Bravo Martin Scorsese, for your evident love of cinema and for the patient crafting that has gone into this masterpiece. Bravo, Asa Butterfield for being innocence personified, for acting as few adults can ever hope to once or twice in their lives. Not that Sasha Baron Cohen and Ben Kingsley, and the other child actor, Chloë Moretz didn't put up a mighty fight as he stole the show... Bravo, Robert Richardson (cinematographer) and Dante Ferretti (art director) for rendering 1930s France and the timeless imagination of Georges Méliès so magnificently!
Way back in February of 2012 I had resolved to watch this movie (along with a list of about 10 other movies with Oscar buzz); until the 30th of December, I had managed to watch every one of them except Hugo. As fate would have it, I would watch it in the closing hours of the year, in an almost private screening, right before descending into four solid hours of bacchanalia and revelry. Now, twenty four hours later, my body feels the tiredness from those four hours, but my mind is still fixed on the movie...
This movie has been amply reviewed and raved about, and so this is not a review. This instead is an account of my experience of the movie, which was not optimal in a sense, but fitting. I'll explain, I promise...
The end of 2012 found us at a resort to celebrate new year's eve. To give residents something to do besides all the outdoorsy stuff, the place also has a two screen cinema; proper movie halls, seats, projection, surround sound and so on, mind... none of that digital nonsense!
As cinephiles, and given how cold the water in the pool(s) was, it was a no-brainer for the wife and I to take in a few long-pending movies then... and they were running some good ones. After catching a late show of Aamir Khan's "Talaash" one night we resolved to spend some time taking in another show right before the grand finale party on the 31st...
Now I honestly don't know what possessed them, but they had set up a show of Hugo for 6 PM on the 31st of December. And so it came to pass that my wife and I walked into an almost empty movie hall just about a minute late. As we were finding our way to our seats we realized we were the only people in the hall apart from one other couple. Evidently they were there for something other than the movie itself though, because within ten minutes of our arrival they chose to leave. Leaving us in the midst of the magic of the movie...
It was a horrible print. The projectionist had clearly taken a 4:3 (or some such ratio) picture and was projecting it at 16:9 which meant everything was a bit... stretched. The sound was a bit scratchy or tinny. At times there were these celluloid squiggles that filled up a few frames on the right hand side. By all means I should've walked out and screamed at the projectionist...except I was (we were) transfixed by the on-screen goings on... and at the back of my head I was thinking this is exactly how a movie that is all about old, imperfect movies is meant to be watched!
Yes, I could watch it in HD with 5.1 Surround Sound or, (in a flight of fancy) at 48 FPS and with 3D a la The Hobbit... but that isn't the point! The point is that cinema is magical when done right, and sometimes it is magical because of the flaws, and the technical limitations - not despite them.
As someone that has been fascinated with the writings of Jules Verne and H G Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs all his life, as well as with cinema itself, this movie just resonated with me. I couldn't tell you what it is about. Is it about the life and work of an early cinemagician, and his redemption from bitterness? Or is it a simple, painful, sweet tale about Hugo's quest to hold on to his father's memory by fixing a machine? Or (to go all meta) is the point of this Martin Scorsese's own cinemagic? All and none, methinks.
The point is... I was transfixed, and I was transformed. For those two hours, I was not a thirty two year old jaded guy just waiting for the new years eve boozing and dancing to begin. No, I was a fascinated little boy myself, in tune with Hugo Cabret. I was the kid that used to get together with a friend or two and do elaborate shadow puppet "shows" in a darkened room for a doting parental audience, which involved pillow-cases and handheld torches and mostly apocalyptic storylines that saw many an action figure get dismembered. The kid that day-dreamed about Tarzan and the Phantom running into each other, or about what would happen if a meteor as speeding towards the earth and I was on a spaceship, and...
(for that last, you will understand that this was at least a decade before both Armageddon and Deep Impact, and in so doing forgive me).
(The internet is wonderful - that there is an actual Georges Méliès hand-colored clip!)
I think for a moment there, I felt the same magic that Scorsese must have felt when making this movie. And that is the point, is it not, of every movie? That you get to put yourself in shoes other than your own, that you get to be one with the mind of the artists behind what you see? That you feel as emotional, as taken aback, as breathless as they did, or would, were they watching this vision on the screen?
When watching works of grand imagination, that feeling is I think best described as a feeling "intimate grandeur", where the picture itself is your wildest imagination - your dream - come true, but at the same time watching it is a most intimate sort of communion with another mind.
This afternoon, I have spent researching Georges Méliès, and I will almost certainly buy and read Brian Selznick's illustrated book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret before long. For now however, I can only express my gratitude to all the people that enabled those two magical hours I experienced twenty-four hours ago. As conspiracies of happenstance go, I think this was one of the best ones I've been subject to.
Thank you universe!
Please sir, can I have some more?
1 comment:
I'd imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured, if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn't be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.
Maybe this holds true of those 2 hours. ;)
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