Norris' Rating: 8.5

Recently the research is going well and my mood is going mess. This made me try to enjoy myself by every means. In Squirrel Hill where I live, there is a tiny cinema named "Manor" which only shows 4 movies at one time. Generally speaking, it shows 2 types of movie: ones of depth and ones acted by hot chicks.

I watched 2 movies without any preparation this year at Manor. One is "Brokeback Mountain" and the other is "Cache". Usually I don't like French movies because I care very much about the plot. It is not to say French movies never concentrate on plot, but I'm so used to the Hollywood way of story telling. However, after seen certain amount of movies, I kind of get tired of it. Though I still care much about the plot, the Hollywood movies' plots are more or less only of a few types. The ones I like, for example, are "twisted time or space", "limited but wild humanities", "shadows from childhood", "vampires and other cults". Times and times I've seen the same plots in such domains, so sometimes I try to find something fresh, either with different contents or different ways of expressing. It doesn't always work when you try something new, of course. For instance, "Dogville" is one of those with pretty new style but keep me "Eyes Wide Shut". Fortunately, my intuitions lead to good stuff for most of time. I enjoyed myself quite much in "Capote", Anotioni's "Eros", "Werckmeister Harmonies" and today's "Cache".

To be honest, the plot is not very fresh. You can easily find some common "childhood darkness" in "Butterfly Effect" or "Mysterious Skin", some common revenge style in "The Oldboy" and some common "video tape" stuff in "Lost Highway". The way of story telling is not original to me either. I've seen the "two endings' meeting" style in "Three Extremes" (Takashi Miike's "Box") and the "real time tracking" style in "Werckmeister Harmonies". However, I do think there is something new that attracts me so much. And that is the smell of ordinary life.

But I'm not going to talk about the smell of ordinary life first, because I have a strong intention to say something about "two endings' meeting" technic. (I'll say TEM for short.) Unlike the ones of pure beauty demonstration such as Antonioni's or ill-logic ones such as"Vanilla Sky", TEM is also causal, like most of the films. There are reasons and consequences in TEM movies, but the director won't tell them chronically. Typically, what is obvious is the consequence line of plot and the reasons resulting in such consequence will float above water at the end of movie. That's right, if you are familiar with detective fictions, TEM won't seem creative. However, I've seen few such movies, and if the director really wants to tell the audience something worth thinking deep, TEM should be highly appreciated and it will give you an unforgettable impression at the end.

In order not to spoil, I'd like to analyze Takashi Miike's "Box" instead. The heroine always has some strange dreams that seems hard to explain for the audience. In the movie, there are always flash-back memories and they are likely to have relationship with the dreams. But Takashi will only tell part of the memory each time and each time it will be interrupted. As the story reaches the end, the complete memory is told and the reason and consequence is illuminated.

The smell of ordinary life in "Cache" is combined with "real time tracking" (RTT for short). For example, there is 7 minutes' walking from home to the square in "Werckmeister Harmonies", and the camera goes for 7 minutes only to show two people walking from home to the square. Such technic can also be found in "Cache", especially the content caught by hidden cameras. But "Cache" is more "good-looking" because it doesn't use RTT for all time, which probably makes non-crazy movie lovers sloppy. It uses RTT for ordinary life and some excitements which only enhances the facticity. I ever heard of "Dogma95". Though I'm not familiar with that, I guess RTT is a certain way of "Dogma95" .(Please correct me if it is not.)

There are two movie endings that I appreciate this year. One is "Serenity" and "Cache" the other. The same reason I like them is that you can never guess when the movies will end. In "Cache", it's also the RTT that makes the ending special and besides this, one more special thing that I noticed is,  there is completely NO background music in "Cache".

By now, I've been trying hard not to say a single word of the plot of this French movie. But I can't help no more, so please let me tell:

"The plot is really very nice."