Shrek Forever After | A Single Man | The Rebound | Mr. Nobody

And now, with Shrek longing for the time before he rescued Fiona and became a family man, well, you can see where this is going. The ogre makes a deal with the deceptive Rumpelstiltskin, and Shrek Forever After becomes a What If? movie as he´s transported to a time where he never met his true love. A sign of a tired franchise, yes, but the film finds a balance about halfway through, and delivers at a steady pace while Shrek attempts to find the out clause in his contract. One blemish: the climactic battle scene, which is entirely perfunctory and just feels out of place here.

It´s to be expected, I guess, from director Tom Ford, famed fashion designer turned filmmaker who is making his debut with the film (his only previous film credit: Daniel Craig´s wardrobe in Quantum of Solace). A Single Man immediately identifies Ford as an auteur with impeccable control over his craft. It also serves as some kind of landmark in queer cinema: so sophisticated, so refined, I cannot recall a film so evocative while simultaneously so non-explicit. The closest you´ll get to an outright homosexual encounter is a brief kiss, but the vibes resonate throughout the movie.

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It´s also a nightmare to sit through. Hellish. It´s completely unengaging, and there´s zero momentum to the story, if there´s a story here at all. “Arty” and “pretentious” are beyond this film´s grasp – those descriptors could go towards something like Jarmusch´s The Limits of Control, which is similarly slow and confounding but ultimately worthwhile. We decipher all we need to from Mr. Nobody in the first 30 minutes, and the rest is a beautiful, but deadly, endurance test recommended only for the brave.

I think Mr. Nobody was going for surrealism. But Van Dormael is not a surrealist, at least not on the level of a Luis Buñuel or a David Lynch. Those directors knew that to keep an audience, the illusion of plot must occur; we must think the scenes we´re watching are connected, or the film makes sense, even if they aren´t and it doesn´t. Van Dormael doesn´t seem to care about this: we watch Scene A, Scene B, and Scene C one after the other, and there is a total disconnect between them – we´re watching a series of possible realities with no pretense of a story to connect them. And thus, no reason to invest in the film as a whole, even though we might like the individual parts.