THE GAME [ENG]

by David Fincher

An eerie sensation struck me at first when I saw the new David Fincher film: a kind of bewilderment mixed with a faint anxiety, and a bad suspicion: I had a broad hint that The Game was only one of the many, shoddy American movies. But a brief reflection thereafter convinced me that in fact The Game was a rather interesting and, in a way, poignant movie.

While in Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects the audience couldn’t get to the truth because the tale it was told was a phoney, in Fincher’s new work it is puzzled and boggled by an unprejudiced use of the “thriller” devices: the spectators are encouraged to recognise the clichés of the “genre” movie and their narrative purpose in order to be startled later by the prompt disavowal of their guesses through unforeseen and bewildering changes in tone. Hence the feeling of bafflement and withdrawal, almost of impotence before a story that the audience can hardly make out and that denies to it a complete identification with the characters on the screen, particularly with the leading actor. Understanding whether the game in which Michael Douglas is entangled is fiction or reality is just about impossible because we ourselves give wrong meanings to the images we see, meanings that are engendered by our own experience of spectators and nothing else. In short, we cheat ourselves with our own hands.

Thus I don’t agree with the reviewers that have written in bad terms of the film, and also for this reason I’d like to have a chance to deepen my analysis so as to further clarify the reasons of my judgement, which in these few lines reads a bit confused and obscure; unfortunately, obvious and actual space-connected reasons don’t allow me to do so, but that doesn’t mean that in a close future there will not be any room for a closer look to the matter, perhaps as a part of a new section of Falso Movimento.

BORIS MACCARIO