By Jonathan Romney
With one more day of the fest to go, there was only one film left that people were looking to for revelations, and that was Synecdoche, New York, the directing debut by Charlie Kaufman, the legendarily innovative screenwriter of Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and others. Anyone expecting eccentricity was not disappointed. Synecdoche - named after a rhetorical trope, but you knew that, right? - starts weird and gets progressively weirder, darker and, to be honest, more downright depressing as it goes on.
Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a theatre director whose world isn't going as it might - he's stuck directing Death of a Salesman in dreary Schenectady (rhymes with synecdoche), he's worried about every aspect of his health from his bowel movements on, and his wife (Catherine Keener) has decamped to Berlin to be a famous artist. As Hoffman's character decides to put on a massive play that's as big as life itself, times turns strangely elastic, characters age, acquire German accents, and everything turns increasingly Kaufmanesque, to nightmarish effect.
The film is either a work of genius or the most expensive extended therapy session in history: left impressed but somewhat unmoved, I'd incline a little to both explanations. Either way, the film is 100% an auteur piece - an evocation of the heaviness of being Charlie Kaufmann. If he wins the Palme d'Or - which is very much on the cards for a film this rampantly individual - someone might want to take him aside and say, "Congratulations Charlie - but lighten up, eh?"
(Picture: Getty)
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