Film Fest - Last Night

The film Last Night (with Keira Knightly) is all about romantic temptation.  Two halves of a couple - separated by a business trip - each meet someone...   You can imagine.  This is a quiet, well-acted, oddly elegant film.  It's the movie equivalent of a literary-fiction novel: well-observed and delineated, paced, thoughtful, not a lot happens, and with a mildly unsatisfying, hanging ending.  I enjoyed this, mildly, but won't rush out to buy a copy.

You'll guess I'm not a huge fan of lit-fic, mainly because I like something to happen in a novel or film. I confess to a weakness, not for mindless explosions or car chases, but for derring-do and fights between the good guy (or gal) and the evil pirate/ hoodlum/ Nazi/ criminal-mastermind/ alien/ pick-your-force-of-evil.  Preferably with swords.  Hopelessly, hopelessly old-fashioned taste.

But all swashbuckling aside, art needs more Shape than life - which this film does have.  Giving shape to life is the whole point of art.  Art was invented because life is unsatisfying.

I, personally, also prefer a defined ending.  You know that scene in Amadeus (great film!) when Saliari tells Mozart he should crash cymbals at the end of his music to: a) wake the stupid audience and b) signal the music was over, so they should clap?  I'm not quite that bad.  But it is nice, as a stupid, sleepy audience member, to get a hint a film is over.  Just personal preference.  With this film, the music gave a faint hint, enough so I could start to say, "No, they're not going to..." Credits roll. "...stop here!  Like this?"

believed public domain image