Remember those crappy horror films that end with a shock – but it turns out to be a dream? Then there is another shock – but it is also a dream. Well, Inception is a bit like that, except that it is just dreams within dreams, with different time frames of action, and finally, just as crappy as those cheap horror flicks.
It boasts a superficially original idea – that someone can share your dream and, through it, unlock your secrets. Christopher Nolan, who wrote and directed the film and was pretty much given a blank cheque after the success of The Dark Knight, draws a blank himself when he takes the idea to the next level. What if someone can implant an idea in a dreamer’s subconscious in order to change their behaviour?
The dream agent is Dom (Leonardo Di Caprio) who specialises in dream manipulation. He relies on a landscape created by an architect (Ellen Page), who also participates in the dream. Then there’s the equivalent of the detonation expert (Tom Hardy) and the driver (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). The client (Ken Watanabe) wants in on the action too. Suddenly we are in a psychological heist movie.
Nolan does not really explain the science bit, but it is possible for people to share the same dream by sharing the same external elements. They have to be deprived of an object that they all want and exposed to each other’s company and the same landscape.
As in all films that work in unreality, the audience’s disbelief is suspended by dramatic momentum. The early part of the film is fast-moving. Dom is found out by the businessman whose dream he tries to infiltrate and is given one last job that will allow him to re-enter the United States – which is, of course, the country of all dreamers. His job is to convince his mark (Cillian Murphy) to break up the business bequeathed to him by his father (Pete Postlethwaite). Standing in his way is Dom’s late wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), who infiltrates his dreams by virtue of his guilt.
If I were Dom’s mark, I might be alarmed by all these strangers in my dream, as if I had sub-contracted my subconscious. As for the mad woman below stairs – the inversion of Jane Eyre’s Mrs Rochester – what’s she all about? Moreover, why are there no people of colour in this unreality? The mark is heavily sedated and is taken to various states of conscious that span continents and genres. There’s a van tipping over a bridge, men floating in a corridor, skiers shooting at one another.
About two thirds of the way through the film, I worked backwards through the narrative to make sense of it – a sure sign that my attention was not sufficiently held. I also came to the same conclusion suggested by the final scene. Crucially, I did not believe that Dom would commit the crime that drives his guilt. The film falls down on the level of motivation. As a 148-minute thriller, it is insipid.
The Concert is the worst kind of crowd-pleaser – one that caters to an audience’s dim prejudices rather than revealing a truth that unites viewers in a single emotional response. It follows the attempt of former conductor Andreï Filipov (Aleksei Guskov) to re-unite his orchestra three decades after he last waved a baton. His frankly nutty aim is to masquerade as the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra to give a single performance of Tchaikovsky’s Second Violin Concerto in D Major (just the allegro moderato bit) at the Théâtre de Châtelet in Paris. His musicians have moved on – his best friend is an ambulance driver. Andreï has a secret, related to the soloist, Anne-Marie Jacquet (Mélanie Laurent), whom he insists the theatre hires. His manager, meanwhile, is concerned with securing the Trou Normand, a restaurant associated with French Communist Party meetings, for a group meal.
Romanian-born, French-based director Radu Mihaileanu makes one simple assertion, explicit in the film’s dialogue: that communism is only relevant in the performance of music and not as a model to re-design society. He likens communist leaders to the modern oligarchs, mustering rent-a-crowds for sycophantic ends. Andreï’s career ended in 1980 on the eve of a European tour because Brezhnev’s regime believed he would defect. The joke is that, once his orchestra gets to Paris, it disperses to make a living – one musician drives a cab, another hawks Chinese mobile phones – with no intention of rehearsing, much less performing. It is only for one former musician that they reform to provide the film with its poorly earned, emotionally manipulative climax.
Characters barely register above a cliché. Eastern Europeans are caricatured as travelling with fake passports made while they wait at an airport in full view of the authorities. You do not believe in the interception of a fax that sparks Andreï’s deception, nor that the Bolshoi would fail to be aware of the fake orchestra travelling in its name. And it does not seem likely that characters would act with such short-term goals. Rather than helping Anne-Marie understand her identity through music, Andreï could just as easily have sent a fax himself.
