You must not ask me what a movie was like just after I have watched it for the first time in a cinema. This will be because I will have spent it in some kind of shocked stupor. It never fails to happen. The story and sounds carefully submerge my consciousness and by the first quarter I will be reacting to it in strange ways, and by the time it has ended I would be alternately speechless, incohate, or rushing for the toilet. Except for the last one, ‘The Queen’ was like that.
If I were to elaborate on how I feel about the damned process of a film experience at this time I would suggest that it could be something like heart bypass surgery. In order to put something vital inside me they had to cut a hole open first. The shock, perhaps, was homeostatical anaesthesia.
It never fails to amaze me, a few hours afterwards when the wound has scabbed over, that such a thing could have happened. This is the impact of a gentle film: you are slowly freezing in the cinema watching the characters before you suffer and can summon none of your daily cynism because you no longer exist, at least until the whole thing ends. You are vaguely aware that your eyes are most uncharacteristically leaking of their own violition. Not entirely like the distant epics of men throwing themselves onto CGI-rendered spears, stirring though they might be in their own right, or the weird heartbreak of deliberately masked figures like everyone in V for Vendetta. Part of the pleasure in seeing a tale that isn’t epic abstract or psychological bloodbath is that I am put into a situation in which I am able to wholly believe that what is being put on the screen was real in the sense that it
really happened, and is happening to me now. Something intimately special, complicated relationships, family as a political arena and a political arena as, well, something thin and timid and petty despite – good intentions? Who has good intentions? The Interpreter was like that. I felt absolutely numb. It was intensely personal and you, always and ever an outsider, but never an intruder, can identify with them precisely because you know – you know, don’t you – you will never be in a situation like that. Like the fact that the only truth in our entire brief flicker of existence on this earth is just what it is: I am going to die one day. It’s not going to happen.
The cinematography was excellent. The acting was indescribable.
You know when it is when you cannot imagine that it was acting.
I recommend this film to anyone who thinks they can handle it.
