Eldorado

I think Eldorado is my first Belgian film...

No disrespect intended, but I think this film should be shown at Chaminade, with an essay on Sin and Redemption due afterward.
It's hard to talk about the subject matter in any terms but Catholic terms.
Let's face it, the main character does nothing but good deeds for the entire movie.
But it was Sean's Pick, and Sean, among other things, wanted to talk about mise en scene.
(The Jesus Prologue was really the worst part of the movie. If the director really felt like he had to leave the only thing that was heavy-handed in the movie, that's fine, but someone should have talked him out of it.
The real first shot, of the main character driving his car, seems to go on forever, but it really sets you up for the rest of the film with a warning: this is going to be a slow-moving film, so get used to it.
My favorite use of mise en scene: the homecoming.


The two guys drive up to the parent's house, they meet the mother, and the three of them talk at the kitchen table. Then the son goes to talk to the father. Instead of following him, we stay in the kitchen, listening to the argument that ensues. You can envision how it could have been done, cross-cutting between the kitchen and, say, the living room where the argument is taking place. Instead, we stay with the mother for a very long time, with pain and sadness registering on her face. This was a really good cinematic moment and pure mise en scene.


In the end, the prophesy is fulfilled.

The literary connection may be obvious, but I will spell it out anyway: There should be a good name for it but we'll call it "This is really about something else" just as most road movies are not travelogues. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, which was published after WWI and for next decade or so everyone talked about the Odyssey connection, but after WWII people started to realise that the book was not "an ordinary day in the life of Dublin" but was the story of what Leopold Bloom does on a day when he finds out that his wife is planning to spend the afternoon in his bedroom with another man. Hemingway read Ulysses and said "I can do this" and wrote the short story "Big Two-Hearted River" which seems to be about a fishing trip but is really about dealing with the nightmares of war. My screenwriting teacher, Jackie Parks, told us that the master of "not saying what you really mean" is the playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter.
(And by the way, this is one of the reasons that TV shows are so bad: everyone always says what they mean.)

Eldorado is 100% linear except for the home-movie excerpt of the two brothers playing in their bathing suits.


If there were a Road Movie Hall of Fame, we'd have to include La Strada and Easy Rider (a slow-moving relic of the 60's). Two of my personal favorites are Wild at Heart (David Lynch) and Y Tu Mama Tambien (which definitely cannot be shown at Chaminade). If there's a list of road movies out there, I'd be interested.