The Ground Of Intense Cold Under The Pole Star

The movie is totally brilliant ! I rarely watch something like that or even close. The whole scenario is a first. During the movie I was categorise it on the kind I perticularly appreciate: Memento, the machinist and so on. There was something, some clues and hints so obvious that make me smiled, and feel good about my analysis. But I was far to imagine the real meaning of the movie. At least the fact that you discover the truth and understand the story the last 5 last minutes isn’t really a first :D.
>> The film stars Ryan Gosling as Henry, an art student at university, who is in crisis. Asked to put out his cigarette on the subway, he stubs it out on his arm. He is seeing a university psychiatrist, but when he turns up for his appointment, a strange man is in her office. This is Sam (Ewan McGregor), who explains that he is filling in for a few weeks. Henry is angered by the substitution, walks out, returns on another day and announces that at midnight Saturday he will kill himself. We see more of Sam’s life than Henry’s. He plays chess with a blind man (Bob Hoskins). He consults a colleague (B.D. Wong). He visits Henry’s usual psychiatrist (Janeane Garofalo), who is sitting at home with the lights out, depressed. He moves within the geometric architecture of the university campus, which seems to repeat itself, and there is repeating, too, in a curious scene where the corridors and stairways are suddenly populated by twins and triplets. Sam lives with Lila (Naomi Watts), an artist who was his patient. She’s suicidal, too. At various points people make little mistakes. She calls him "Henry" instead of "Sam." Understandable; they were just discussing Henry. Henry thinks the blind chess player is his father, but Henry is clearly going mad. Henry had been dating an actress named Athena (Elizabeth Reaser); Sam visits a rehearsal where she is playing Hamlet. A female Hamlet? No: "I’m just running the lines. I play Ophelia." He follows her down a spiral staircase and trips, falls and loses her. When the movie is over, and we know all that is to be known, it deserves some thought. The ending is an explanation, but not a solution. For a solution we have to think back through the whole film, and now the visual style becomes a guide. It is an illustration of the way the materials of life can be shaped for the purposes of the moment. <<