In which I think morbid thoughts

Look Both Ways at the Grand Illusion. For years, I've been wanting to have private screenings of movies, and I've often come close, although usually it's the last showing of the night and I've given the lonely projectionist the option of just going home rather than screening the movie for me (they always take that option) and that was rather frequently the case at the lost, lamented Pike Street Cinema. But this year, I've twice been the only person to show up for an early show--once, surprisingly, for American Dreamz (which I thought had much more bite than the overrated Thank You for Smoking--probably why no one showed up) and now for this Adelaide-set ensemble drama. It's rather a shame--it was the last night of its run, and I kept thinking of all the people I knew who would appreciate seeing it. It's as morbid a film as I've seen, but naturally so--all the characters in the movie are drawn to death in a very common way, half in love with it. One of the protagonists, an illustrator, frequently imagines her own horrific death in various ways as she walks down the street, realized as animated sequences. The animation is watercolor and pencil work, very realistic in coloring, and the sequences start so seamlessly and climax so rapidly that I kept thinking "how did they do that?" before I even realized I had been seeing animation and not some big special effect. The central character, of course, has a reason for his morbidity (beyond simply being human)--he is diagnosed with testicular cancer, which has already spread throughout his body; consequently he sees death reflected everywhere: every time you see a hearse go by, you know someday you're going to die. And he sees plenty of hearses. The film has a different rhythm for him, frequently expressed in rapid cutting of still photos and snippets of film: you see his life pass before his eyes, you watch the development of his cancer, you discover possible reasons for his cancer, you see the possible deaths of other characters, all in a rush of images...I loved the faces of the two lead actors: he looks like a non-doughy Aaron Eckhart, with a more interesting nose, and she is just so normal-looking that she's completely delightful to see in a lead part; together they have great romantic chemistry. I loved their sex scene, in which neither can stop thinking about their own deaths and diseases, realized through a merging of the two animation styles--until the sex seems to cure them both as they find each other's rhythms...The main problem for me is the filmmaker's reliance on montage sequences set to maudlin or mediocre pop music. It's not that the sequences themselves were so bad, but that the lyrics made them banal. They should have just cut the vocal tracks: uninspired music calls less attention to itself than uninspired lyrics.
The story made an interesting contrast to Ozon's Time to Leave (in fact, when I got home and wrote the name of the movie in my notebook, I accidentally wrote Time to Leave, instead of its proper title). This movie actually makes the Ozon film seem rather romantic, in a "leave a beautiful corpse" sort of way, and not the realism it seemed while watching it. Not that Look Both Ways rubs your face in the actual mechanics of death (other than those incredible image-rush scenes), but it deals more realistically with the fear and sadness than the Ozon. I think Time to Leave is actually a better film, or at least much more assured than this one, but it's definitely a romantic vision.
No dancing in this movie, although there should have been. Nice shots of people being rained upon. Lots of stuff about watching one's parents die--always sure to jerk a tear from me. There's a scene in one of the secondary character's flats where the refrigerator noise dominates the scene--great detail.
Final scene: hard to say--I could say a freeze-frame on an embrace, but it's followed up by another of the rapid-fire image montages, this time orchestrating the remainder of the two protagonists time together, and stretching it out into the future, until finally there are no people left in the pictures being shown--not unlike a hyperactive version of the end sequences of College or Zardoz, but at 30 times the speed.