"Your troubles will cease and fortune will smile upon you."

Film of The Month: Stay (2005)

Directed by Marc Forster, starring Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts and Ryan Gosling.

“Do you know that Tristan Rêveur quote about bad art? It says ‘Bad art is more tragically beautiful that good art because it documents human failure’.”

This film is objectively awful in nearly all areas. Sitting at a gleaming 27% on the ever reliable Tomatometer™ (trademark pending), the acting from two of three main members of the cast is flat and distant, the visual style is showy and pretentious and the plot is so nonsensical until the awful twist, you regret spending your time on it at all.

In an interview with MTV, Marc Forster said that the twist was not designed to be this way. The audience should not be expecting a twist, but instead enjoy the journey and presentation, being propelled through space and time. The marketing department didn’t get the memo I suppose; “…this suspenseful chiller that will keep you guessing right up to the shocking ending!”. Hmm.

The visuals in this film were dubbed ‘showy’ but ‘innovative’ upon release, and I’m sure all zero people who saw this film in cinemas agreed. For some, it creates a sense that the film was so far up its own arse that it would never find its way out even if it tried, drowning in its own pretension. For others, they saw an atmospheric dreamscape (for lack of a better word) committed to celluloid. The presentation in this film is truly astounding, so Marc Forster has, if nothing else, presented some of the most amazing scene transitions in recent memory that all contribute to the story being told.

The music by Asche and Spencer is also hard to fault, maintaining this shifting New York landscape as dark and dangerous in our heads, but also with these bouts of serenity and peace that juxtapose to create something that’s incredibly hard to describe and immensely disturbing to feel. This film is pretty hard to write about if I’m honest, so if this sounds confusing it’s probably just because I’m confused about what to write.

If you enjoy watching films with your eyes open, actually paying attention to what’s going on and the relevance of it, you’ll have a lot to mull over in your head here. This film was playing with our perception of human minds and our subconscious five years before Inception ever did (although Inception was being written at the time), and everything this film does is with intent.

I give this film a Rêveur / 10, needed more ill-fitting trousers.

Credit to Paratr00per for the train gif. The others belong to others, I don’t know who.

When I watched “Stay” for the first time there were many things that crossed my mind. One of them was the idea of Tristan Reveur.

To be honest - I thought that Tristan was real. Then I started to wonder - why the hell I’ve never heard anything about him? I’m not an ignorant. As a human being interested in many things - I know at least some basic information about artists so why I missed him? Such a shame… When I realised that he was… well - just an illusion I was really sad.

But then I thought:

I feel the same real disappointment and sadness that I can’t see his art - no matter if he’s real or not. Nothing’s left - no matter if there were something or not - still nothing’s left. But you know what?

The art that doesn’t exist - in my eyes - is the most beautiful art in the world.

Because in our minds things can be perfect. This perfection is breaking apart when we’re trying to pull it out of our minds and transfer it into something real. If Tristan was real I think this could be the reason why he destroyed everything. He didn’t want his art to be bad. He was just sick of documenting human failure. And…

… and I have a few more words about Tristan but I think I’ll just leave it for now or this text will be simply too long.