Tuesday

Night of the Sunflowers is a conservative film. I hesitate to call it a 'good' one, although it is certainly worth seeing more than many other movies out at the moment. The story begins with the discovery of the body of a young woman - in a field of sunflowers - who has been raped and murdered. But this is all we hear of that. The rest of the film is concerned with another rape that occurs in a small, insignificant village nearby. This movie is about the small-town mentality, the 'protect-your-own' way of thinking. Later it will be implicitly compared to a hive of bees, who are passive unless disturbed. Here, justice and morality become relative. But I feel as if I am saying more about the movie than was said in it, if you see what I mean. I feel as if I'm extrapolating more meaning than I was given.

The pace was very slow, the dialogue sparse, and the direction conservative. I think there should have been more of an oppressive atmosphere to this movie. It pretends to be progressive - we are given fragments of stories from different perspectives, at different times, all with their own placard - i.e. 'the man on the road', 'the man in the motel', much like a Tarantino movie. But this is very far from a Tarantino movie. What is great, though, is the inevitability of one mistake leading horribly on to the next. The slow pace brilliantly emphasises this. However, towards the end this steady intensification is lost. We have seen what happens and we now have to watch an old policeman slowly figure it out. There is no tension anymore. The ending is slightly unsatisfactory. Things are deliberately left open and undone, but I felt there were too many loose ends. Overall, a promising debut from this director, but definitely perceptible as a debut.