"For every shadow, no matter how deep is threatened by morning light." -- Isabel, 'The Fountain'

Film Even though some people appear to have missed it, Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain was one of the best films of last year and like Blade Runner before it, seems to have gained a resurgent interest since the critical derision and poor box-office which greeted its original release. It's certainly film which has fixed in my brain, the images and the poetic script, fractions of which are available at the imdb. In many ways too it seemed like a broad re-imagining of Bill Forsyth's Being Human; it's almost as though during the shooting of Pi, Aronofsky fell asleep in front of some obscure cable channel showing Forsyth's film and it was absorbed into his consciousness, half dream half idea.

It always happens to be the case that misunderstood near-masterpieces will not get a decent domestic release. Forsyth's film went direct to video rental almost everywhere and didn't get much further. My copy was recorded from ITV in the mid-nineties at about two in the morning at Christmas time and has one of those scrolling messages throughout advertising the care line. Aronofsky's film has been put out on dvd (and actually High-Def) but with what amounts to an EPG and a rather quirky 'interview' in which Rachel Weisz chats to Hugh Jackman during one of his make-up sessions. What it does not feature is a commentary -- I mean even cocking Big Momma's House 2 was afforded that privilege even though that didn't have an experimental narrative structure (at least on purpose).

So Darren's decided to record his own and here it is. Direct download. But you knew that already if you clicked the link at the top of the post.

Now that he's up and about, Roger Ebert is reviewing some of the films which he missed during his illness. The Fountain was amongst them: "I was relieved to find that pseudo-science and visual excess are now behind us in the cinema. But let’s talk about hair. In the first story, Jackman portrays a conquistador, in the second he is a modern scientist, and in the third he is bald and floating through space inside a magical bubble. Auds who cannot parse that must be plumb parsed out. And why trash Aronofsky’s first two films, just when I was trying to decide which I would write about as a Great Movie? He made “Pi” at 29 (best director, Sundance), “Requiem” at 31 (Oscar nom for Ellen Burstyn), and now, at 37, he was already a “onetime wunderkind.” Scott Fitzgerald said American lives don’t have second acts; he never said they don’t have first ones."

In his article, Ebert links to this spoilery analysis of the film which only confirmed what I understood the film to be about and how the structure works: "Instead of giving us easy answers, Aronofsky gave us all an opportunity to explore that which is deepest and most sacred in ourselves and those we love. The fact that he happily risked the derision of critics put off by the films audacious scope, or simply too lazy to contemplate a work that was more challenging than typical RomCom fare, shows that among many other admirable qualities, Darren Aronofsky is a filmmaker with gigantic, bubble-spaceship-sized balls."