{"id":6603,"date":"2011-10-01T13:42:40","date_gmt":"2011-10-01T17:42:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=6603"},"modified":"2011-10-01T13:42:40","modified_gmt":"2011-10-01T17:42:40","slug":"klimt-2006-raoul-ruiz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/6603","title":{"rendered":"Klimt (2006, Raoul Ruiz)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Finally I got a hold of the director’s cut, which I’ve been looking for since reading about this movie somewhere five years ago. In the meantime I’ve discovered that I love most<\/a> of Ruiz’s movies<\/a>, but I don’t get much out of painter bio-pics<\/a>, even artsy ones<\/a> – so this was destined to be a mixed bag.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I’m not sure what happened, or who was supposed to be whom. I know John Malkovich plays the artist Klimt, and an appealingly manic Nikolai (son of Klaus) Kinski plays Egon Schiele. I know Klimt is visited by an embassy “secretary” (Stephen Dillane, Kidman\/Woolf’s husband in The Hours<\/em>) whom no one else can see. The rest becomes a blur of people and places, but an appealing blur, since Ruiz can’t make a boring film, not even with a prestige artist bio-pic in English (quite good English, translated by the writer of The Dreamers<\/em>). The very fluid moving camera and framing device of a dying man in bed (Klimt, of syphillis towards the end of WWI) bring to mind Mysteries of Lisbon<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Egon Kinski:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

Klimt seems to enjoy refractions and mirrors as much as Ruiz does. Klimt meets Georges M\u00e9li\u00e8s around the turn of the century, sees him a couple times more, also meets the man who portrayed Klimt in a film – is intrigued with the girl named Lea who he “meets” in the film (Saffron Burrows of fellow painter-bio-pic Frida<\/em>) and her own actress-double.<\/p>\n

Either Lea or her double:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

Appearing as characters I didn’t figure out: Joachim Bissmeier (Zimmermann in Joyeux Noel<\/a><\/em>), Ernst Stotzner of Underground<\/em>, and Annemarie Duringer of Veronika Voss<\/em> and Berlin Alexanderplatz<\/em>. It also didn’t help that there’s a woman named Midi and another named Mizzi.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

B. Berning:<\/p>\n

With Ruiz directing, philosophical inquiry is a not an end in itself, but a springboard for the imagination, and for humor. In one scene, there is a street brawl between men wearing top hats and men wearing bowler hats. By the next scene we see that the bowler hats have won, for there isn’t a top hat in sight. The upper class elitists have surrendered their influence, and the symbol of modern egalitarianism, the bowler hat, has taken over. It’s a clever visual riddle that in a way recalls the writer Lewis Carroll. Carroll was also a great imaginative thinker who preferred to clothe his intellect in stories that would amuse a young girl. Ruiz’s audience is decidedly adult, but he aims to entertain nonetheless.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

The word I used most in my notes is “unusual.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Finally I got a hold of the director’s cut, which I’ve been looking for since reading about this movie somewhere five years ago. In the meantime I’ve discovered that I love most of Ruiz’s movies, but I don’t get much out of painter bio-pics, even artsy ones – so this was destined to be a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[369,374,541,302,67],"class_list":["post-6603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-2000s","tag-john-malkovich","tag-melies","tag-painting","tag-raoul-ruiz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6603"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6729,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6603\/revisions\/6729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}