Three great curious things about this short: director Andrey Konchalovskiy plays a film director who makes a re-reading from a Cezane painting and
the whole setting is on a film set moments before the shooting of a scene begins; the whole set feels like having a massive budget unlike any of Godard movies
and the reason for it comes from Francis Ford Coppola, one of the many investors of Godard's "Passion"; and Coppola's regular cinematographer at the time Vittorio
Storaro plays himself here, while finding the perfect way to compose a shot. A multi-lingual film set with plenty of challenges but one common goal: to make a good
film.
Since there's no captions you might struggle a little with some parts from the film since there's English, Polish and French being spoken - gladly, I caught some translated comments that explained a little of what I missed. However, the experience of watching "Handyman" (whoever plays that role here since there are so many crew people appearing here and there that it's hard to know) feels a little empty afterwards. Where's the magic behind the creation? Very reduced and very dark to be seen - though the set showing an old fancy hotel and the lights moving mysteriously are all amazing.
And I'm gonna have to thrown some wood on the bonfire of controversies: wasn't JLG who managed to destroy his great friendship with Truffaut after critising "Day for Night"? We all know the story of how much he complained about it in a lenghty letter/review of his friend's film telling how phony and unrealistic the makings of movie were portrayed in that movie. Well, for the little Godard shows here, you can sense that the behind the scenes isn't all that much of a perfect collaborative effort. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's all about hard job to be made even when artists disagree with each other.
And if "Handyman" was in fact a documentary following a film being made (it never was, anyway) then we could give some credit of this being an interesting behind the scenes picture. It's manageable but it's mostly empty and soulless. I tried hard to enjoy, I really did. 5/10.
Since there's no captions you might struggle a little with some parts from the film since there's English, Polish and French being spoken - gladly, I caught some translated comments that explained a little of what I missed. However, the experience of watching "Handyman" (whoever plays that role here since there are so many crew people appearing here and there that it's hard to know) feels a little empty afterwards. Where's the magic behind the creation? Very reduced and very dark to be seen - though the set showing an old fancy hotel and the lights moving mysteriously are all amazing.
And I'm gonna have to thrown some wood on the bonfire of controversies: wasn't JLG who managed to destroy his great friendship with Truffaut after critising "Day for Night"? We all know the story of how much he complained about it in a lenghty letter/review of his friend's film telling how phony and unrealistic the makings of movie were portrayed in that movie. Well, for the little Godard shows here, you can sense that the behind the scenes isn't all that much of a perfect collaborative effort. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's all about hard job to be made even when artists disagree with each other.
And if "Handyman" was in fact a documentary following a film being made (it never was, anyway) then we could give some credit of this being an interesting behind the scenes picture. It's manageable but it's mostly empty and soulless. I tried hard to enjoy, I really did. 5/10.