First Reformed Directed by Paul Schrader
First Reformed
Directed by Paul Schrader
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Michael Gaston, Van Hansis, Victoria Hill, Philip Ettinger, Kristin Villanueva, Ronald Peet, Elanna White, Krystina Alabado, Joseph Anthony Jerez
Year: 2017
Country: USA
Author Review: Roberto Matteucci
"If only I could pray."
Paul Schrader is a powerful, ambitious author who knows well reality. He also has the ability to mix it with a good imagination to allow the truth and the dream to cross and merge.
Creativity helps to mitigate or accentuate the difficulties of existence.
The same style followed in the film First Reformed presented at the 74th Venice Film Festival.
The themes of history are high-sounding, they are topics to search for solutions for the whole universe.
Perhaps he exaggerates but the tone of the director is incontrovertible and dogmatic:
"I do not believe that humanity will survive this century. By now we have exhausted the resources of the planet and my generation, for example, has not absolutely committed to leaving the fertile ground to the next one. The problem today is humanity ". (1)
If we have the days counted, if we have no expectation, if the world does not survive the end of the century, what can we hope for? Maybe on faith? On our religious soul?
The day of judgment will arrive, it is certain, we do not know when, but they have taught us not to be sad because at that moment we will reach the eternity of heaven.
In Schrader's biographical data we read that his parents gave him a strictly Calvinist education. (2) Calvinism should mitigate its pessimism, but we do not perceive it in the film.
The alter ego of the author is Reverend Toller, who runs a beautiful white church of the First Reformed Church. The film begins in a sunset with a forward dollied on the church.
From the voice-over we know that the reverend is writing something.
Everything is white, clean, immaculate but it is only a facade. The church has no faithful, only a dozen. Only tourists come to visit it because inside were hidden slaves fleeing.
Also, Toller has a deep sadness. He has a pain inside, he has suffered the death of a son: "no marriage can resist the death of a child."
To depression for the death must be added a serious disease that causes him severe pain. He should be treated but the reverend refuses.
The bad luck increases when he comes in contact with a couple, equally depressed and out of mind. They are a couple of ecologist terrorists. They have the conviction that the earth has little time, the pollution will destroy it soon. The anger is deleting their emotion of living. The expression of their opinion is violent and vindictive even against the son, because the woman is pregnant. They want to abort because they are blinded by their pride, they believe to be God. They decide for their child, who does not have to know such ugliness, so they prefer to kill him.
Worse of them, there is only the Reverend, instead of comforting them and explaining the value of life he is even more depressed. When the man talks to him about his pessimism, the priest does not listen. A zoom on the priest's face, in his close-up we can observe his anguish.
The author combines religion and environmentalism, then unifying them in the person of Toller. The images are decided, precise, every frame defines the various characters.
The long shot is often used, for example in the disturbing dialogue between the priest and man, the framing always has a perspective which delineating the scene.
Then there is photography. The solitude, the pain of the Reverend can be glimpsed with the chiaroscuro. The chiaroscuro enhances the unhappiness while he is eating at the table with an exact and obsessive position of all objects.
The same scene when he is vomiting on the toilet shoot by a chiaroscuro on a long shot.
The colour is used to describe wickedness, the metaphor of the end of everything: both for Toller's illness and for the world pollution. A stain of red dirties snow on the park; the red is Michael's blood after his death. Another spot of red appears when he does a blood test.
The magnification arrives with the ominous final. Toller's depression pushes him to mass destruction as if everyone were guilty of pollution while he is the only warrior capable of facing the enemy. As the terrorists' couple, Toller is also believed to be God, yet he is an executioner who must punish sinners guilty of wanting to annihilate the world.
The relationship of Toller with the woman is unfortunate and fatal, the coitus is as painful as their life. It's the imaginative moment of the director: close-up on the two crushed faces. Her hair grows and hides the physical contact, the camera rises and around there are just lights. The couple during the embrace rises from the floor and fly. An image of fiction but always sad and disheartening.
But the illusion is repressed by the following images: smoke from the chimneys places full of waste, fires. A dollied on the streets of the city at night with the thousand and more problems as if we were in Taxi Driver.
The final destruction will be with a world destined to explode by the rubbish.
Toller wears a cilice of barbed wire, the whiskey is thrown to the ground, and he drinks detergent.
Everything is finished.
The earth is cancelled by pollution, the religion by men.
But are we sure that the defenders of this land are better than their enemies? Or are they the worst Taliban?
The voice-over is predominant, it is the schizophrenia of the reverend, which narrates two different people. The music non-diegetic is disturbing as when the priest consults the internet sites on the climate and learns the final threat.
In the film the slogans are so much because the cultural level is low, the subject and the dialogues are full of banality without building a mental and intellectual discriminator. So the film lives of lowness, mediocrity, sentences: "stop the fossil fuels" or "who will oppose the strong powers?" Overcome by the artistic skill of the director.
