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DVD: **** Elephant by Gus Van Sant - 2003

I fully understand why the film won at Cannes in 2003 and the Palme d' , is the prize for best director . To assign both deserved awards, the jury had to ask for an exception to regulation, which normally does not grant you assign them both the same film.

large movie refinement, full of long shots with the camera that follows all the movements of some of the players who later become victims or killers.
Van Sant was inspired by the fact massacre carried out by two fellow students at Columbine High School and professors in the United States.

The action takes place over one day: about 2 / 3 the film is about the normal and peaceful life of a high school student in Portland (Oregon), taken from more subjective, then the violence traumatically bursts with a massacre carried out by two armed students. The film then two opposing rhythms: the initial, slow, including the dead time of the real life of students, and the final one, is just as surprising and immediate execution.

The director Gus Van Sant

G. Van Sant, as always, does not investigate and does not judge but merely to observe and to show, by shadowing a real constant, the daily atmosphere of a day that in reality will not be at all "normal" .

His style is unique and unmistakable, he's clever and incisive as few others today. All his films are masterpieces, from Drugstore Cowboy to The Beautiful and Damned, by Last Days in Milk, Paranoid Park. Just to name a few of the most famous, but I do not remember a film by Gus Van Sant that I liked it and I have hit.

I ask what the strange title Elephant and so I discovered that attracts American proverb, the one known as the 'elephant in the room ", which amazingly no one notices despite the huge size .. .

Another curiosity: the film was shot in a very short time, just 21 days, with non-professional actors.