I share with you my review of the film:
The Neverending Story: Vertigo of Identifications
Released in the heart of the 80s, the film adaptation of the first half of Michael Ende’s book, The Neverending Story , puts itself at the level of children by celebrating their capacity to dream. A dichotomy is created between those who have their heads in the clouds and those who have their feet on the ground. Dreaming is seen as a quality, a strength: it is about imagining, escaping to find hope and act.
Quest, fairy ecosystems, threat, end of a world, temporary tranquility, epic actions, suspense, re-enchantment, The Neverending Story by Wolfgang Petersen contains all the recipes of fantastic cinema by pushing to the extreme the characteristic of “books where you are the hero”. Parallel between fiction and reality in a superb artisanal setting: the principle of representation and identification of the reader produces a surrealist interactivity by signifying the importance of what the film calls “the fantasy of man”.
The first few minutes quickly impose a gloomy reality, where a child, Bastien, lives with his father after the death of his mother. The latter, isolated, listens to him tell him that they have responsibilities and that life must go on.
– The teacher said you were drawing horses in your math book. – Not horses, unicorns.
This preliminary framework, this life on earth, will then be replaced by the world of Fantasia, with Atreyu as the hero, when Bastien finds refuge in the attic of his school to read a book stolen from an enigmatic second-hand bookseller.
This curiosity, this appetite, this taste for reading is the central theme of the film.
With its lost forests, its racing snails, its gigantic bats, its stone-eating giants, Fantasia is a world with immense evocative power but in decline. An evil is spreading, nothingness, a force that gradually makes everything disappear.
Nothingness evokes disappearance, the end, death and therefore emptiness, like the death of Bastien’s mother imposes a void in his life.
This fading universe is not without hope and contains an internal logic that allows us to think that everything is possible. Having become iconic, Falkor, the “lucky” dragon, is an optimistic partner for Atreyu, who repeatedly emphasizes the importance of luck in getting by, finding a way out. This luck is seen as an improvement, a favorable circumstance that can happen at any time without any prior special elaboration. It is a belief, an act of faith, in a world where magic exists, which incidentally can be reassuring for the viewer.
Metafiction and mise en abyme with a book in the film with similar themes
The Neverending Story highlights the link between the writer and the reader. It is a kind of divine possibility that is offered to the creator of a book: to be able to generate a Big Bang of characters, stories, with its codes, its standards, its laws, its coherence, maintained by the imagination, the appropriation of the reader, who mentally draws all the descriptions, actions, etc. The two need each other.
The film also participates in this self-conscious cinema, through a mise en abyme, using one of the characteristics of metafiction, the metareference, where a character realizes that he is part of a book and where the reader realizes that he is part of a film.
The result is a feeling of vertigo, a phenomenon of reverberation, a network of identifications between the spectator and the reader.
The reader, Bastien, must be aware of his reason for being in order to save Fantasia. This necessary lucidity is the vital element of the story.
We can note the importance of the world of childhood which is particularly highlighted. Three key characters, including two heroes, are under 12 years old.
Whether or not it is relevant to reveal a subtext
According to screenwriter Ron Nyswaner, it is often better not to write the subtext of a work, not to put the theme of the film into the mouth of a character, even if he did it himself in Philadelphia .
This reserve, this caution, can be explained by the desire to favour a more subtle, indirect process, where the spectator himself decodes a statement through each of the scenes that follow one another, in order to generate a progressive, global impregnation, made of symbols, of representations, conscious or not, without clear and explicit discourse.
But this approach is not always necessary if the context of a scene is favorable and if the disclosure of the theme is inherent in the denouement of a plot. By untangling the plot, one is then forced to disclose the subtext of the film.
The Neverending Story confirms this, by having Gmork, the antagonist, a ferocious giant wolf in the world of Fantasia, speak.
Fantasia is the world of man’s fantasy. Every part of it, every creature in it, is part of man’s dreams and hopes. That is why Fantasia has no limits. People have begun to lose hope and forget their dreams, so nothingness invades everything. Despair destroys this world. People who have lost hope are easy to subdue, and he who achieves submission holds power.
Melancholy, isolation, mourning, hope, magic, imagination, reality, metafiction, mise en abyme, identification, reading, vision, the lexical field of the film evokes a success that plays on several tables, with a subject without particular sophistication on the substance but which exploits the assets of cinema with a certain mastery, daring a stroke of madness, to the glory of dreamers, where imagination and reality coexist, in order to generate exaltation, excitement, stimulating emotions. The math teacher must not confuse horses with unicorns. We must change the world, redefine it, reshape it, connote something new, formulate an elegant equation that describes the reality of existing fantasies. A life without dreams can mean a lack of momentum, a loss of meaning, and therefore death. Like nothingness.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars