Movie Details
FOLLOWING(1998)
Director-: : Christopher Nolan
Cast-Jeremy Theobald,Alex Haw,Lucy Russell
Movie type- Crime/Thriller
Release date-5 November 1999
IMDB Rating-7.5
Languages- English
Duration-1 Hour 10 Minutes
Trailer
Synopsis
Petter, the narrator of “The Circus Manager’s Daughter” by Jostein Gaarder, loved watching people from an early age. Watch how intensely they live, and how they turn in a cylinder. When they fool each other, they play with each other. They entertain – consciously or not. How they enjoy their imaginary power, boast about their ingenuity, and always sure that they have their finger on the pulse. Lonely losers. People like Bill, the hero of Following.
Delving into the human psyche
Bill follows people without knowing that he is being followed. That he is closing himself in a death trap. He pushes towards the guillotine waiting for him. He chooses one face from the crowd – just like we choose someone when we stand too long on the bus or get bored at the Sunday sermon. Someone to focus your eyes on. A grandmother in a mohair beret or a toddler playing under the altar. But Bill doesn’t stop at assessing the coat, the handbag, the hairdresser. He begins an investigation. Quite innocently – just crossing the street, walking this person to the door – and deciding never to follow him again. One of the rules is that you will not follow anyone twice. And this is the first rule that Bill breaks. And that’s how he meets Cobb.
Cobb also follows people. Except that, unlike Bill, he is a professional. Bill’s occupation fills the similar days of the barren existence of an unemployed twenty-something who would like to become a writer (but doesn’t even have an electronic typewriter), but can only afford to wander around the streets. Cobb is not interested in just exploring the districts of London. Cobb is a burglar. He breaks into apartments and looks through women’s underwear, postcards from friends, books, and newspapers.
He drinks wine bought by strangers. For him, being a thief is a kind of philosophy: taking records, candlesticks, and letters from apartments only comes down to completing the act of burglary. The most important thing is to penetrate the reality of the person being robbed. Discovering his addictions, habits, and interests. A walk around the apartment. A bit like looking through the mind of someone you’ve only met once or twice at best. A face was frozen in a dusty photograph. Cobb is interested in people. He is also interested in Bill. Bill – naive, trusting appearances, always bored, lonely. The kind of kid who is easy to manage.
Analyzing the first three feature-length films by Christopher Nolan, it is impossible not to notice that the director of Following, Memento and Insomnia is no stranger to manipulation and delving into the human psyche. Each of his characters – Bill, Leonard Shelby, and Will Dormer – is pushed into action by their obsessions and the people who can skillfully use these obsessions. Bill is lonely, looking for something to do – and easily accepts the hook Cobb offers him at once. In a sense, he becomes his student, or at least considers himself to be one. However, he acts without thinking, without even considering for a moment whether he is not a puppet in the hands of a calculating, cynical burglar. Just as Leonard Shelby will trust the notes on the back of Polaroid photos, and William Dormer will trust his police experience, Bill relies on Cobb, discovering too late that he has become his plaything.
Cobb knows his fears, passions, and dreams. Cobb knows when to say what. He knows when to attack. Knows when to use the appropriate comment. Bill eagerly fulfills his wishes – he changes his image, cuts his hair, buys a suit, and even a new windshield wiper. He carefully absorbs the “master’s” words but does not pay attention to what is hidden between them. He’s like Leonard, insisting that his system is foolproof (when all signs point to the contrary!) and Dormer, muttering, “I’m going to get that son of a bitch!” But what can you expect from a man who leads a life so dry, dispassionate, and monotonous? “Sad bastard with no social life,” Cobb says while breaking into Bill’s apartment. He would have said it even if that “fucker” wasn’t standing right in front of him, in his worn-out leather jacket and greasy feathers, with the look of a frightened chicken.
Game with the viewer
Interestingly, by making a film about a voyeur, Nolan becomes a voyeur himself. He is interested in details, sometimes very mundane matters, details that build the reality and personality of the characters. For example, a row of photos of Jack Nicholson sticking his head between the door panels with the famous “Here’s Johnny!” on the lips. For the plot itself, small and inconspicuous things are of great importance: an earring, a credit card that we would not have noticed if it weren’t for the last sentences in the finale, and a box with personal items. Tiny pieces of a large puzzle, without which the puzzle would not be complete.
These puzzles are simple, gray reality – Nolan likes dirty staircases, cramped studios, mediocre restaurants, and crowded streets. Interestingly, after the amateur Following, which takes place in B-class London, the low-budget Memento will take place on the outskirts of some larger American city, in seedy motels and abandoned warehouses, while with a larger budget and stars like Pacino and Williams, the director will go to exile, to the province, to frosty Alaska. However, everywhere, even in the moderately successful Insomnia, he will maintain attention to detail and attachment to everything that is every day, supposedly ordinary, supposedly boring, supposedly trivial. And the figure of a loner hero whose psyche is whipped by his stupidity or pride, short-sightedness or self-confidence. A hero locked in a trap with no way out.
The music of David Julyan, whose compositions will also cause shivers in the English director’s subsequent films, remains somewhere in the background, but it is the perfect complement to the picture – somber and dark – Nolan has never hidden his fascination with noir cinema. The whole story, with its disturbed chronology, is, like Memento, a puzzle with missing pieces.
A game from the first to the last minute, a game immersed in a hypnotizing atmosphere of illusions, cruel manipulations, and playing with other people. Nolan penetrates the web of lies and deception, observing Cobb directing the steps of the blonde and Bill, the blonde playing with Bill and Bill himself, who does not know that he is a puppet. He doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know. At the top of this pyramid is Nolan himself – but I leave the examination of his habits, passions, and path from an excellent, amateur psychological crime story to a cliched, star-studded Hollywood thriller to myself or someone else as a topic for a longer article. However, one thing must be said about Nolan: he knows how to play with the viewer phenomenally while creating fascinating, tragic characters – both manipulative and manipulated ones. And we like to watch such heroes. Watch how intensely they live.
Watch For Free On Filmy4Wap