Monday, 14 May 2012
Saturday, 5 May 2012
This Must Be The Place
One of the trends on display at last year’s Cannes festival was of EuroAmerican mash-ups that were to receive varyingly felicitous receptions. Not least so was Paolo Sorrentino’s return with This Must Be The Place: a road trip movie featuring Sean Penn as an aged rock star-turned-Nazi hunter, set, for the most part, in Ireland - for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
Having kept himself in hermit-like retirement for two decades, Penn’s Cheyenne - an overgrown oddball somewhere between Robert Smith, an old lady, and a fey adolescent – finally rouses himself in a bid to track down the concentration camp guard who served as his late father’s enduring obsession. This is a tale of catharsis and redemption, just as Sorrentino’s earlier works have all been in their own way, with atonement for the pain of the past being sought in the unlikeliest of places.
It is a picture that seems to have first been guided by a simple premise, of a displaced Cheyenne coming home to his family and facing his own personal, and musical, demons. That Sorrentino then interweaves a plot of loss, revenge, and the Holocaust (not to mention a frankly jolting cameo by David Byrne) is something of an absurd miracle. As it stands, This Must Be The Place is a baffling, oddity of a movie; enough of a curiosity item, perhaps, to secure its future cult status.
Having kept himself in hermit-like retirement for two decades, Penn’s Cheyenne - an overgrown oddball somewhere between Robert Smith, an old lady, and a fey adolescent – finally rouses himself in a bid to track down the concentration camp guard who served as his late father’s enduring obsession. This is a tale of catharsis and redemption, just as Sorrentino’s earlier works have all been in their own way, with atonement for the pain of the past being sought in the unlikeliest of places.
It is a picture that seems to have first been guided by a simple premise, of a displaced Cheyenne coming home to his family and facing his own personal, and musical, demons. That Sorrentino then interweaves a plot of loss, revenge, and the Holocaust (not to mention a frankly jolting cameo by David Byrne) is something of an absurd miracle. As it stands, This Must Be The Place is a baffling, oddity of a movie; enough of a curiosity item, perhaps, to secure its future cult status.
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