Left Bank is a classic tale of girl meets boy, girl loses chance to become a running champion, girl moves in with boy, girl befalls a great evil. Okay, so maybe not so classic.
The movie is served with several extra helpings of mood. It’s a sluggish tale told in muted tones and melancholy. Don’t try to watch in when you are tired or it’ll take you two or three times as long to watch, like it did for me. I kept falling asleep.
That’s not a very good endorsement. Let the Right One In was similar in this fashion, very moody, very slow, very quiet. In the end, worth watching, but it is such a slog to get to the stuff that makes the film worth it. At least the aforementioned vampire film had a sense of foreboding, that things were building within the characters. Here, there is some idea that something odd is going on, like that apparently dirt is coming out of her vagina, but it is very slight, until nearly an hour in when the movie punches you in the face with the history of the land the building rests on, at which point the vast majority of its wad is blown and the film proceeds exactly as planned to its inevitable conclusion. And it proceeds to that end slowly and methodically, somberly and in shades of drab colors. I kept falling asleep.
I’ll have to keep Left Bank in mind for the next time I’m having trouble sleeping. I haven’t had this much trouble staying awake for a movie since the ironically named Insomnia – which I’ve still never fully seen because just a few minutes of that movie sends me off to slumber land.
Despite the slowness and frequent bouts of unconsciousness, I found the movie to be very well shot. The cinematography was often beautiful, and the acting was good. Everything about the film was well crafted, it was just extremely unexciting. Well, it did pick up a little in the final fifteen minutes. It’s just the previous hour and twenty that was so slow.
The ending of the film will probably be a bit of a head scratcher for most folks, it even had be confused for a little while…
Be sure to keep an eye on Final Girl and the rest of SHOCKtober.
UPDATE: Check out other participants - Blog @ Rotten Cotton, Life Between Frames
