a trip to the continent

The first thing that hit me after watching "Gomorrah" is how similar it felt to "A Prophet" a film I had seen a few days earlier. It was hard to pinpoint why exactly they felt so similar. They are of course both European films so you might expect some degree of similarity but they were made in completely different countries and therefore there are a lot of cultural contrasts. I think it was the films' attempts at realism that made me make the link, through the way they are shot and the way the story progresses. Unlike Western cinema we are not spoon fed information, we pick up tiny morsels from conversations the characters have and we have to piece together what is going on ourselves. We can't just turn off as we sometimes do when watching an American film. However I want to disagree with this style of storytelling.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In both of these films we frequently jump into scenes and we lose our bearings because the situation has not been established. It is only halfway through the scene that we realise "oh, that's the character he was talking about a few scenes earlier". In their attempt at realism they don’t seem to want to tell the audience exactly what is going on. I think this has a negative effect because any point you are trying to make can be completely lost because the audience is still trying to catch up. This is what happened when I watched "Gomorrah". I followed the stories fairly well but I was not sure exactly where we were scene to scene. "A Prophet" however worked a lot better, I felt engaged throughout. Maybe it's because "A prophet" only really followed one character which made it slightly easier.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I simply feel that to make your points felt in a film the audience needs to be in a structured environment which allows them to concentrate on the characters and the story being told.