Alfonso Cuarón has never been a filmmaker known for his thematic subtlety — a fondness for overly eager and heavy handed metaphors separates his work from his more eloquent forebears.
Gravity, in part due to its quick characterization and on-the-nose visualization of re-birth in the face of adversity, is quite possibly Cuarón’s best film — a title arguably belonging to the socially and sexually conscious Y Tu Mamá También. But in Gravity, with all reservations aside, Cuarón has delivered a mesmerizing and pulse-pounding instant classic.
The film clocks in at a lean 90-odd minutes that unfolds at a feverish, nightmarish pace — despite featuring camera work that is often relaxed and prosaic throughout. But it is in the visual dynamism of the film that Cuarón has stamped his authoritative label as one of the great storytelling artists of the last decade.
In Gravity, Cuarón showcases the entire repertoire of his considerable talent. His bravura filmmaking long went unnoticed and only grabbed attention for the gripping and impossibly complex single-take in Children of Men, in which the director fluidly juggled five actors within the cramped confines of a car during a bloody roadside ambush. The shot is a marvel, and features extraordinary sleight-of-hand, being simultaneously unobtrusive and perversely close to the action.
Gravity features a plethora of extraordinary shots; the opening — a 17-minute long opus in itself — is arguably one of the greatest single takes in cinema. Created almost entirely digitally, Cuarón’s visionary achievement is at times playful, comedic, awe-inspiring and utterly harrowing, while introducing us to the relevant leads and the calamity that sets the movie in progress, all the time floating over a stunning view of the Earth below. It is a magnificent and utterly captivating cinematic experience.
In Gravity, Cuarón showcases the entire repertoire of his considerable talent.
As in Children of Men, the single take as used by Cuarón seeks to be totally immersive, drawing the audience into the world of the film and the plight of its characters. With respect to Gravity, Cuarón often inserts the audience into Sandra Bullock’s space suit, floating between a first and third person view of the action, ensuring we squeamishly feel the entirety and hopelessness of her predicament in a way the cookie-cutter script could never communicate.
There are countless stunning shots in the film, with the most referenced being the opening to Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, thrilling in its sharing of an imminent and hidden threat that breathlessly sets off its plot. However, despite the innate subjectivity of such a claim, Gravity’s opening is a league apart.
While setting a technical standard for the advancement of digital film as an art, Cuarón’s storytelling prowess and gut-churning ability to drop his audience into an alien and impossibly hostile environment — to actually make us feel the physical constraints of his world — is an unrivalled artistic achievement.
