Since I am a Berlin-based photographer and film enthusiast, Palermo Shooting was very appealing to me: Wim Wenders, a key figure of contemporary German cinema, shooting a story revolving a photographer learning to see anew? What could go wrong? Well, pretty much everything, I'm afraid.
There are problems with Campino's delivery of the lines (insufficient acting or unbelievable dialog?), with a soundtrack that feels like an ipod on shuffle (and hey, I love Portishead as much as anyone), and with the general rush of scenes. The same filmmaker that twenty years ago made wonders directing with restraint (How to forget the cabin scenes of Paris Texas, for instance?) is nowadays lost in camera movements, cinematography effects, and 'dynamic' editing.
However, the main problem of the movie lies on how its thesis actually contradicts the film itself. Here we have a photographer, Finn, who at the beginning of the movie believes that photography can just depict surfaces because that's the only thing there is to reality. The film, therefore, will follow him as he learns otherwise: that the things we cannot see shape our experiences and understandings. How ironic –and disappointing-, that he gets his final lesson from a guy painted in white who IS Death. And how disappointing, too, that when our hero overcomes his fear to Life by embracing Death, Wenders has to actually show us how they hug. There's no subtlety, no space for the images of the film to mean more than what they are; they feel clichéd and, sadly, superficial.
Maybe Wenders should now look for his own Palermo and, instead of having characters delivering grandiloquent speeches about the unseen, show us what lurks under the visibility of things, because Palermo Shooting is shot with the same disregard for the revealing qualities of the photographic/cinematographic image, as Finn shots his fashion campaigns. Just surface.
There are problems with Campino's delivery of the lines (insufficient acting or unbelievable dialog?), with a soundtrack that feels like an ipod on shuffle (and hey, I love Portishead as much as anyone), and with the general rush of scenes. The same filmmaker that twenty years ago made wonders directing with restraint (How to forget the cabin scenes of Paris Texas, for instance?) is nowadays lost in camera movements, cinematography effects, and 'dynamic' editing.
However, the main problem of the movie lies on how its thesis actually contradicts the film itself. Here we have a photographer, Finn, who at the beginning of the movie believes that photography can just depict surfaces because that's the only thing there is to reality. The film, therefore, will follow him as he learns otherwise: that the things we cannot see shape our experiences and understandings. How ironic –and disappointing-, that he gets his final lesson from a guy painted in white who IS Death. And how disappointing, too, that when our hero overcomes his fear to Life by embracing Death, Wenders has to actually show us how they hug. There's no subtlety, no space for the images of the film to mean more than what they are; they feel clichéd and, sadly, superficial.
Maybe Wenders should now look for his own Palermo and, instead of having characters delivering grandiloquent speeches about the unseen, show us what lurks under the visibility of things, because Palermo Shooting is shot with the same disregard for the revealing qualities of the photographic/cinematographic image, as Finn shots his fashion campaigns. Just surface.