Planetarium

[osprey_archer]

Planetarium has a really low star score basically all across the internet, but I decided to see it anyway because it stars Natalie Portman, and now I’m not quite sure why the ratings are so very low. True, the parts don’t quite add up to a whole, and I think the movie wanders a bit at the end, but some of those parts are quite good.

I particularly enjoyed the plot thread about seance-running sisters Laura (Portman) and Kate (Lily-Rose Depp), who have come to Paris in the 1930s to ply their trade. The 1930s is a rough time for any business, and Laura and Kate are down on their luck and nearing the end of their rope - until they meet a filmmaker named Korben, who becomes fascinated by Kate’s powers and offers the sisters a place to stay so he can have seances day and night.

I particularly loved the relationship between the two sisters, and the two sisters as individuals: fiercely protective and ambitious Laura, who wants to create a stable life for her little sister Kate. Kate is young and curious and perhaps not very bright - or alternatively, perhaps not all there because she’s in contact with the spirit world - it eventually becomes clear is that, while Kate believes that she can genuinely contact spirits, Laura thinks the seances are a load of hooey and only does it because the sisters need the money. She’s happy to get into the movie business for a lot of reasons - it offers fame, wealth, fun parties after a life that has clearly been lots of hard work - but also because it allows her to use a genuine talent, instead of enacting a fraud.

I got the impression that they’re orphans, living by their wits (or rather Laura’s wits and Kate’s wide-eyed artlessness), but the movie never really spells out their backstory and, as much as I love a good tragic backstory spelled out in all its gory detail, I think there’s something to be said for leaving things mysterious. It gives you something to go on thinking about after the movie is over.

But on the other hand, this aversion to explanation may be the reason why the movie doesn’t quite come together in the end. The sisters’ backstory ultimately isn’t that important - they’re on their own against the world and that’s what we need to know - but the other main storyline, which focuses on Korben’s obsession with seances, probably needed to be a little less vague.



Korben’s backstory is also mysterious at the beginning, although the movie eventually reveals that he was born a Polish Jew. When he came to Paris, he remade himself as a movie mogul (changing his name from Korbinsky to Korben), and that lost past seems to be connected with his seance obsession - which is so intense that he ends up spending some large portion of a movie budget trying to film Kate summoning an apparition, going so far as to use some kind of radiation to - make apparitions show up better? Is that a thing? I guess it only needs to be a thing in Korben’s head.

Kate ends up getting leukemia, possibly because of this unfortunate radiation experiment. I usually hate it when characters get sick and die at the end of a movie (or in the middle of a movie. Or if they’re sick at the beginning and the whole movie is about sickness), but by the time this happens in Planetarium the structure of the film is already disintegrating, so it felt sort of canon-optional.

Anyway. This questionable expenditure becomes the pretext for an anti-Semitic campaign against Korben. Not only is he kicked out of the company, but they take him to court, and before the court case has even been tried, he loses his French citizen. He’s taken to court for the trial, and they’ve got a camera in the courtroom, and he breaks down, shouting “Don’t film me! Don’t film me!” -

And that’s pretty much where the movie ends. There’s a little tag scene with Laura and an actress friend, whispering over what happened in a cloakroom during the Nazi occupation. Kate died of leukemia last winter. Korben has been sent East, and you hear the most horrible stories about what is happening there...

It feels like the movie got cut off prematurely, or perhaps abridged. The build up is good, but the ending feels like the over-zealous abridger has cut so much of the connecting tissue that the story becomes hard to follow, and the themes unravel into loose ends.

Comments

[sovay]

It feels like the movie got cut off prematurely, or perhaps abridged. The build up is good, but the ending feels like the over-zealous abridger has cut so much of the connecting tissue that the story becomes hard to follow, and the themes unravel into loose ends.

That sounds incredibly frustrating, because the moving parts of this movie are otherwise all things I like.

[osprey_archer]

Yes and no. It's not a satisfying ending, but it's not unsatisfying in a way that undercuts what went before - at least for me; but then reactions to the flaws in a work of art are maybe even more subjective than reactions to art in general, so it's hard to say how you might feel about it.

Some of the visuals are quite stunning, though.

ETA: I think this gifset does a good job capturing the visual style and general weirdness of the film.

[missroserose]

I was going to say, this might well be why the star scores are so low—I know I personally find it extra frustrating when a story shows promise and then unravels at the end, far more so than if it had just been a dud all the way through. It's a little like a betrayal. Maybe I take my stories too personally, haha.