A Distant Neighborhood (2010)

Too much of everything

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Can a movie be the imagetrack of your childhood memories? Can a movie put you in such a disharmonic relationship with time?With what you were?With what you are?With what you could be? Out of the thousands of movies i've watched in my entire life,only very few can answer affirmatively to the above questions. Quartier Lointain does that in a very disarming and welcoming way.It puts you in a time bubble were allthe smaller or bigger significancies of the Past,the Present and the Future coexist in a mutual process of self cancellation.The drowned pain of a meaningless life(father),the life-affirming enthusiasm of the first love(girlfriend),the bitterness of an unjustified abandonment(by the father),the urge to please someone that can no longer be pleased(mother),all poured out of the psyche's Pandora box.You cannot intervene,you cannot change the course of things.All you can do is to passively feel.

Thomas, an illustrator based in Paris, goes to a trade show in Eastern France. He has not been active in a while. His only fan, at the booth he is manning, wants to know whatever happened to the series that made him popular. Thomas, must concede he has not created anything in a while. On his way home, he takes the train going in the wrong direction, landing in the small town where he was born. The small town has seen better days. Thomas ambles through the deserted place on his way to the cemetery to visit his mother's grave. A wave of memories, gets the best of Thomas, making him faint. When he wakes up, he is back as a teenager. We follow him around in his original surroundings.The town is seen in the 1960s when life was easier. His parents are middle class people with no social pretensions. His father, Bruno, a tailor, is not a happy man. He had married his wife, Anne, on the rebound. Thomas discovers another side of his father he never knew existed. Following him, he realizes Bruno had been in love with a woman who is now in the hospital with what appears to be a terminal disease. It will not take long before Bruno will desert the family."Quartier lointain" directed by Sam Garbarski, is based on a Japanese manga. The adaptation is by the director and Philippe Blasband and Jerome Tonnerre. The idea of going back in time is not exactly new, and it has been done better before. This is an unpretentious film that takes the viewer back to a previous era where the actual Thomas, is seen as a young man and his world at that moment. It is a nostalgic look at a situation that will mark Thomas for the rest of his life.Pacal Greggory plays the older Thomas, although he has little to do in the film. His presence was more like an after thought. His young self is the center of the story. Jonathan Zaccai has some good moments as the younger man at a crucial moment of his young self. The supporting cast does an excellent job for director Garbarski. The beautiful area around Nantes is photographed in vivid colors by Jeanne Lapoirie.

Another movie with a lot of potential to be outstanding but fell short of expectations. Overall it is a well-made movie, but the problem in making a science fiction movie like this is that the creators have to make the extra effort to ensure things stay true to reality, a.k.a. the screenwriters had to fully analyze what anyone would do in the same situation portrayed in this movie.The main flaw here is that a grown man who has seen the world as a mid-age adult, trapped in a 15-year old boy and gets to relive his past, should be able to accomplish a lot of things that can make this movie really great. Probably the child actor was wrongly chosen as he did not exhibit in full the maturity level of a say 40-year-old adult, or the direction was flawed for not allowing the main character to take more action outside conventional expectations. And when i mean 'outside conventional expectations', i am referring to the level of constraint in his action paths isn't supposed to be as limited as say, if the same character in the movie was a real young boy not knowing much of adult issues, or a character who has not lived through this past and had no way to predict what will happen next.I actually expected him to be more of a mediator, or more of a neutral character, or attempting to fix issues via a third-person point of view, rather than falling into a victim of those circumstances himself (which he should have known better being an adult and assuming he must have encountered similar situations)

story to a movie is what voice once has been to a song...this is still valid for European movies, and "Quartier lointain" is an example of this. alright, it is probably not the best movie ever, but the story has soul, even if the story is small, but life is knitted together with small stories like this.the search for love, the feeling of something lost, the memory of past desires and forgotten anxieties, the wish to turn back time, the dreams of dreams...a story moving in its own pace, no flashes and exaltations, just a fragment in the life, that should not be spent in vain