Waking Life and The Two English Girls

Waking Life is my favorite movie ever. I first saw it in my freshman year of high school and fell in love with it right away. I have probably seen it at least thirty times. Obviously, I watch it a lot and I think it's worth watching mulitple times. I think my response to the film is very different from the other members of the class partly because of when I saw it. When I was fourteen, I did not know about existentialism or the problem of free will, so the information presented was new to me and really engaged me. I strongly disagree with people who think this film is pseudo-intellectual or self-indulgent. I think Linklater is intelligent, but not necessarily intellectual, and I like that the film really leaves the interpretation up to the viewer.

Anyways, on to the specifics of the film. First, I love the animation and I love all of the jokes in the animation. For instance, when the four radical guys are walking down the alley, it says "don't fuck with Jesus" on the wall. There are many more examples, but it's more fun if you find them for yourself.

One of my favorite moments in the film is in the cafe, when the girl asks the novelist guy what his story is about. He says, "there's no story. It's just people, moments, bits of rapture, fleeting emotions. In short, the greatest stories ever told." I think this is hilarious, because it's a commentary on the film itself, and he's so amazingly pretentious.

Something I noticed for the first time when watching the film in class was that after the soap-opera girl tells Wiley that he can do whatever he wants now that he's dreaming, he doesn't do anything interesting after that. I think he listens to Speed Levitch right after that, but then he just watches TV and then goes to a gas station. That moment could have really changed the narrative, but he keeps going on as he was before. I could go on forever about this film, but I still have to finish writing about the rest of the films, so I'm going to move on.

The Two English Girls
I didn’t really know what to make of The Two English Girls. It was kind of like a dream too (I like that it was under the theme “Tripping”), but one that kept going on and makes less sense as it went on. The most interesting thing about the film to me was the way it plays with expectations. Having seen Jules and Jim, I expected Léaud to have relationships with both the women, often going back and forth between them, and then there’d be some tragic ending in which Léaud gets neither of the women. This is true to an extent, but the film was a lot darker and heavier than I expected. However, I found myself wanting to laugh a lot, and I wasn’t sure if that was an appropriate reaction. The only example I can think of right now was the shot of the blood. I think I read a review of this film that said this was like Jules and Jim “without the youthful audacity” (I have that in my notes and I’m not sure where it came from). Anyway, I thought that was a really good way to describe this film. I didn’t think it was boring, as someone said in class, but I thought it was tiresome. After awhile, I just did not care what happened to the characters. I kind of liked Muriel at first, but then she turned into a puritan nutcase, and Claude does not care about anyone but himself. Overall, the way relationships are depicted in all of Truffaut’s films bothers me (Story of Adele H., Bed and Board, Day for Night, and so on), because it’s the same story of people wanting what they can’t have, being selfish, and making stupid mistakes. However, the ridiculousness of the relationships in this film is made all the worse by the overuse of irises, which didn’t really seem to have a purpose. As frustrating as watching this was, I would probably watch it again, because I’m sure my expectations going into the film distorted my first viewing of it.