Platform

Platform is one of those movies that critics are supposed to love and admire for its artistic shots and real story. It won many awards and played at many film festivals. Platform explores many things like controversial topic of the westernization of China as seen through the bellbottom jeans and other things like the flamingo dance. All of these are worthy reasons to see this film unfortunately the film is extremely dull, boring, monotonous, and too long for its content and subject by at the very least an hour and a half. The length of the film just leads to confusion. I was lost by the first hour of film, three plus hours is too much for any film. The version we saw was around 150 minutes but it felt more like 100 plus hours to me.

The scenery is nice enough, the landscapes are pretty, however the filmmaking is so humdrum that anything we would have gained from the scenery is lost because of the time sent on each scene. He holds shots long past the end point of a scene, showing people walk further out of frame or just having them stand still as the camera slowly pans away only to stop when the actors are out of frame on a piece of scenery for another minute or two. I feel as though the characters in the film are so board and unhappy with their lives that, that combined with the filming combine to make us just as unhappy with the fact that we have to watch the film.

Also music was supposed to play a big part in this movie. I can see why that should be considering that the main characters were actors in a traveling performance group. But to be honest I didn’t notice any music at all in the movie aside from the two dance scenes (if you can call whatever they were doing dancing) and whenever it was a part of the movie, like when they were listening to the radio. The only other time I know they played music was when he was lighting the fire at night. Even then it seemed like a child edited it in because it started up out of nowhere and didn’t even fade in. Also the scene ended without warning, cutting out the music I know it was supposed to be this great film but it all seemed too amateur to be made by a professional.

The film’s ending was supposed to be some big moment in modern filmmaking. I don’t see it. All I saw was a man passed out in a chair and a women walking back and forth holding a baby over a stove. He entire last scene is exactly two minutes long. That is way too long in my opinion for a scene with no camera movement. At about a minute and twenty-five seconds into the scene there is this obnoxious noise that starts to sound. I couldn’t tell if it was a siren or the teapot. Either way the movie cuts to black for a whole ten seconds before fading the sound out and rolling the credits. When I saw this I had no idea that it was the last scene of the movie. So when it cut out randomly to a black screen still playing the background noises I figured it was going to switch to another scene where I would be equally board. But instead the credits started to roll. I didn’t know weather to be confused that the film ended that way or be happy the film was over.