ROBERT REDFORD IN ALL IS LOST

Faramarz Soleimani:Robert Redford in All is Lost
Water is to make you hear,to make you feel,...to make you see
-Joseph Conrad-
All is lost is a silent movie-redux,par excellence .A pure cinema of today amid all those fake action movies.Sea,wind and water has been frequently seen with survival kits in the movies adapted from stories by Ernest Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea,Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim,Herman Melville's Moby Dick,jack London,among others.This one is probably an exception,with Robert Redford in it.

You love this man not only because of his acting with his two years high school junior,Natalie Wood,in their 1966 movie: This Property is Condemned  ,as well as Buch Cassidy and Sundance Kid,and Sting, with his pal ,Paul Newman ,but because he put a lot of money and mind on Sundance Studio,Utah to discover new comers to make movies,including this one with Jay Chandor as director and writer,even to play for him in the movie,All Is Lost,Hopefully a candidate for this year Academy Award  for RR as an actor.You Know that he won an Oscar for Ordinary People as a director,and this one would be his second.No matter how many wrinkles he's got on his beautiful still sexy face and a six pack on his 77 year young superb belly.--FS

By Robbie Collin, Film Critic

Dir: JC Chandor; Starring: Robert Redford. 100 min.

In ALL IS LOST, the second film from the young American director JC Chandor, worse and worse things happen at sea. Chandor’s debut feature was Margin Call, a lean and thrilling anatomisation of the collapse of a Wall Street bank, and what that film did for Merrill Lynch, this new one may do for yacht charter companies.

As the film opens, we see a large, strange object bobbing in the open ocean while a man – "our man", as he is named in the credits – says what sound like last words. He explains that he was shipwrecked one week earlier, and has fought for survival until his dying breath. “All is lost here – except soul and body, or what’s left of them, and a half-day's ration,” he croaks.

The croaker is Robert Redford, and this brief monologue represents around three quarters of the words that pass the actor’s lips in the entire picture; his is also the only face that ever appears on-screen. We flash back eight days, and our man, who is in the middle of a solo voyage through the Indian Ocean, wakes to see water sluicing into the cabin. His hull has been punctured by an enormous red shipping crate drifting on the current: a billion-to-one thunderclap of bad luck, but he accepts it with little more than a sigh.

After dislodging the crate, he methodically patches up the hull: much of what happens in All Is Lost is intensely methodical, however dire circumstances get. Then that night a storm blows in, plunging the boat into fresh jeopardy, which is probably the point at which I would have jumped overboard and started yelling for the sharks to come and put me out of my misery.