Hearing Paul Auster’s voice in the trailer for this film convinced me that I needed to go and see it. Indeed, his words, reading, and shared experiences were definitely the high points of the movie for me. It’s just too bad that he’s in only 10 minutes or so of the film.
I had high hopes after viewing the tantalizing trailer over at the SIFF site but I found the movie to be a very big let-down – in fact, I’d say it’s the worst film I’ve ever gone to see at the SIFF theatre. There was no semblance of a narrative or any build towards greater understanding of the lightning phenomenon. A good deal of the movie is dialog from ignorant people expressing their awe of lightning and the religious/metaphysical significance they find in their personal encounters with it. The rest was a fairly off-tangent storyline about how lightning is similar to the electronic impulses of neuron firing, as viewed by the brain waves of a man playing a music (later he performs a musical interpretation of a lightning storm in some sort of attempt to make this feel related). OK, can you say “random”? Much more should have been done to bring some sense of cohesion to this film. Following one of the stories all the way through would have been infinitely more meaningful than the hodge-podge that’s presented.
In the trailer you’ll hear Paul Auster say, “These things happen and they happen to all of us but I don’t want to create a religion out of this. There’s no meaning to this. It’s absolutely meaningless”. I couldn’t agree more.
