Birdman

Every now and then a film comes along that changes your understanding of what a film can be. This was my experience in the Odeon Covent Garden last night. I spent most of the two hours of Birdman giggling with sheer delight at the technical and artistic audacity of the long-shots. Most of the film is presented as one unbroken shot, in some of the most complicated situations imaginable. Of course there are hidden cuts; but even admitting that the hyper-long shot was an artifice, the real-long-shots that lay within the uber-shot of the whole film were dazzling. It’s embarrassing enough when someone in the audience claps at the end of a film; I had to stop myself from clapping two or three times along the way because I couldn’t quite believe they had pulled it off. Pity the people around me: like sitting between the guy with rustle-o-matic Haribo packaging and the couple checking their halogen-brite tablets for so important messages. But it was much more than cleverness. There was a constant sense of mystery about what the film was and where it was going. It’s not often that this mysteriousness lasts beyond the first couple of scenes.

Is it deep? Well, it’s about deep things. Life, death, identity, love, sex, success, failure, truth, authenticity, fame, violence, family, rehab, life… But every time it says something deep about these deep things it undercuts the depth (can you undercut depth?!) with a dollop of self-deprecation, dramatic irony, arch post-modern self-referentiality or old-fashioned slap-stick. Even the over-cleverness of the film-making was part of the triumph, because you are constantly shifting your perspective from being caught up in the film to being dazzled by how it was constructed to critiquing the director’s intentions and achievements as the film unfolds. The film kept saying, ‘Come inside to take a look’ but ‘Don’t forget it’s all a game’, like the real lovers within the artificial play being analysed by the New York Times critic within the digital film. I guess it’s all there in Hamlet‘s Players; and even more explicitly in Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

I knew absolutely nothing about Birdman before I saw it. I won’t ruin it for you by even placing a YouTube trailer here. I loved Iñárritu’s 21 Grams; I enjoyed Babel, but found it disappointing in the end; I didn’t want to see Biutiful after the reviews. If you love film, as film, then Birdman is definitely worth a trip. And despite the shallowness of its depths, it will make you think.