Cannes is covered in bits of scalp. But despite rampant head-scratching, we do at least now know how to pronounce the title of Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut. Sin-neck-doh-chee. We think.
The reclusive, probably-mad-definitely-brilliant screenwriter of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind pulled in a giant crowd for the first screening of Synecdoche, New York. One mighty enjoyable headache was about to be served…
SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK
Cal meta-meta-movie is something brain-meltingly complex, very funny and bursting with thrilling ideas. Philip Seymour Hoffman is Caden (read: Kaufman), a tortured theatre director who’s convinced he’s going to die. To discover his real self, Caden decides to spend his remaining decades creating an epic play of his own life. Blurring Caden’s reality into a theatrical mirror-world, Kaufman’s thrillingly inventive super-conundrum demolishes the fourth-wall brick by brick before building it back up again. A typical scene? Caden employs an actor to play himself – a scene which is then repeated as the actor must then perform the scene in which ‘Caden’ employs an actor to play himself. And down the postmodern rabbit hole we go… Near-impossible to grapple with on one viewing, Synecdoche is too heavily wrapped up in its own layers of postmodern cleverness. But at its core – like Kaufman’s previous films – this is a delicate, sad, beautiful story about art, love, loss and life.
