December 27ths (Sweet Hereafter)

12/27/1997

Film: Sweet Hereafter directed by Adam Egoyan. This film has personal resonance: when something is moot, you might as well forget about it and let people get on with their lives. I like that Egoyan used the mosaic approach rather than straight chronological time. It keeps the audience engaged by not presuming that every scene proceeds in forward time. It's fun to skip around. It would have been interesting if he just left out the bus accident scene and “submerge’ it below the storyline.

[12/27/2024: The opening scene is of a school bus crash, but the film wasn't about that--it was contextual foreshadowing. If you hadn't read the Russell Banks novel, you would be thinking that it was somehow central to the narrative. But it's just the backdrop--the inflection point in which the story unfolds. The bus crash is in some sense more generically symbolic--a common trope or archetypal tragedy and could have been any other tragedy that stresses a community. When I watched it then, I was in a personal zeitgeist period and wasn't "triggered" in any way. It was something that happened to other people.]

12/27/2024