YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE (Lynne Ramsay 2017) - PARIS

[oscar jubis]

You Were Never Really Here. Fans or Lynne Ramsey, Joaquin Phoenix, and cinema with edge or originality should not miss it.

Indeed. Couple of comments...

Interesting for such a sparse screenplay to be judged "Best" (Cannes). Ramsey states the film was not finished when shown there; it's revealed in her Film Comment interview, for example, that flashbacks to the protagonist's war experience were part of what was deleted from the finished version.

I like how the three, sweet pop songs in the soundtrack clash with the score. There's one girl-group, early 60s ditty that is totally anachronistic and creates such an uncanny effect.

Ramsey's style is original so it makes sense to recommend to fans of the cinema of originality. And yet, the movie is so totally upfront, self-conscious, and clear (obvious?) about its repeated allusions to Psycho and Taxi Driver.

All films are fragmented in a way; plot does not include the parts of the story that are boring, that we can assume or infer. You see a shot of a character entering a building and then you see a shot that shows the character meeting someone in a seventh floor office. There's no need to show how the character gets up there. Ramsey's films often remove shots that would not conventionally be removed. Example: There's a shot of Phoenix looking at the governor's mansion and then there's a shot that reveals that he has ALREADY killed the entrance guard. There is a LOT of this type of radical fragmentation in her films. One important influence or pioneer of this style is Nicholas Roeg. I kept thinking about
DON'T LOOK NOW (1973)...

[Chris Knipp]

i always liked Roeg