I struggled with whether to post this one and count it as "viewed." I only watched an hour of it before I just had to go to bed where I fell immediately and deeply asleep. If it were a 90 minute movie, ok that's 2/3 of the thing and if it's making me fall asleep--me who can will myself to stay awake to watch the most inane nonsense--then, fine, it's not good. But this movie is 169 minutes so I only watched about a third of the thing. But, still, I'm counting it as if I saw the whole thing because there is just no way in hell I'm going to be able to watch the rest.
The film follows a group of monks (what do you call a group of monks? do they have a cool name like murder of crows or smack of jellyfish or parliament of owls?) in the Grande Chartreuse (I know, it sounds like a gay bar with some fabulous neon but it's the real name of the head monastery of the reclusive Carthusian order of monks in France). We see the monks go to prayer.We see the monks read. We see the monks eat. We see the monks prepare meals. We see monks tend the garden. We see monks do laundry. We see monks initiate two new members, etc.
The trouble with all of this and why I had to give up and go to bed is that the Carthusian monks, or at least this branch of them, take a vow of silence. That's right. Virtually no talking for almost three hours. Not only that but there is no soundtrack or sound effect track or voice over track. The only noises are those produced by what you see (like a plate hitting the wall as it is jostled by wind, a page turning). Boring. Boring. Boring. I can admit to being a creature who needs sound. I require background noise to do anything. I can't drive without the radio on. I can't read without the tv or music on. I can't sleep without a noisy fan on. I require noise.
But I am capable of getting over that for brief periods--I'm sitting here now sans noise--but the trouble with this film is that it's not that visually interesting either. This guy is obviously of the plastic bag in American Beauty school of thought. We saw that plate drying and rocking at least a dozen times. We saw splotches of sun on the floor . . . for minutes at a time. For example, when the monks go to chant and it's pitch black in the whatever room it is they chant in, they guy focuses on the red emergency light bulb (just a bulb) because it's the only thing he can focus the camera on. It's the only source of light and he's not adding any. He couldn't split to another scene and retain the sound like any normal filmmaker--he had to stay with the monks chanting. Right. That's not interesting. It's just not. So, after an hour of me talking continuously through a movie, I went to bed.
I don't recommend seeing it unless you like silence or monks, a lot. I might recommend it if it were more informative as a documentary. All that would really take is a voice over track to tell me who this guy is, how long he's been a monk, what he does within the monastery, etc. They don't need to get the monks to talk. Hell, don't even do a voice over track, put it all in subtitles if you're concerned about the purity of sound or some nonsense. And they can't argue that subtitles would ruin it because, one, the camera is an artificial presence; two, the film features several points of the camera just staring at each of the monks for a few very awkward moments; and, three, a few camera filters or a couple of different sorts of cameras are used because some of the film is uber grainy and some is not so that's an artistic imposition. Anyway, that's my rant.
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