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[personal profile] freckles_and_doubt
My long-suffering mother brought many of my Amazon acquisitions with her when she visited in December, among them a three-pack DVD set comprising Labyrinth1, The Dark Crystal and Mirrormask. What with one thing and another, I hadn't ambled around to watching Mirrormask2 until yesterday afternoon, when the EL and the jo&stv and I broke it out.

OK, so you take the basic plot premise of Labyrinth: teenage girl deals with family/psychological problems through a dream-quest. You get Neil Gaiman to script it with his customary wit and warmth. You find a completely unknown actress with very far from conventional good looks and a down-to-earth, slightly sultry quality, to play the lead role. Then you take Dave McKean, already guilty of the fractured, haunting, heartbreakingly beautiful covers for Sandman, and filter the whole thing through his visual imagination, without - and this is important - any actual artistic or commercial limitations whatsoever.

You end up with this:



And this:



Mirrormask stunned me. It's about as far from Labyrinth as you can possibly get given the superficial similarity of the plot; Labyrinth, for all its charm, was frequently cutesy and generally rather shallow. This wasn't: it's a perfectly surreal document, offering without apology resonant, frequently inexplicable images which colonise your imagination unabashedly and cryptically, leaving reason to wander plaintively about, bumping into things. It's, frankly, weird, and rather trippy, or what I imagine trippy would be given that I have never, so to speak, tripped. The real-world emotional story is reasonably real, perhaps a little underdeveloped, but it doesn't matter: what stays with you is the imagery, the completely insane and random characters, the strange leaps of almost-logic, the extremely odd bits of humour. This is a visuality-geek's movie. It's also an art movie, not a popular film: anyone expecting Labyrinth would have been completely weirded out, so it's no wonder it tanked at the box office.

I cannot, in short, recommend it highly enough, at least to those who actually like having their minds blown. Mind-blowing will do me quite fine, thank you. I will be finding new pleasure in this film for multiple watchings to come.

1 Which I ordered well before the current Bowie fixation, so score one for me in the gypsy soothsayer department.

2 While watching Labyrinth twice. For obvious reasons. Is there anyone female who was between the ages of 8 and 25 in the 80s who doesn't have a thing about Jareth?

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