The Shrouds (David Cronenberg):2024
Reviewed by Larry Gleeson at AFI FEST 2024.
Canadian Auteur Director David Cronenberg’s latest fare, The Shrouds, debuted in competition at Cannes, and made its LA Premiere during the American Film Institute’s 2024 AFI FEST in Hollywood, Calif., Thursday, October 24, 2024, at the TCL Chinese Theatres. AFI FEST Programmer Malkin Kahn thanked the AFI FEST sponsors, community partners, the audience, festival volunteers, and “Elma” before introducing the film. Kahn eloquently delivered a few intimate details of the film such as Cronenberg’s impetus was John Donne’s poem, “A Valediction: of Weeping.”
According to the Poetry Foundation) “…Donne’s predilection for intricate rhetorical figures, paradoxes, surprising swerves in tone, associative leaps, and ingenious conceits can make them feel artificial, or made of artifice.” Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, follows a similar arc vacillating between the real and the surreal, swerving in tone with associative leaps and his use of ingenious conceits, that not only makes it feel artificial (futuristic) but deeply visceral.
Cronenberg opens the film with an ethereal prologue of an image of some sort of protoplasm floating in the ether. From a brilliantly executed match cut leads
In the Mood for Analyzing
Paper by Drake Zimmerman.
In the Mood for Love is a dramatic romance released in 2000 by Wong Kar-wai, a Hong Kong film director and screenwriter. It tells the melancholic story of Mr. Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) and Mrs. Chan’s (Maggie Cheung) relationship with one another following the realization that their wife and husband respectively had an affair with each other. The film was captured entirely between Bangkok, Thailand for its exterior shots, including street scenes, taxi scenes, and Singapore scenes, and Hong Kong for its interior shots, like apartment scenes and Mr. Chow’s office space (Filmed in Ether, 2020). In the Mood for Love features a fictional narrative and was plagued by a troubled, 15-month production due to financing issues, his cinematographer backing out, and a lack of a coherent script (Filmed in Ether, 2020). While originally screened at Cannes Film Festival in 2000, it soon reached international audiences to much audience and critical acclaim and landed Wong & co. awards (Filmed in Ether, 2020).
This paper analyzes the scene in the film (52 36 – 57 35) largely between Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan in which they spend time with one