Here, by Robert Zemeckis. The review

A doctor calls his patient: “I have good and bad news for you. The good news is that she has 24 hours to live.” “Ah!”, says the man. “And the bad one then?” “Eh, I should have told him yesterday…”

You are here

As often happens with Robert Zemeckis, one of his films poses a philosophical question starting from the title of the work: here, Who. This is also the name of the splendid graphic novel by Richard McGuire at the basis of the operation, but the “here” drawn on paper takes on (at least) an extra coordinate when it is transposed to the cinema, which is time, movement, becoming, the “now”. Here and nowhere and now. The coordinates of Zemeckis' cinema have always been, moreover, combined with the ever-living obsession of capturing “visually” the mutations that occur to bodies and things during their stay on the screen.
This is what Bruno Latour (in his posthumous volume, the beautiful Where are they?) calls 'the thaw of the landscape'. “This change in form is based on a very simple observation: we humans have never had the experience of encountering the 'inert things' that apparently made up the 'material' world. It is evident if you live in the city, given that every millimeter of your living environment has been created by human beings, your fellow human beings, but it is equally evident if you live in the countryside, given that every single detail of the territory is the work of a living being, sometimes even very far in time. This feeling that things have consistency applies to the entire extent of the critical zone. The 'inert things' exist only for an experience of thought that would transport you, with your imagination, to a world in which no one has ever lived. Hence the question arises: does the sensation of this evidence change your way of being today, of looking to the future, of placing yourself in space, of understanding what you call freedom of movement?”
That's why the characters of Here they often look in front of them and rarely behind them, with an expedient stolen from the language of soap opera (those familiar with soap operas know that often the protagonists they earn the foreground approaching the lens of the fixed camera, with the other figures on stage speaking to them from behind their backs or from the back of the picture): the scope of the questions that these stories bring with them goes beyond the bloated melody aspect of the family events of Richard and Margaret, and also experimentation on deaging and speed of rendering of CGI, to reflect on one of the central problems of our time – our position in the field of action of the image, now that every window on the outside, as happens dozens of times in the film, has been fragmented into a quantity of smaller screens that pile up on top of each other before our eyes. The times in which the protagonists will look through the large window overlooking the living room can be counted on the fingers of one hand, that opening serves above all to let the out nell’internal (the firefighters, the archaeologists) – and in fact in the incipit the two empty chairs turn their backs to the window, look towards us, as an invitation to the spectators to sit down, to look at themselves in the mirror (how much Harold Pinter is in all this device?).

No, not now, not here, this huge landslide

It is a problem of perspective, that is, one of the crucial issues of artistic representations since the dawn of time: it is no coincidence that Hereat the same moment in which it crosses the cosmogony of Terrence Malick and the chamber inventions of Michel Gondry, it actually starts again from the origins fronts of the device, and therefore by the structure of the sit-comfixed shot on the living room of the house, the sofa as the hidden protagonist, the actors who grow and age as the episodes and seasons pass (the same intuition that the neighbor had had WandaVisioncome to think of it). “How to highlight such a mutation?”Latour always asks in this regard: “Saying that Earthlings are no longer to be found in front of to a landscape” (the crucial sequence in which we see in reverse the family films of the head of the family Al projected on the white sheet of which the spectator finds himself behind…).
Here then is nature forcefully immersive of this fixed plan reconnects this entire parable with destiny more and more installation of the cinema-to-come (Here come The area of ​​interest apparently without the Holocaust?), the vision of a panel which interacts with our eyes as it changes and opens “live” with us. Is there still the possibility of a vanishing point? Because the characters of Here they seem to want everything, except to stay there, in this here and now (another of the great questions of the contemporary…) – but the homes where they were born demand their tribute (as the little ghost of A ghost story), and so Margaret will try to leave for a lifetime, Richard's father will be destined to return for his last days, Richard himself will be trapped in that hall alone, his dreams shattered like his father's.

Like the comic it is based on, Here it also aims to be a compendium of how technological progress has influenced our concept of domestic space (the arrival on the scene of the television, of the home-made Super8, of reclining armchairs, up to Covid masks…). In this, in the illness of Margaret's character And also contained an indication (as they already did The Father di Zeller e Vortex by Noé) on how much the “augmented” virtual reconstruction of family environments will be able to help us in the future (according to what several experts such as Federico Faggin and others say) with the understanding of neurological deterioration, about which we still know very little. In other words, again borrowed from Bruno Latour: “What would happen if the protagonists of this story started walking again, turning 90 degrees again, this time in the right direction, to dive back into the flow of things, who in turn would start walking again, thus ceasing to allow others to limit themselves to represent them? On the side of the 'objects' there would be a cheerful commotion. […] Here too, again, it is like the thaw of a river. End of naturalism”. Ecco.

Original title: id.
Regia: Robert Zemeckis
Interpreti: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Kelly Reilly, Michelle Dockery, Paul Bettany, Ophelia Lovibond, Jonathan Aris, Nikki Amuka-Bird, David Fynn, Lilly Aspell, Mitchell Mullen
Distribution: Eagle Pictures
Duration: 104′
Origin: USA, 2024