Trailers

Trailers (2016) – Rouzbeh Rashidi   —> versione ITA

An empty movie theater, many red seats, no one sitting spectator. A man crosses the room: he is the director, Rashidi, who with its passage seems to start the show. The screen in front of the chairs comes to life and begins a long journey to discover the world, the discovery of ourselves, of what we were, we are and will be.

Rashidi is the demiurge of a movie reality, therefore artificial, but it appears more authentic than reality itself: through an alien entity invisible gaze, which is outside the represented or, more precisely, expressly built world, we see an epic about both human evolution and involution, that is at the center of a continuously creating and at the same time decomposing universe. The universe, in its cosmic essence, is represented on the hall screen and is the factual context of theatrical performances that take place in front of it, on the stage: a group of characters perform mysterious sexual rituals at the mercy of instincts, without any inhibition, suspended in an ineffable time and space. On the screen, at the same time, the gradual development of the earth gets revisited, along with the animals that lived in the past, like the dinosaurs, and those who still live there. The screen, in front of which this dark show, representative of what humanity has become, takes place, it is a delimited space for all that is not human. The space emphasizes that, what we are witnessing is not just fiction, not only cinema, but something that transcends the cinema itself: it is our reality.

Rashidi is pursuing his own investigation into the nature of cinema in all its forms and possibilities, as he did in his previous films, always trying to capture the deep cinema essence. In this movie, he seems to accomplish his goal: by using powerful images, a perfect editing technique and a superb direction and with the help of the soundtrack, Rashidi can really catch the heart of the cinema and go further, reformulating this way the concept of cinema. He reinterprets the cinema as a process of continuous decomposition and aggregation of all its elements and also as an universal cataclysm that with its destructive power does not spare even those few strange characters, who are the symbol of a now drifting humanity.

Several scenes in the film concern the development of an ambiguous relationship between a man and a woman: at the beginning she seems to seduce the man with   sinuous and sensual movements of her body, but after she prevails on the man, inflicting on him physical tortures that become increasingly humiliating and oppressive. The woman evokes the fascination that the Seventh Art carries on the man, who, unable to resist his blandishments, ends up being easily dominated by her. Most of the actors who suffer the humiliation of submission are indeed directors. In one scene, Rashidi himself acts as a puppet manipulated by the woman: the cinema rules its own quintessential ruler!

Cinema as a mirror of the mankind, which is more and more degraded and steadily declining. Cinema subjugates, humiliates, and mocks the man himself. This way a film becomes an instrument of submission and humiliation: the man is first seduced and then submitted by the film in person. The reality and the cinema are mixed: does the film adapt to reality or reality to the movies?

Rating: ★★★★★

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