Day fourteen: Syneddoche, New York (March, 23)

Today was pretty weird, and being with Synecdoche, New York didn't help  to make it less strange. 

I love Charlie Kaufman as a screen writer. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is movie for life for me. So much that it was the subject of my first paper for college, during my masters degree. I saw it four times in the same week at the movie theater. Montauk at winter is a destination for me someday and a constant feeling at my imagination. 

I couldn't relate myself to Synecdoch,  though. It was like I was in another dimension, looking at the movie from a different universe. I could identify what it was saying, and the sense of it despite all the weird way of telling this story. And when I say it didn't make any sense to me, I go further than that weirdness. It was something more than that. I understand the thesis of art as a human way to avoid death, oblivion, as a way to live beyond the ordinary daily life... but in any moment of this movie I couldn't feel any of those feelings that were portraited before my eyes.

As I've said, it was a strange day. I wasn't feeling well, and so I decided not to eat anything. Only watermelon juice for me today. I begun to see the movie at about 1pm, I stopped in order to take a nap - a four long nap - and I went back to it after. At some point in the movie, there are a flashback from one of the first scenes in it, and I was chocked. It was a image from a long time ago, it seemed, from another life even. But actually I had seen it just a few hour before. 

Not even the amazing Philip Seymour Hoffman was able to make sense to me in this movie. As I've also said, I couldn't relate to any aspect of this movie. It is smart like a PhD thesis. But is soulless too, in a story that intends to be a tale about the meaning of life. 

An afterthought (I'm writing it in the day after): yesterday, two good friends that also love movies, told me how they admire this film. They gave me a lot of reasons, every one of them I could understand. What was inexplicable to me was my true aversion to this movie. And I was thinking about not being able to relate to it... and something came to my mind. Before the indiference, in the first scenes, I was actually angry with those characters, specially Adele and Maria. So, there are more layers here that I could see yesterday. But I'm not sure that I will go back to it so soon. 

Scrutinizing life through art... sometimes is wonderful and the only way...
other times, is just too antiseptic. 

Synecdoche, New York. Directed and writen by Charlie Kaufman.  With: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener. Us, 2008, 124 min., Dolby Digital/DTS, Color (DVD).

PS: Fragments: When Harry Met Sally (1989); Psi (2014), a brazilian TV show that really got my attention today.