Sunrise - 1927 - 5 Stars

Sunrise operates on the same principle as the very end of Lost in Translation - it is sometimes better in love stories if we don't know what the characters are saying. Sunrise's being a silent film makes this rather easy for the director.

The film opens with a simple concept - a man cheating on his wife - then becomes this bizarrely Tarantino/Lynch/Fellini film. It backs away from these ideas later on (perhaps naively so), but the end result is a beautiful movie that certainly rewards the patience needed to view a silent film.

One of the more interesting aspects of the film is the farmer's reaction to the 'big city' - having been used to television and more recent film's treatment of fish out of water, I here quote David Foster Wallace's E Unibus Pluram: "For to the extent that TV can flatter [a viewer] about "seeing through" the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of outdated values, it can induce in him precisely the feeling of canny superiority it's taught him to crave, and can keep him dependent on the cynical TV-watching that alone affords this feeling. And to the extent that it can train viewers to laugh at characters' unending put-downs of one another, to view ridicule as both the mode of social intercourse and the ultimate art form, television can reinforce its own queer ontology of appearance: the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others' ridicule by betraying passe expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability. Other people become judges; the crime is naivete." Movies have also played with this idea - Napoleon Dynamite seems to be confused about whether I should be laughing at Napoleon Dynamite for being such a gawky loser, or sympathizing with his plight (it leans towards the former). In Sunrise, I was confused whether I should be laughing with the rural bumpkin who seems to know not the customs of the city, or laughing at him for being a fool. I suspect the former - the film does not admit of these sorts of ironies. It has moments of lightness, darkness, humor, sadness, love, and loss - in short, everything a great film should have.