A Rough and Beautiful Transition: Hugo

Hello everyone, to be honest this is was supposed to be a short post talking about the transition I would be making from football to film. However on second thought it seems clear to me that anyone who read my football blog last semester wasn’t doing it just because they liked my writing style. It is college after all. At the end of the day we do what we need to do for our grades. Sometimes that  necessitates reading a weekly college football blog written by an overly passionate bordering on hysterical football fan. So as it stands I doubt anyone else from my last class is still reading my blog and if they are well rest assured I’ll bring my neurotic sense to detail to the film screen in the same way I brought it to James Franklin’s left eyebrow.

To start off my new film blog I wanted to talk about a film I recently saw called Hugo by Martin Scorsese.  Now it may be overtly sentimental but the reason I started off with this film is because it reminded me of why I love film so much in the first place. That’s because it’s a film about the love of film in itself.

Set in post WW1 Paris, the story revolves around a young boy named Hugo. Hugo is an orphan who gets by working on clocks in and around a train station in Paris ( which also doubles as his home). He spends what little free time he has working to restore a robot his father found shortly before his passing. Eventually he makes a friend named Isabelle and the 2 of them go on a whimsical adventure to figure out how to repair the robot.

Now on the surface the beginning of the story itself is rather bland and straight forward but the beauty of the film is how it uses its simple starting premise to slowly weave before us a story filled with mystery, heartache, and regret. this is punctuated by incredible performances by Asa Butterfield  as the lead character Hugo, and Sir Ben Kingsley as the reclusive Papa George. All of this is set behind a beautifully shot background of Paris where each action and moment is highlighted by a tantalizingly consistent color palette of blue, gold, and white.

As the story progresses the colors themselves lend us to clues as to how things might change and whether something good or bad is on the periphery. Though I don’t want to spoil too much of this film I must tell you that the plot eventually comes to revolve around the movies ( old ones in particular). In doing so we see the director  Martin Scorsese reveal to us the main reason he made the film in the first place. Because not only is this film centered on the story surrounding Hugo’s adventure, but it also reflects a part of Scorsese’s very real life.

Where as some directors love to golf or travel in their spare time, it seems that Scorsese simply likes watching movies ( as if being a film director weren’t enough). In particular he loves old movies, and in 1990 he founded The Film Foundation to help restore and reclaim movies from the early 20th century that many had deemed lost or destroyed. As the story onscreen progresses we see the restoration of old films become a bigger and bigger theme in the movie itself. By the end we see just how powerful this simple initiative can truly be.

I could take this review of the film in a number of directions. I could talk more about the acting or the story but I don’t want to focus on that. Instead I just want to tell you how incredible the medium of film is to allow a story like this to take place. Through the crisp intertwining of whimsy and reality, Scorsese crafted a story that serves 2 functions. One, to resolve the conflict set in its own unique time and place. And two, to show the entire world why the charm and power of cinema demands that we restore old films. Because to honor the legacy of the pioneers such as Melies is to give thanks for the wonders of film.

Because everyone loves the movies. And for some us ( like myself) we don’t love movies so much as we see the cinema as a second home. A place where we escape the routine tribulations of daily life. A place where we see our dreams, and the dreams of others. A place to get lost in charming film, like Hugo.

 

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