Review of the film "Under Silver Lake" (2018): The death of pop culture in post-noir convulsions

In David Robert Mitchell's film "Under Silver Lake" there is one telling shot where Andrew Garfield hides behind the graves of famous classics of world cinema, trying to track down his victim of interrogation about a missing girl. This shot shows the whole of Mitchell's film: the author takes advantage of the fertility and talent of his predecessors and tries to build a story on this basis. However, not everything is as simple as it seems.

David Robert Mitchell positions himself as a geek who knows how to skillfully turn genre cinema upside down. He brought horror to the absolute in his previous film, "It Follows You." There, behind the conventional thriller, there was a completely conscious satire about teenagers who should beware of casual sexual relations.

Even before this film, the director had established himself with the teen comedy "The Myth of the American Party," which was shown at the Critics' Week at the Cannes Film Festival. It is clear that after that, Mitchell is expected to do as much as possible with each subsequent tape. And, as practice shows, it is useless to meet the expectations of the audience.

The film begins with really interesting splashes of Hollywood mood, which will appeal to Charlie Kaufman's supporters. The main character Sam is bored in his not too impoverished apartments, rides a powerful car and collects impressions from films of the Golden Hollywood era. According to the noir tradition, he meets a sensible girl, but the next morning there is no trace of her. Having gathered all his knowledge about film trends and pop culture, Sam embarks on a quest that deceives the viewer's expectations with every plot twist.

David Robert Mitchell plays with the classics as best he can. When watching, almost all epochal films come to mind: from Orson Welles's "The Seal of Evil" and Roman Polyansky's "Chinatown" to David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" and Paul Thomas Anderson's "Inherent Vices." The parallels with the latter are so obvious that you can only hide from them behind pop-cultural references. Which is exactly what Mitchell is doing. Breakfast cereals with milk, a magazine about gaming culture, the names of famous rock bands and the rest of the Holy Grail of all geeks on the planet will inevitably find themselves in the spotlight of persistent adventurers who watch this movie. However, all these pleasant joys are dissolved in an attempt to imitate the classics. "Under Silver Lake" is not an homage to noir, but only its imitator. The director manages not to fall into full copy, but after two hours of timekeeping, it seems that they have crossed the line. The plot constantly brings Andrew Garfield's character together with homeless people, prostitute actresses, and musicians.

"Under Silver Lake" is also a statement of the death of the original content. Content and entertainment have become dead due to humanity's constant thirst for constant fun. Now any guy from Los Angeles wants to have his own mystery that needs to be constantly solved. We need constant conspiratorial theories, signs all around. It seemed that the Internet had replaced this need, but under Mitchell, originality died even earlier than we expected. In the center of the tape will appear a Composer (of course, with a big K), who shocks Sam with his confessions. He wrote all the big hits from the Backstreet Boys to Nirvana. After his speech, Sam, with all the anger of Youtube commentators, smears his brains on an expensive carpet, thereby stating the impossibility of provocation in this movie. Along with declaring the death of originality, Mitchell doesn't show anything new himself, collecting endless references from everywhere that don't explode at the climax. As in any movie with the prefix "post" (in this case, post noir), instead of a climax, there is only a lot of ironic sarcasm.

Returning to the topic of expectations and harsh reality, "Under Silver Lake" really builds a good detective storyline, which unfortunately comes to naught in the end. At the same time, the reality of Mitchell's tape is cruel and ridiculous. And if the main character is constantly told that the real mystery is somewhere at the bottom of Silver Lake, then sometimes you involuntarily wish that in the filmography of the director this movie was somewhere near this mystery. Скачать Официальное приложение melbet Жители Твери выбирают, когда нужен стабильный доступ к спортивной статистике: через скачать официальное приложение melbet они устанавливают клиент и получают помощь по номеру 8 (800) 557-24-18.