An average movie

Guillermo Arriaga has written some very good screenplays for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (‘Amores Perros’, ’21 Grams’ and ‘Babel’) so I was really eager to check his directing debut. Unsurprisingly since it is his trademark, he went for a hyperlink feature which is when some unrelated stories are developed separately and brought back together towards the end. Unfortunately, even though I have a weak spot for the genre, it didn’t work very well here. The point is that it didn’t add much to the story and felt more like an annoying gimmick to trick the audience. Eventually, I figured it all out midway through (Charlize Theron and Jennifer Lawrence portrays the same woman at difference age). I mean, visually, you don’t get absolutely any clue that there are actually two different time periods involved which was once again a rather worthless way to put the audience on the wrong foot. Above all, when you get what was actually going on, you wonder what was the whole point and you might wonder if a more linear narrative wouln’t have been more appropriate. Still, it is not a bad movie, far from it. Indeed, the directing was actually pretty solid, the 3 tales were quite intriguing and the 3 main actresses (Charlize Theron, Kim Basinger and Jennifer Lawrence, two years before her breakthrough in ‘Winter’s Bone’) gave some very intense performances. To conclude, even though it remains a failure, I still think it is worth a look, especially if you are interested in Guillermo Arriaga’s work.

6/10