Prestige on Arte: a brilliant metaphor for cinema signed Cristopher Nolan

What did we think of Christopher Nolan’s film when he was released?

In 2006, between two Batman, Christopher Nolan signed one of the jewelry of his filmography, the Prestige, to review this Sunday on Arte. A magic round that had amazed first when it was released. Our criticism of the time:

A brilliant metaphor for cinema

“Do you look carefully?” From the first images of this cousin film by Memento, the voiceover takes us into the dark corners of the Victorian drama. Prestige first seems to be dedicated in turn aesthetic, a Gothic style exercise consisting in marrying past and future, bric-a-brac and technology. Dark lyricism, raw realism: Nolan confirms after Batman Begins, his status as a monstrous dark stylist. Each plan is a trap for the eye and leads to the edge of visual asphyxiation.

But behind the melancholic fantasy at the end of the century its cache … a double background. It is not the illusion that interests the filmmaker. It is the technique, behind the scenes of the show which give prestige its theoretical base and its poetic potential. The confrontation between the showman and the technician actually recounts the opposition between spectacle and science, magic and reality, and gently replay the confrontation of Méliès against Light. By following Borden and Angier (Christian Bale still neurotic and Hugh Jackman intense), two artists who burnt their wings in an obsessive race for progress, Nolan laments on the disappearance of the Iron Age while annoying electricity and mechanization …

Cocktail of futuristic visions and classic imaging, a tortuous intrigue who has fun losing the spectator, human tragedy against the mechanical of the story, prestige is a beautiful metaphor for cinema. With his duel of imposing actors, his stylish staging and his brilliant script, Nolan has just succeeded in his new lap.

Gaël Golhen

(While waiting for Tenet) how Nolan begged David Bowie to play in prestige