2022 is over and carried out with, however best-of-the-year lists are nonetheless rolling out, as cinephiles meet up with the whole lot they missed in a 12 months the place terrific films have been scattered throughout each launch platform conceivable. Two movies that ranked excessive on loads of these year-end lists: Todd Discipline’s 158-minute epic, Tár, concerning the rise and fall of a fictional conductor (performed by Cate Blanchett, who’s all however assured a Finest Actress Oscar nomination for the position), and Dean Fleischer-Camp’s whimsical little ditty Marcel the Shell With Footwear On, a feature-length growth of some YouTube oddities that went viral 12 years in the past.
Considered one of these films is a grim, much-analyzed drama a couple of world-famous, sexually manipulative, morally questionable lady in a profession that hardly ever acknowledges ladies. The opposite one is a couple of cute, lonely seashell with googly eyes. However weirdly sufficient, it seems that they’re just about the identical film, aside from just a few minor particulars like “tone” and “intention” and “scope” and “execution” and all that stuff. Take a look at the parallels:
Picture: A24 and Picture: Focus Options
- Each movies heart on sensitive, fussy, idiosyncratic creators who categorical their personalities by way of music, have very exact methods of doing so, and resent any exterior opinions or interference of their work.
- Each protagonists are estranged from their households and making an attempt to maneuver ahead with their lives with the assistance of non-family members.
- Each Marcel and Lydia Tár flip to assistants for that assist, then make the error of believing these assistants are extra personally invested in them than they really are. Each assistants wind up rebelling in opposition to the protagonists’ emotional wants.
- Each protagonists spend loads of on-screen time being interviewed by real-life journalists — The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik in Lydia’s case, 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl in Marcel’s case.
- Each protagonists want the media’s cooperation and collaboration to attain their targets, however each discover the unwanted side effects are overwhelming, problematic, and never straightforward to manage. Each discover their fame positive aspects them undesirable consideration from opportunistic folks.
- In each instances, their assistants surreptitiously movie them and distribute the video on-line, the place it goes viral and causes an enormous blowup.
- Each of them expertise devastating loss, and each reply by falling into paralytic despair, withdrawing from everybody they’d beforehand been connecting with. Each of them search for simplicity by retreating into the fundamentals of their earlier lives.
- Each finally reunite with their estranged households.
- And on the finish of their films, they each categorical the tip of their emotional paralysis by creating music for different folks. Each films finish with a efficiency the place the protagonist takes up music once more in entrance of a reasonably weird-looking viewers.
So there you will have it — completely no significant distinction in any way between Tár and Marcel the Shell With Footwear On. To sum all of it up, each movies have the identical elementary message: Artists are laborious to work with, the media is just too, and the general public is the worst of all. Bizarre that we would have liked two films in a single 12 months about the identical factor.
However hey, keep in mind the time we received Armageddon and Deep Impression, two motion blockbusters about asteroids threatening Earth, in the identical 12 months? That is precisely like that. The truth is, perhaps we should always rewatch each these films to see if they’ve similarities with Marcel and Tár, too.
