Things I Listened To: Pierrot Le Fou's Jazzy, Orchestral, Sometimes Frenetic Soundtrack

After writing my recent review of Pierrot Le Fou, I wanted to share another part of the film I greatly enjoyed: the soundtrack.

The second track (as featured above) features a bunch of screeching violins, reminding me a lot of Bernard Herrman's legendary score to Psycho. There's also a couple of musical interludes in the middle sung by the film's lead actress Anna Karina. There's also a very good penultimate track called Twist - the kind of thing that just makes you want to twist and shout and bop and stuff.

It's a curious mix of highbrow and lowbrow material, which reflects the film perfectly. I should also mention that it's all composed by Antoine Duhamel, a French composer who later worked with Godard on my favourite film of his, Week End.

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Things I Played: Lightyear - A Twine Game About Living Alone In Outer Space

Have you ever considered what it's like to be an astronaut floating around in outer space? I admit I haven't thought about it much but that's because I'm a filthy ground person. Or, maybe I should say I hadn't because after playing a little Twine game called Lightyear I'm starting to reassess things.

Lightyear is a game about living alone in outer space. It's also about nostalgia for home, chronic loneliness and a mysterious signal coming from the further reaches of the galaxy. Suffice to say, I'd rather not explain what the game is about because it's only fifteen minutes long, but for a text-game it's hugely atmosphere. So much so that it bagged its designer, Jim Bruges, a BAFTA nomination.

Though I'm still new to Twine games, it's definitely one of the better ones I've played. I'd recommend it if you've got any interest in either astronauts or interactive fiction. Now excuse me while I head back to my home planet.

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Things I Watched: Branded To Kill - A Subversive Mash-Up of Avant-Garde Pretension, Absurdist Logic and Yakuza Violence

If you were a Japanese studio president who'd just watched a film about a hitman with a sexual obsession for boiled rice, would you call it ‘incomprehensible’ and proceed to fire its director? If you said yes then you might want to check your passport because you could infact be Kyusaku Hori, former head of Nikkatsu, who did this to Seijun Suzuki following the release of Branded To Kill.

The plot follows ace gun-shot Goro Haneda, the number three ranked hitman in Japan. One day a butterfly flies in front of his rifle making him miss one of his prime targets. It causes a descent into personal turmoil, inviting rival assassins to emerge from the darkness to put poor Goro out of his misery.

The film isn't best described, it's best experienced. It features themes including sexual attraction for the smell of boiled rice; a masochistic femme fatale with an obsession for butterflies; a neurotic rival figure who invites himself to live with Goro; lots of jazzy music; and multiple breaks to the 180-degree rule with a whole loads of jump-cuts to boot.

In Japan, they describe films like Branded To Kill as 'mukokuseki'. This loosely translates into a film with no cultural origin. It's true because it's basically a french new wave movie crossed with hard-boiled american noir. It result is a highly ambitious gangster film with a lot of eclectic charm and fortunately I'm a total sucker for that.

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Things I Thought: Firewatch's Story Is Too Short and That's Not Cool

One thing I try to avoid doing too much is going against general consensus. Over the years, I've learned that disagreeing with the popular voice tends to lead to the impression of being an edgy dude and while it might be true, it's not really a description I'd like to stick with me. With Santo Campo's latest game Firewatch, however, I'm afraid I'll have to straddle the line. This is because while the game received a lot of good reviews, I found the game's story to be too short to make the impact it felt it wanted to. While it deserves credit for telling a mature story, the major issue is that it tries to tell too deep a story in too short a space of time. The experience leaves a weakened taste, a lot like a teabag not left to embroil in balmy water for long enough.

If you haven't played Firewatch, then let's recap. The game tells the story of Henry and Delilah: two volunteer fire lookouts operating in the Wyoming wilderness during the heat of one lazy, hazy summer. With no fires on the horizon, the two have little else to do but converse with each other via the game's emblematic walkie-talkie device. They tell each other everything, like schoolkids keeping secrets, and in turn reveal their tumultuous pasts to us, the player, eager and voyeuristic as ever. For instance, we learn that Henry became a lookout to forget about a troubled relationship with his wife, Julia, who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. And Delilah? Well she's just as troubled, prone to alcoholism, harbouring serious guilt about a missing kid, and unable to hold down a serious relationship to boot.

It's these types of situations that highlight the game's willingness to tackle mature themes, relevant to so many things that I'm sure they're bound to resonate on one level or another. Naturally, a combination of them all provides the framework for the story to develop and the result is a realistic account of two characters caught in what I'll kindly describe as arrested development. It's quite a refreshing turn of pace from most games and there are both serious and humorous moments to be found, like when Henry's mumbles over the word 'panties', or when Delilah nearly suffers a nervous breakdown from fear the two will be blamed for the disappearance of two sulky teenage girls.

One of the problems, though, is that while the game embarks on a quest to make us see how their vainglorious and foolish actions have only led them toward solitude it only haphazardly provides moments for self-reflection. Instead of being able to witness Henry and Delilah come to an understanding of their personal problems on a daily basis, we're offered very little insight unless they're conversing directly. Revelations come and go, often feeling as if a light bulb went off somewhere in the off-screen, prompting us to wonder exactly what each character might have been thinking. At one point, the game skips forward from Day 3 to Day 50, suggesting that while the developers wanted to tell a much longer story, they weren't willing to write the dialogue needed for it.

While the game clearly wants to stay brief, the elliptical design inevitably means that the game's emotional qualities get watered down. Final attempts to wrap-up the story by having both characters receive epiphanic moments about their action only serves to reinforce the point that it often feels like we're being told what Henry and Delilah are thinking, not being able to see it for ourselves. While the game could let us rarely afforded much time to investigate them as people from our own perspective, it doesn't. This means that there's too little to take from what is essentially a game that relies on us forming a close connection with them.

Personally, this disappointed me because while Henry and Delilah always felt as if they could be great characters, it never felt as if they actually were. While I was happy to experience their story, I didn’t find that there was much more to take from it other from it than a broad message about not running away from your problems. While I can appreciate that, it was spoiled a bit by the fact I'd just played the exceptional Everybody's Gone To The Rapture a week before. While not a long game either, it feels like a veritable season compared with Firewatch’s two-part pilot. Its characters are deeper but, crucially, it allows players to see characters change in real-time. While I’m sure many will appreciate Firewatch’s short two-hour duration, I invariably left the Wyoming woods wondering if it would have been better by being slightly longer.

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