Anomalisa review: 'Being John Malkovich' writer Charlie Kaufman presents a fascinating, bizzare story

Writer-director Charlie Kaufman is a strange and fascinating person. His movies don’t exactly make it easy to decipher exactly what drives him forward. Is it the search for something new and meaningful in life? Is it the voyeuristic undercurrent of the world that makes him tick? Or is it nostalgia of the good old days? Or the apparent disillusionment with the universal definition of ‘love’? A bit of everything collides together in his latest film Anomalisa, a stop motion animation feature he co directs with Duke Johnson. It’s impossible to talk about Anomalisa without really getting into what the title means. That way Kaufman has made a genius move by making it extremely difficult for film geeks to review this film. [caption id=“attachment_2491420” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] A still from Anomalisa. Image from Facebook.[/caption] Talking about the outline of the plot in any way would give away the incredible central concept of the film, so the little you know the more the film would reward you. A man named Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis) arrives in Cincinnati for a routine work based conference. He checks into a hotel, haunted by memories of a woman from his past and encounters something he has never experienced in the longest time. Digging up any more info on the film would only mar the experience for you. What we can talk about, is that Anomalisa has many of the idiosyncratic touches from his earlier work like Synecdoche New York, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. His trademark themes of duplicates, dual conflicting personalities and a generally bitter and pessimistic worldview are laced deeply into the film. Much like in his oeuvre dialogue and scenes that should be mundane are so mesmerizing you can’t look away. A good half an hour of the film is dedicated to only two scenes, one where Stone takes a taxi from the airport to a hotel and another where he orders room service. The taxi guy can’t stop selling the city’s famous chili, and the room service guy is so specific it’s hilarious. Kaufman demonstrates that observed closely, there’s bizarreness and hilarity to be found even in routineness. And these routine sequences are complemented by spurts of bizarre imagery that is left to the viewer to piece together and make sense of. On that front there is a two-pronged road – firstly the filmmaking is so good you won’t even realize for a while that you’re watching a stop motion film, and secondly the use of stop motion is integral to the plot. Often times a film’s visual style doesn’t corroborate with the plot but Anomalisa answers pretty early on why Kaufman decided to try his hand at stop motion instead of doing a regular feature. And even with the restrictive filmmaking tools like puppets that exude less emotion than human actors or computer animation the film still somehow manages to make you ponder over some existentialist themes. Talking puppets will make you ponder over the last heart you broke, your shallowness as a person, others’ inability to understand why you’re disenchanted with romance and your apprehension of meeting people. They don’t get it, and you don’t get why you’re like this. You’re trying to find yourself, and that special someone who can make you feel like the person you were many years ago. But that’s forbidden because that’s unbecoming, and because everyone already loves you, and yet you don’t have a shred of sympathy for any of those people because you just can’t connect with them. Whom do you turn to then, whom can you connect with? The answer is the writer of Anamolisa: Charlie Kaufman. Anomalisa is playing during JioMAMI Mumbai Film Festival at Nov 2 at 7pm PVR Juhu Screen 2, and Nov 5 at at 1:30 pm at PVR Juhu.

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