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If you’re going to the movies this evening and looking for something different, I recommend I Declare War, a Canadian feature that ends its weeklong run tonight at Facets Cinematheque. As I wrote in my capsule review, the movie—about preteens playing an elaborate and increasingly brutal game of capture the flag—is most commendable for its ambiguity. It’s never clear whether screenwriter Jason Lapeyre set out to write an allegory about war or the brutality of childhood bullying. But rather than coming off as vague, the movie feels eerily unstable—an appropriate emotion to evoke in depicting both warfare and early adolescence. Moreover the game with real-world consequences is an ever-fruitful premise, as demonstrated by a number of films ranging from Last Year at Marienbad to the recent genre hit The Purge. Maybe it’s because the premise inspires us to make connections between our behavior as children and our behavior as adults, which most people prefer to think of as separate entities.
You can find a DVD of Blue Remembered Hills in the Chicago Public Library’s collection, and you can also watch it on YouTube.
