regret

The sort of high-concept swing nobody risks any more (which is of course a small tragedy). What struck me most was this: do this exact film with football and it’d be insufferable, yet with baseball it’s earnest and earned. The mundanities of another country’s sport arrive here as something close to myth. We don’t have that for football. Partly the game’s class baggage, partly a national suspicion of taking it too seriously, of being caught intellectualising a thing that’s meant to be felt. Costner stands in a cornfield talking to ghosts and it plays straight. Try the equivalent featuring a centre-half on a wet Tuesday in the Championship and you’re looking at something vastly different.

Excellent. Quiet, subtle, really well observed. Lovely to look at too.

I have vivid memories of watching this at the cinema, especially the delayed opening credits and Beck’s “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime” arriving about 20 minutes in. A song I had no idea was coming. Its appearance and reprise at the end are moments that have stuck with me.

The nonlinearity isn’t as complicated as it first felt, but it still keeps repeat viewings interesting.

Above all, it’s just such a fucking good *film. *A story that could only work in cinema, and a beautiful collaboration from Gondry, Kaufman and Bismuth all at or near the height of their powers.