Synecdoche, New York

I saw this film under curious and unexpected circumstances, I had just arrived in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, traveling with Elena Mesthos, on the trams on the way into town I turned to Elena and said I think the Sarajevo Film Festival was on, I had been alerted by every second billboard and poster advertising the festival, for a small city Sarajevo locals seem to take film very seriously, much like Adelaide, the city is so small, everywhere you go, you know the festival is on, when we got our hands on a programme we discovered that Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut was screening the next night, Elena did not need much convincing, she, like me, believes Kaufman is one of the most creative and original voices in American cinema today, I went to buy tickets early the next morning and was surprised to find that it wasn’t sold out, the screening was on in an open air cinema, a vacant block in the city surrounded by apartment buildings, the cinema was a thrilling experience in itself, the film was a mess, but a fascinating mess, Kaufman has been let of the leash, free of the compromise that collaboration with a director would necessitate, it allows him to go further on certain ideas (authorship, self doubt) than he has previously before, but he puts too many ideas into the film, in reflection it felt like he would have been better to scale back on the amount of ideas and focus of them, even if it was disappointing for Kaufman, the screenplay is still much better than the usual of other writers, a film with too many ideas isn’t all bad, most American cinema doesn’t have enough ideas nowadays, it just makes the film longer than it actually is, and the weight of it made a lot of people walk out, and most headed for the exits as soon as the credits began, for such a dialogue heavy film, the subtitles might have been tiring for the Bosnians, but I felt sorry for Kaufman, who is attendance, and all he had to say to the remaining of us at the end of the credits was ‘Thanks’.