2022 is over and carried out with, however best-of-the-year lists are nonetheless rolling out, as cinephiles meet up with every part they missed in a 12 months the place terrific motion pictures have been scattered throughout each launch platform conceivable. Two movies that ranked excessive on loads of these year-end lists: Todd Discipline’s 158-minute epic, Tár, concerning the rise and fall of a fictional conductor (performed by Cate Blanchett, who’s all however assured a Finest Actress Oscar nomination for the position), and Dean Fleischer-Camp’s whimsical little ditty Marcel the Shell With Sneakers On, a feature-length enlargement of some YouTube oddities that went viral 12 years in the past.
Certainly one of these motion pictures is a grim, much-analyzed drama a few world-famous, sexually manipulative, morally questionable lady in a profession that hardly ever acknowledges girls. The opposite one is a few cute, lonely seashell with googly eyes. However weirdly sufficient, it seems that they’re just about the identical film, aside from just a few minor particulars like “tone” and “intention” and “scope” and “execution” and all that stuff. Try the parallels:
Picture: A24 and Photograph: Focus Options
- Each movies middle on sensitive, fussy, idiosyncratic creators who specific their personalities by way of music, have very exact methods of doing so, and resent any exterior opinions or interference of their work.
- Each protagonists are estranged from their households and attempting to maneuver ahead with their lives with the assistance of non-family members.
- Each Marcel and Lydia Tár flip to assistants for that help, then make the error of believing these assistants are extra personally invested in them than they really are. Each assistants wind up rebelling towards the protagonists’ emotional wants.
- Each protagonists spend loads of on-screen time being interviewed by real-life journalists — The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik in Lydia’s case, 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl in Marcel’s case.
- Each protagonists want the media’s cooperation and collaboration to realize their objectives, however each discover the unintended effects are overwhelming, problematic, and never simple to regulate. Each discover their fame positive factors them undesirable consideration from opportunistic individuals.
- In each circumstances, their assistants surreptitiously movie them and distribute the video on-line, the place it goes viral and causes an enormous blowup.
- Each of them expertise devastating loss, and each reply by falling into paralytic melancholy, withdrawing from everybody they’d beforehand been connecting with. Each of them search for simplicity by retreating into the fundamentals of their earlier lives.
- Each finally reunite with their estranged households.
- And on the finish of their motion pictures, they each specific the top of their emotional paralysis by creating music for different individuals. Each motion pictures finish with a efficiency the place the protagonist takes up music once more in entrance of a reasonably weird-looking viewers.
So there you’ve got it — completely no significant distinction by any means between Tár and Marcel the Shell With Sneakers On. To sum all of it up, each movies have the identical basic message: Artists are exhausting to work with, the media is simply too, and the general public is the worst of all. Bizarre that we would have liked two motion pictures in a single 12 months about the identical factor.
However hey, bear in mind the time we bought Armageddon and Deep Influence, two motion blockbusters about asteroids threatening Earth, in the identical 12 months? That is precisely like that. The truth is, perhaps we should always rewatch each these motion pictures to see if they’ve similarities with Marcel and Tár, too.
