DVD Verdict :
Even more challenging and confusing than his previous offerings, Mamoru Oshii's Talking Head is as strange as they come—a calculated Lynchian blurring between the line of action film, confessional, documentary, and dramatic stage play, deconstructed to such a degree that the entire experience almost becomes unrecognizable as a film. Sound like fun, eh? It is, but it is not for the easily annoyed. You will need ironclad patience to digest and enjoy it. ... The most anticipated anime movie of the year, "Talking Head," is set to debut in two months. One small problem: the director has long since vanished, taking the entire project along with him into obscurity—there is no storyboard, no finished drafts, nothing! The movie has not even begun. In desperation, the production company hires a maverick anime director, a man known to get things done under pressure, a man who has saved flailing projects from damnation. He is a "migrant technical director," and his job is to imitate the work of the erstwhile director, finishing the film, getting it in by the deadline, thereby completing the illusion of studio prosperity. When he arrives at the "movie set" to begin work, he realizes there are bigger problems than a tight deadline. For one thing, there is a ghost. Another thing is, one by one, the entire staff is being murdered. Thirdly, it seems that the line separating reality and the movie being made has blended together, creating a metafictional nightmare of staggering proportions. Who knew all this work went into the creation of an anime? ... The final film in the Mamoru Oshii Cinema Trilogy, Talking Head is only sequel to the two previous films in the loosest of senses. It has precious little in common with the first two films—precious little in common with anything at all, actually. The majority of the principal cast from the last two films returns, but all play different characters with no connections to their previous identities. Secondly, the film seems to exist outside any rational notion of reality; it can safely be said that Talking Head does not exist inside the reality of The Red Spectacles and Stray Dog, because the film exists inside no reality but its own. If you are quick, you can catch a single fleeting reference to the Kerberos, delivered through the guise of a coffee commercial. Finally, the entire film takes place within a movie theatre (AKA the animation studio) that appears to be identical to the movie theatre in The Red Spectacles, with the same washroom, and identical movie playing on constant loop (a young woman's face, on a tight close up, focusing on the eyes). Sets are sparse, often missing walls, as if to de-emphasize the importance of backdrops and distractions, choosing only to focus upon things of importance (a trick taken to the umpteenth level by Lars von Trier in Dogville). Lighting cues are implemented as if the film were actually a stage play, and characters often break into pantomime, and do stage-like things, such as having conversations to the camera/audience. Talking Head completely smashes any notion of a "fourth wall," not in a gimmicky, Ferris Bueller's Day Off sort of way, but in a very unnerving, meaningful, and aggressive way. Characters will be talking, then stop talking, gaze directly at the camera, as their monologues continue from some unnamed, outside source. In a way, this film is more dense and thematically complicated than The Red Spectacles (it has far less in common with Stray Dog, the aptly-named odd film out in the trilogy). While the basic gist of the movie is simple enough—trying to make an animated movie while the cast members get killed off—the film requires of the viewer a rather verbose understand of film theory, criticism, and history to avoid extended sessions of head-scratching that could over time lead to hair loss. Rather than, say, just be a movie, Talking Head is a movie about making movies. It is a movie inside a movie, possibly inside one more movie. It is a reflection upon the cinematic art itself, an experimental examination into the very structure and rhetoric of filmmaking…or something like that. Really, it's hard to say. Watching it, one gets the sneaking suspicion that the film could actually be about annexing ownership of land, cultivating eggplant on an industrial scale, and government cheese, and the viewer would be completely in the dark. This is no clever tongue-in-cheek riff on the tenets of editing and stage theory—this is an all-out deconstructive and metafictional assault. It is an exercise in self-reference in a capacity so far and beyond any traditional semblance of a motion picture. And it sure is a lot of fun to try and figure out. But you need patience, my friend—serious patience. (Only on the third viewing did I dare consider myself ready to even begin writing this review.) ... Most of the actors in Talking Head are real players in the anime world, performing numerous voice-acting roles. Die-hard anime fans will recognize no faces, but many voices. Of course the cast of Talking Head would be people who either work on anime movies, or who have worked on Oshii's movies—the joke would be incomplete without this particular intertextuality. It's all part of the gag, my friend. All part of the gag. |
Duration: 1h 45m
Video: 704x368, 1804 kbps
Audio: 2.0, mp3, 128kbps vbr
Video: 704x368, 1804 kbps
Audio: 2.0, mp3, 128kbps vbr
