents in the body and the soul of Catherine.

Has the image of the first scene, so there is a very good choice formal throughout the film. The huis-clos of the house, the top symbol of confinement and mental, is filmed on 2 scales of plans. Catherine is always displayed in a tight close-up in the nervousness of a camera shoulder and when it is found in a wide shot, she remains stuck in the frame of a door or lost in the emptiness of a room that is too white. This alternation manages to create a feeling of oppression and emptiness among the spectators, such a body be unable to find its place and its serenity. The light projected on her face in some of the sequences on the outside gives it the allure of the spectra, the stray and the director does not hesitate to make a zoom sound on acceleration of the heart beat of the actress performing a monologue of icy.

You can’t deny that the journey into the intimacy of a body which suffers is a great success from the point of view of the realization. If a lot of lengths to manage all the same to install it is because the scenario is affected by a cruel lack of guidance.

The abundant use of the flash back we routed them completely. These scenes from the past are surprisingly too rich and it nothing happens in the rest of the film. The director seems to have to the heart to trace the background psychological of the characters, but he does it and forgets it, probably from the writing, to think of the plot and the stakes of this !

“There is a big problem of balance between a prior art that it wants to show us the consequences but of which no one then said nothing more. The story disappears in favor of a pure psychological portrait in the past.”

That happens now? What does it tell us about the film ? Nothing else, unfortunately, as a result of the situations and dialogues over and transparent. It starts out a breakup, but it passes through the film without knowing anything. Except in the last quarter of the movie but it changed direction. We went through a story of friendship, again without really digging otherwise than by an opposition manichean expected. And then it is also the story of a girl and her father, addiction, grief, etc a Lot of thing but a little consistency to the finish. The film loses all interest and traînaille at the option of her going back in time and its multiple primers tracks failed, we get bored.

The actors themselves are good without being mind-boggling, a few beautiful moments are to be noted for Elisabeth Moss to be relatively intense in his monologues, but it touches all the same sometimes ridiculous, and shows a more distorted disturbing. It was unfortunately by the time want to mock. It will be necessary to forget a scene so it looks more like a parody of horror movie that the overwhelming demonstration of the folly ; when at a dinner party guests transform into monsters approaching Catherine all hands crooked and eyes out of the orbits…

No, we will not remember the QUEEN OF EARTH in spite of its achievement, a precise and conceptualized because the film does not have a stand story strong enough to be at the height of his ambitions. Pity, it could have been really better…

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