Synecdoche, New York 4K 2008 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

The theater director, in a creative crisis, tries to deal with his life and the women around him. Finally, thinking that it is not worth wasting his life, he decides to stage an "important and sincere play," for this purpose erecting a real live model of New York in an abandoned warehouse. He goes through the throes of love and suffers from incomprehensible illnesses...

Review 4K Movie

In Charlie Kaufman's world, there is no time. Characters leap over time; years and lives are contained in a second. Absurdity and only absurdity rule everything. People seem unconnected to each other, whether they have children in common or years lived together. And even the closest relationships do not make people any closer. It's as if glass partitions were put between them and a system of soundproofing was put in place. The world turns into chaos, where each atom is perplexed and incredulous looks at the atoms floating nearby.

The pale bleakness and realism, the exaggerated realism, the pent-up anticipation of death - this is what plunges the viewer into an impenetrable fog from the first seconds of the film. Real chaos, but chaos is external, visible, built into a complex system in which one cannot exist without the other. Death here is not the end, but a stage, the beginning of the next stage, of which there are perhaps critically many. The piling up of details is not pointless. The only task the director has not set for himself is to simplify the viewer's viewing experience. We don't need to look for meaning like a needle in a haystack, "Synecdoche, New York" is a haystack of such needles and, frankly, digging through it is quite painful.

For all the carnivalesque nature of the film, the underlying themes are easy to guess here, and one of them is loneliness. The protagonist participates in the events, but looks at them from the sidelines. It seems natural for the artist to be an observer, but Caden Cotard observes the events with such unspeakable regret and a dog's longing, as if he missed everything possible, all the best and important, and therefore resembles the Mole, staring with a blind eye after the slipping away Thumbelina.

It is a film about growing up, about the separation of a father and a child, about a body turned into a field for flowers planted by someone else. It's a movie about love. It's a movie not just about loneliness, but about what leads to it - about alienation, which Charlie Kaufman speaks of in the language of mindless lines and crazy situations; and it's especially wonderful when, out of the profusion and motifs, the sting of a joke as caustic as Coke and unexpected glistens.

The modern man--or the modern creator--appears in all the brilliance of copper that seems to be lodged in his gut. Caden Cotard is sick. Caden Cotard seeks comfort without comforting anyone. Caden Cotard has lost himself (to lose himself is not to endure minutes alone with himself: from somewhere a double appears, knowing every thought of him and every event that has happened to him). The protagonist has mixed the phenomena of life into an indigestible mess that he cannot unravel, he has put theater above existence, he has equated illusion and reality, landscape and sketch. Surprisingly, the attempt to imitate life down to the smallest detail discredits both life and play, and completely drains the whole action. It's like a warning about the dangers of any substitutes. No drug movie can more strongly convey the sense of immersion in virtual reality that eats a person alive piece by piece. And Caden Cotard falls apart just as a piece of paper tears under his hands: "I want to put on something brutal. Brutal. Every day I'm going to tear off a piece of paper and tell you what happened that day: you got a tickle in your chest; you looked at your wife as a stranger, and so on. - Caden - What?! - When will the audience come here? It's been seventeen years."

And once you've got into the suit of the Demiurge, once you've started the meat grinder to grind up human life in order to mold your own space from the resulting minced meat, you must remember that creations, along with life, get freedom as a nice bonus. Caden Cotard is dead, frozen at one point. And time rushes through him and beyond him. Searching for meaning through art, he falls asleep every night in a tired confusion and realizes that he will find no meaning.

Charlie Kaufman's film-literary world is filled with allusions. "Synecdoche, New York" is a promised land for fans of postmodern sophistication. With the ease and swiftness of bees flying into a common hive, numerous quotations and allusions to quotations sweep through; Dostoevsky or Woody Allen are recalled, or ... well, to each his own. It seems so natural, so logical to turn a literary device into a cinematographic one. Cinema has always seemed to me, for the most part, a continuation of literature, and Kaufman admits to this with almost shameful boldness, literally exposing this misunderstanding. Dziga Vertov, in The Man with the Camera, decided to create a new language of cinema that was different from that of literature and theater, and Synecdoche, New York is a kind of disappointing response to Vertov's experiment, because here film, literature and theater are woven into a deliberately tight lump.

Synecdoche is a literary trope denoting the transfer of meaning from the particular to the general, the naming of the whole by its part. The helpless stage manager of theater plays, whose existence has merged into a giant mosaic with the existence of the people and characters surrounding him, is a synecdoche of the whole of New York, lined up in a set.