Notes on "The Color Wheel (2011)"
23 June 2018 (a little after 9am)
Why was it called The Color Wheel? Darkly comic, very funny, genuinely surprising for all the telegraphing––I suppose it's pretty difficult to make incest not surprising, especially when done the way it is. Genuinely perverse, in all its erotic trappings and whatnot. Tender and sweet as well, or, at least as far as it can be done in a film this snarky. The capstone longtake of the film, which is a tour-de-force in screenwriting and storytelling (note how willing we are to accept the sudden movement of the camera, jerky and amateurish by any standards, because Carlen Altman's performance is so captivating and the dialogue so peculiarly honest), manages to balance an incestuous eroticism without it becoming distracting, I felt, until it verges over. The tenderness of the sex scene, focused in on Altman's face is refreshing, and as I write about it I remember the scene in Hannah Takes the Stairs where the camera zooms in on Greta Gerwig's face. This is what cinema is all about (in some cases)–––a camera, and a face. Bergman, or whatever. Perhaps it's all the Gilmore Girls I've been watching but the rhythms and textures of the dialogue here reminded me a lot of that, which, ultimately feels like classic Hollywood screwball/Preston Sturges except without the sort of naturalness of the stiltedness. Refreshingly different.
Why was it called The Color Wheel? Darkly comic, very funny, genuinely surprising for all the telegraphing––I suppose it's pretty difficult to make incest not surprising, especially when done the way it is. Genuinely perverse, in all its erotic trappings and whatnot. Tender and sweet as well, or, at least as far as it can be done in a film this snarky. The capstone longtake of the film, which is a tour-de-force in screenwriting and storytelling (note how willing we are to accept the sudden movement of the camera, jerky and amateurish by any standards, because Carlen Altman's performance is so captivating and the dialogue so peculiarly honest), manages to balance an incestuous eroticism without it becoming distracting, I felt, until it verges over. The tenderness of the sex scene, focused in on Altman's face is refreshing, and as I write about it I remember the scene in Hannah Takes the Stairs where the camera zooms in on Greta Gerwig's face. This is what cinema is all about (in some cases)–––a camera, and a face. Bergman, or whatever. Perhaps it's all the Gilmore Girls I've been watching but the rhythms and textures of the dialogue here reminded me a lot of that, which, ultimately feels like classic Hollywood screwball/Preston Sturges except without the sort of naturalness of the stiltedness. Refreshingly different.
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