Swallowtail

[Martin Beck]

After reading the latest mails concerning Shunji Iwai's "Swallowtail" I just 
couldn't resist to put in my own two cents of opinion. During the last months I 
have read several negative reviews of this film, citing it as "arthouse 
torture", damming it as being overly pretentious and now, being racial and 
negative towards certain cultures. Er, what exactly is going on there?? This all 
sounds to me like some very highbrow critics' bla bla who just have to condemn a 
financially successful film. I mean is a film only good when it wins festival 
prizes and plays for 2 weeks at the midnight screenings of small arthouse 
cinemas? Certainly not.

Of course everyone can have their own opinion about a film but especially this 
talk about "Swallowtail" being NOT multicultural is totally unnecessary. First 
of all, I think "Swallowtail" is a very daring film, a film which doesn't stick 
to conventional filmmaking but tries to match different styles & genres into a 
completely new coherent whole. Shunji Iwai has succeeded in creating a 
commercially successful film, which is both immensely entertaining and also 
thought provoking. This alone makes it a very good -to me absolutely brilliant- 
film. Everything else just has to stay behind. It seems to me that certain film 
critics just don't know what rubbish usually plays at the cinema. Now here we 
have a film which at least TRIES to be different and yet, it just can't be 
appreciated. Isn't this a lot like people telling you all the time how they 
hated "Titanic" but nevertheless had red eyes at the end of the screening? To me 
there seldomly has been a scene more intense than Chara singing "My way". With 
my feelings so directly involved in a film I just don't care about anything 
else. A film should grab you, right? "Swallowtail" certainly did this like few 
films have before. And that's all that should count.

Greetings,

Martin
adrenafilm at t-online.de


P.S.: What about Shunji Iwai himself? Has he labelled his film as being 
"multicultural"? Did he intentionally wanted to achieve this??




just can't live with a financially successful film