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Christopher Nolan’s ‘Tenet’ will tell you what kind of a film viewer you are

Not another 'TENET EXPLAINED' post, I promise.

By Charlotte StanbridgePublished 3 years ago 7 min read
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Try and keep up.

Tenet is a difficult film. Take the nonlinearity of Memento, the narrative layers of Inception and mix them with the futuristic technology of Interstellar and you’d still be several PhDs away from getting a grip on the complexity of this high-concept thriller. Even the ‘Tenet: Explained’ videos on YouTube seem to leave the most important questions unasked, and as soon as analysis of one plot point begins to cohere, it opens up gaping problems in another.

Yet the film knows it is difficult, and in Nolan’s trademark style, explains itself in a tongue-in-cheek manner which recognises the fact that you probably aren’t getting it. And whilst Tenet’s plot is undeniably complicated, its visual and experiential impact are equally indisputable.

This is Nolan as unchallenged master of the action blockbuster; building on his own visual palette from the dramatic heist opening evocative of The Dark Knight, to the reverse bullet images of Memento; the scale of battle from Dunkirk and the espionage atmosphere of Inception. Nolan said he’s had these ideas in his mind for over twenty years and it shows; Tenet encompasses all of the most idiosyncratic elements of his own particular genre of filmmaking yet somehow manages to push them even further; refreshing the style with twists on the conventional spy thriller that are exhilarating and genuinely original. Backwards fight sequences, an inverted car chase, reversed building explosions, temporal pincer movements, a plane crashing into the side of a building. These are images you won’t have had even a hint of in other films, other than perhaps in Nolan’s own.

There is no denying that Tenet is a cinematic experience made for the big screen and born of the big budget. The question then becomes; are you not entertained? Responses to Tenet are likely to fall into two camps, both grounded in confusion; those who felt the cinematic spectacle, pace and visual drama of the film were gripping enough to justify its obscure narrative, and those who were unsettled by the lack of certainty Nolan is willing to cede to you in terms of plot, and became disillusioned with a spectacle that has little grounding in understanding.

Tenet therefore, like the most obtuse of Lynch’s or Noé’s films, will confront you, abruptly and unforgivingly, with the character of your own spectatorship. It will tell you how open you are to sitting with uncertainty for 150 minutes, and what it is you really want from your cinematic experiences. Is it enough for a film to grip and impress you visually, or do you need a firm grasp on the details in order to get enjoyment out of it? Are you happy to leave the screening with burning questions and a desire to come back for more, or would you rather have everything tied up properly before the credits begin to roll? Tenet’s palindrome plot will leave you either hungrily curious and experientially full or disappointingly frustrated and confused. Nolan has never claimed to be in the game of easy watching.

Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.

Exposition is the bane of a high-concept drama, and Tenet is typically Nolan-esque in its determination to explain itself to you. And there is a lot to explain. Time inversion, algorithms, secret societies, radioactive plutonium, multi-national conflict in the future being beamed back to the present day. Before you’ve got a grip on one piece of mind-altering information, Tenet has moved onto the next, building up a precarious Jenga tower of concepts, and if you drop one piece, the whole thing collapses underneath you.

I take no shame in admitting that I had to surrender extremely early on in my first watching of the film to not having any grounding whatsoever in the concepts, and only a feeble grasp on the plot. The best advice a watcher of Tenet can take is that which inversion scientist Laura (Clémence Poésy) gives to The Protagonist (John David Washington) in the first thirty minutes of the film; “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it”. Tenet is a film that has to be felt before it can be understood, and is perhaps best enjoyed this way, at least the first time around. Leave the details to be picked up later on during a second watch, and don’t look back.

Yet there is perhaps a fine line between being challenged by a film and watching it soar at dizzying heights over the top of your head. Nolan has always treated his viewers as intelligent and informed, but Tenet seems to take this a step further than Inception or Interstellar, and perhaps risks leaving those who are frustrated by the film’s unrelenting complexity behind. This is seemingly why the film is so action-packed and spectacular; to entertain those of us who are trailing behind the plot enough to keep us watching until the end.

On an emotional level, Washington brings a refreshing complexity – as well as an incredibly impressive physicality – to the spy agent stock character, who is reassuringly as confused as his audience in keeping up with the inversion concept. The Protagonist is personally and faithfully involved in the idea of saving humanity in a way that Bond is always too unfeeling to express and Washington delicately balances this vulnerability with the muscularity of the jaw-dropping fight and battle scenes.

Robert Pattinson is playful and charming in the supporting role and Kenneth Branagh is genuinely terrifying as the brutal, if somewhat stereotypical Russian Oligarch Andrei Sator, in whose arms humanity’s fate hangs in the balance. Elizabeth Debicki easily steals the best performance of the film as Cat – Andrei’s oppressed wife – who lays claim to the film’s most poetic and emotionally resonant moment; becoming the emancipated woman she envied in her past. But her storyline seems somewhat underdeveloped and rushed; the son she so dutifully wishes to save is only ever seen from afar, and the Protagonist’s protective interest in her is never fully justified or properly realised. Cat’s emotive plot-line feels like an afterthought; a superadded heart to the ballooning brain of the film’s conceptual narrative. Those looking for the strong emotional through-lines of Inception or Interstellar will not find them in Tenet, and the film does suffer for this.

Does your head hurt yet?

Like all of Nolan’s blockbusters, this is a film made for multiple viewings. My second watch – in a worryingly empty cinema on a Saturday afternoon three days after the film’s release – gave me lots of ‘Ohhhhh’ moments and made me appreciate in closer detail the genius of the cinematography. This is Nolan’s most ambitious film – evidencing world building on a scale that I cannot find a comparison for – but it is arguably not his best; lacking in the emotional resonance that makes his previous films not just spectacular but meaningful. The concepts and complex nonlinearity even set the film up for a sequel (not that Nolan would ever), and perhaps would have suited a long-form serial style, in the same way that Alex Garland’s high-concept sci-fi thinking benefitted from having more room to breathe in the eight-episode series Devs.

Yet what makes Tenet so brilliant the first time around is its pace; the jump cuts which take us from Mumbai to London and back again, the chest-rattling terror of Ludwig Göransson’s electrifying soundtrack as it pulsates through the plot, the feeling of being dragged along by something unstoppable and immeasurable. Tenet is a film likely to frustrate as many people as it floors, but in the context of an online culture of ‘Explained!’ videos, a polarised political landscape that is resistant to nuance and a cinematic schedule full of mindless spectacle, it is refreshingly and swaggeringly rebellious in its refusal to ‘make sense’ the first time around. Tenet is a difficult film, but then nothing worth having comes easy.

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