Online rolling out the film in Sally Potter’s “Unelected roads” with Javier Bardem and Elle fanning in the lead roles. The basis of the picture lay personal experience of postanoxic associated with the illness of a loved one, but this is not the case when the session of art therapy may be of interest to other viewers, says Julia Siegelman.”Unelected roads” is perhaps the most personal project Sally Potter, best known as the Director of the film adaptation of the novel by Virginia Woolf “Orlando” (1992), refined exercises on the topic of the variability of gender. In the new film where Potter was not only the Director and script writer, but she wrote the music, also there are games with the form, but the content is painfully personal. In 2013 the younger brother of postanoxic, artist and musician Nick Potter, died of early dementia, but the nature of this disease is such that the waste it starts earlier and three years have witnessed the extinction of his personality. However, in the film these experiences are transferred into the plane of abstract and speculative reasoning about “roads we choose”. Dementia is an optional item, only giving everything a tint of artificial melodrama.Leo (Javier Bardem), a lonely man of indeterminate age, lives in a shabby and nearly empty apartment, with the window where the clock thundering trains Skytrain. But there is only his physical shell — the dying mind, Leo has long been wandering away from the Brooklyn of the hole, which is technically called his house. He was a writer, but now from a past life not even clear memories. However, Leo himself is not forgotten — her young daughter Molly (Elle fanning) shows up on their doorstep to take him to the dentist and ophthalmologist, to perform simple everyday tasks, which given the state of the father will require an endless supply of patience and love.While Molly is trying to move Leo from point a to point B (this is, of course, succeeded with great difficulty), he dwells either in the past or in fantasies. Sally Potter uses fractional installation to convey on screen the confusion and the chaotic consciousness of the sick person: the narration veers from bleak pre-winter new York, saturated with exhaust fumes and the cacophony of traffic, frightening Leo, in Mexico, painted in bright and warm colors — pink, yellow, vagienna-terracotta, island in Greece, where sea and sky the same blue, fresh and clear. Gradually it becomes clear that the real only new York and Mexican and Greek fragments — these are the “unelected roads”, ways in which could go the life of Leo, if he once made a different decision.It is not known whether Leo’s a good writer, but the journey into his imagination formakes to doubt, because his parallel lives look like a set of flat stereotypes.In the Mexican part has a wife Dolores (Salma Hayek), full of passion and grief and dressed in red, and live in this reality day is, of course, the Day of the dead and ends up sobbing in a cemetery. In Greek there are a tavern with an older blosum host and a young blue-eyed blonde who resembles the longing of the writer abandoned daughter, and a life choice that rhymes with the choice of ending for the book. However, the new York the reality of the depth of meaning and subtlety of metaphors is no different: here the ex-wife of Leo and mother, Molly (Laura Linney), why it arranges a showdown with the former and nothing understanding husband straight to the hospital, where it results in an accident, evil aunt in the store shouting: “Get out of my country, you damn Mexican!”, but the taxi drivers of Eastern origin be kind and merciful and even biblically washed by Leo’s feet.The only glimmer of something living and present here is a heroine Elle fanning, which has to pull a film, while the share of Javier Bardem in all his incarnations falls mostly meaningless views into the space or centered within yourself. Molly, tired, sometimes irritated, but still desperately brave smile and genuine concern in his voice, the only one who continues to believe Leo man— the emotional hook that allows you to hold the viewer’s attention and evoke empathy. But perhaps in order to tell her story, Sally Potter would be worth to choose a different path.
