Multi-Media, March 22, 2013

Ignoring Schnitzler

360 veers from its source

by Gaëtan L. Charlebois

As I was watching 360 I tried to imagine the meeting of the minds which gave birth to the film.

WRITER

How about a modern day adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde?

PRODUCER (A friend of the writer but still his tone of voice deeply noncommittal)

Hm.

WRITER

A classic of world theatre! Commentary on sexual mores that still resonate! How all our fates are intertwined- 

PRODUCER

- like Crash?- 

WRITER 

- fuck no!!-

PRODUCER

- not the car crash one, the LA one-

WRITER

Oh! Yeah! Maybe!

PRODUCER 

Well I've got Rachel, Jude and Anthony looking for a project.

WRITER

Are you talking, like, Weisz, Law and Hopkins?

PRODUCER (After a pause.)

If the material is right.

WRITER

Right?

PRODUCER

Let's just say we START with the Schnitzel-

WRITER

- Schnitzler-

PRODUCER

- corrected, thank you. Let's start there but...more?

WRITER

More.

PRODUCER

Much.

WRITER

Hunh.

PRODUCER 

Schnitzler less.

WRITER

Less.

PRODUCER

Much. 

WRITER

Much.

PRODUCER

...a suggestion of.

Scene.

Because, thank God, someone along the way realized La Ronde is one of the most over-praised, too-often-produced "classics" of the modern repertoire. It's dull as dishwater and its original scandal value (as commentary on class, morality and the propogation of VD) only interests nowadays if presented with plenty of nudity and near-pornographic fuck scenes.

@gcharlebois

360 eschews the fucking, for the most part, and settles, instead, on Schnitzler's intertwined destinies, discussions of class and social structure and how space does not separate us when there exists those famous six degrees. The central characters now are a London couple, her paramour, the paramour's ex-lover, a sex offender and a father trying to track down his daughter and what feels like a million others. It's superbly acted but the grim greenish tint of the film sets the tone early and is adamant in maintaining it (and, in passing, that tint was, long ago, a cinematic cliché). Indeed director Fernando Meirelles stomps all humour out of his people. (A scene with a little girl forgetting her lines during a school play is actually horrific instead of adorable.) The point of the lack of humour (read: humanity) is lost somewhere in a hodge-podge of plotlines which, halfway through, left me profoundly confused and bored because I was confused.

Finally, 360's ties to the Schnitzler are merely a footnote for a movie that is reminiscent of too many other films. It owes much to those films without, finally, paying it forward.