Movies You Don't Understand

Believe me, there is a Facebook page called “Movies that you don't understand the first time you see them” and 135 people have liked the page. Although there is hardly any activity on the page, its pure existence states that we sometimes really don’t know what a movie is about all the time.

Weeks ago, some of my friends went to see “Cloud Atlas.” The feedbacks I got were, “What happened?” “What’s it all about?” “What are they doing on the screen?”

Well, I have tried hard not to include some inappropriate words here. But we just don’t get it. Have you ever felt like a movie is a total mess and that you just want to get out of there? You're determined to continue sitting there trying to be awake. You wished that you could figure it out at some point. However, the usual case is that the confusing movie you're still watching unhappily just goes on and on and on, and eventually you will end up leaving without a clue what you just saw. 

I experienced this exact feeling with the movie “Mulholland Drive.” That is without doubt on the top of my impossible-to-be-understood movie collection. I watched it for twice and still couldn’t understand it until I saw some movie reviews explaining what’s going on. If you haven’t watched it yet, I recommend you check it out to see how confusing a movie can be and how a director prefers to plays with himself and not care about what you feel.

“Mulholland Drive” surprisingly receives high ratings among film critics. Once I understood the movie’s strings, stories and what it tries to reflect, I also considered it as a good movie that provokes audiences to think. It is in the same category of “The Man with a Movie Camera,” which requires an educated and informed audience to be able to appreciate it.

A split personality character often adds confusions to a movie, too. “Fight Club” and “Identity” are good examples. Unlike the case with “Mulholland Drive,” you will understand these movies, though, you probably will get puzzled at the beginning or in the middle of it. 

Complicated cutting is another way to mess things up, like what Alejandro González Iñárritu did in his movie “21 Grams.” Alejandro González Iñárritu is the master of cutting. He cut stories into pieces and puts them back in a novel order to tell the audience. Go ahead and check one of his films, like “Amores perros,” “Babel” or “Biutiful,” and you will see how different a story can be told. Be prepared for the depressed atmosphere in his movies.

Sometimes it’s no harm in playing with the cutting for a little bit to make the story more attractive and effective. However, when a director goes too far in this path, audience gets narrower and narrower. It might be the time for directors to realize that the most important thing in film making is neither the technology used nor its complexity. Sometimes the beauty of movies lies in that idea of, "See, the characters are just like us.”