On trusting your intuition and the director's intention when watching movies
Sometimes a movie can be really frustrating to watch and your initial reaction may be that the movie isn’t very good, because it is doing something unconventional or strange that doesn’t align with how we expect a movie to work. I recently watched the French movie Abus de faiblesse1 which was really challenging in that regard, and I am going to use it as an example on how to have faith in what the director is doing and trust that your own feelings about it aren’t wrong, and even negative feelings can be entirely intentional from the filmmaker.
Sometimes a movie can be confusing, the characters make choices that seemingly doesn’t make sense, things are left unexplained, story threads are started but left hanging, the acting feels unnatural, the characters are all unlikable or any other things that could be signs of a bad movie. However, I would argue that sometimes these things are entirely intentional from the filmmaker.
If you are watching a movie and feeling lost, confused or just discomfort in general, then the director probably has you right where they want you to be. Not all movies are meant to wrap things up, give all the answers or provide resolution. In the case of Abus de faiblesse it tells the story of a women who is recovering from a stroke and then knowingly invites a convicted conman into her life, who proceeds to trick her into giving him large sums of money. Her actions make little sense, even seem out of character, plot setups are established and almost completely abandoned, scenes start and stop with little cohesion and it all feels a bit unrealistic. However, it being a semi-autobiographical film, it succeeds in creating a sense of the paradoxical feelings that arises for those who fell victim to that form of psychological manipulation.
Having an intuitive approach to watching movies and trusting that the filmmakers have a deliberate intention behind everything we see on screen, is how I personally think allows for the best experiences. Few people set out to make a bad movie, though all of this probably best applies to auteur directors who have been given creative freedom and not movies that are handled by a committee of producers. Making a movie is full of thousands little choices and few things are unintentional. For example, in many of the movies by Yorgos Lanthimos the actors are doing a very stiff an unemotional form of acting. It could look like incredibly bad acting, but we know from other movies that these world class actors are more than capable of many kinds of acting, so there must be a good reason for the acting to be strange in this movie. I think it is important to try and be curious on why such choices are made. It might be challenging when it goes against what we are used to being the “do's and dont’s” of movies, but that is exactly why it is much more interesting to see where the unconventional choices takes us.
Forget the notion that you are too stupid to understand a movie, or that you need to analyse it to get the right interpretation. Trust that the artist has an intention and see where your own intuition takes you. To quote the late David Lynch:
Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That's the thing about painting, photography, cinema.2
Of course, sometimes a movie is just bad.
From 2013, English title is Abuse of Weakness, directed by Catherine Breillat and starring Isabelle Huppert. I also wrote a very positive review on Letterboxd.↩
Another great quote: "It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.” I actually don’t know if these quotes are real, I just found them on BrainyQuote, but it does seem to align what the views he as expressed in various interviews.↩