Joker 2019 - Part 1

It wasn't so much the violence but all that could have been if it weren't for all that was. 

However people are missing . . . I wouldn't say the big picture but the very fundamental truth of the cinema: storytelling. 

I remember sitting there completely absorbed in Joker's mood, his meticulous (sometimes painful to witness) body language, the magnanimous music and beautiful, comic-like photography, his visceral storytelling while my mind would retrieve fragments from Tarkovski's work, or closer in time Taxi Driver. That feeling of great cinema happening right before my eyes that I lived through so many times, but that felt lacking in the industry for the past two decades, maybe less, it's hard to be precise. That same feeling that made me fall in love with this art, that still feels like coming home. Do you follow me?

I read nothing before watching it deliberately. And very little afterwards. I didn't want to contaminate the very first impression you have after watching such intense work. I wanted to slowly let it unfold. I allowed myself to feel what needed to be felt without being told, without being asked, few expectations. Art is for me a personal, private, experience. 

One thing needed no explanation, I was sitting before a classic. 

Joker through the eyes of Todd Phillips captures the poetry inheritent to life (in general and especially in the character's life). This is the work of an artist that can see beyond the linear structure of logic to express the deepest and often incomprehensible life's phenomena. Without such perception his work would feel simplistic and narrow, a mere repetition of a format we know so well, and that has failed quite tenaciously throughout the years.

Perhaps there will be a part 2.