★★★★½       By Pavita Millimuff                January 13, 2090

With all due respect to my colleague Z.P. Kibbleworth, his review of the new film Seven Sunrises directed by the duo Clivespogger and Munk is an outrage. For a film as daring as this one, which confidently asserts its vision and makes no concessions in order to cater to the preferences of a fickle audience, which does all its important work in audiovisual brushstrokes and engages in narrative only tangentially, which explores the human soul in intimate textures without imposing an Aesopian moral, the reduction of it to, as he asserts, “a banal platitude” demands correction. So I have taken up the responsibility of setting the record straight, and of giving Seven Sunrises the credit it most certainly merits.

The first point of Mr. Kibbleworth’s which I must rebut concerns his criticism of the film’s style, and the sameness he perceives amongst its different sections. It’s true, the parametric choices of each of the film’s segments – their aspects ratios, film or digital stocks, color palettes – differ considerably, while much of the underlying craft, the camerawork, editing, and use of light, remains consistent across the film. But the mistake my colleague means is too quickly attributing this feature of the film to laziness or lack of inspiration. On the contrary, this consistency too is a deliberate choice, one that gives the film a rhythm and resonance which allows its various chapters to be in dialogue with each other. Imagine the alternative, a film perhaps like the multi-director anthology suggested in Mr. Kibbleworth’s review, where each segment was its own closed-off unit, stylistically severed from the rest of the film. What we would then have would be something much closer to the triteness Mr. Kibbleworth bemoans, one where the only real unifying concept of the film is “the sunrise.” Such a film would be disjointed and messy, trying to do too many things without any centralized mission. But having a base film language underlying all of the film’s outward stylistic diversity keeps it grounded, it transforms the film’s sequences from various stories all loosely connected by a common element to chapters of a much larger whole.

What the film is speaking to is the much larger human urge to straddle the line between the finite and the infinite, to grasp the latter without losing our hold on the former. The contrast occurs in the film on multiple levels. The most obvious is in our relation to the sun. There is scarcely a more fitting metaphor for humanity’s struggle with the infinite than the sun, an object of basically inconceivable proportion, responsible for our life, always present above us, and yet which we are physically unable to look at directly without seriously damaging ourselves. It’s a metaphor that has been used ever since the days of Plato, and even in the present-day sequences of the film, where humanity has branched out beyond Earth and begun an ascension to a higher kind of civilization, the sun’s magnitude and incomprehensibility only seems to increase. The same struggle between finite and infinite is expressed in the film’s structure, where it seeks to sketch the entire journey of humanity, including far into the future, through just seven contained sequences. Whether or not such a limited structure succeeds at such a massive representation is part of the film’s discourse with the audience. Its picture of humanity may be incomplete, but what is important for its purposes is that it tries to draw one nonetheless. Finally, this theme is expressed in the film’s style. The film’s core language maintains consistent, we stick to a single way of expressing stories cinematically. But through its loudly diverse stylistic parameters, the film suggests the infinite possibilities of its medium, though it does not actualize them. On each level, the film presents the viewer with the temptation, the possibility of the infinite – cosmically, historically, cinematically – but maintains its hold on the finite. This is not lack of vision. This is a statement of philosophy.

Let us turn, then, to make of Mr. Kibbleworth’s assertion that the film is “hollow, […] with no real ideas.” What to make of this? According to Mr. Kibbleworth, the closest thing to a message that the film presents is that “despite all our differences, we all live under the same sun,” a sentiment he correctly labels as banal. But he seems to have gotten the film’s thematics backwards, taking it as an attempt to reflect on the sun and its importance across human history. I see the sun not as the focus of the film, but as a reference point, one of the only points of consistency across such a broad historical scope. The sunrise is a necessary constant, and by looking at the same thing, with the same cinematic language, through the same lens (literally and metaphorically), in a variety of times, places, and cultures, we do not just gain greater understanding of the sunrise, we also gain a useful point of comparison between those different times, places, and cultures. To see how we reacted to the sun in prehistoric times and how we do so today in juxtaposition tells us far more than just what the sun means to us, it gives us an indication of who we have become and which values have changed. We can see similar themes of reverence, terror, and awe occurring to some degree or another in all of the film’s sequences, but their relative frequency is more important than their mere presence. The film does not attempt to proselytize; rather, it puts different instances of humanity in direct conversation with one another. Failure to find anything worthwhile in that conversation can only mean failure of the viewer to listen closely enough.

I should close by admitting that, although I undoubtedly gain some joy from being able to publish a teardown of a colleague that I often butt heads with, I certainly do not think Z.P. Kibbleworth is an unintelligent or incapable film critic. On the contrary, he is a talented one who has tremendous respect for and knowledge of the medium. But boy, did he drop the ball on this one. There is no real material incentive to anybody for my leaping to this film’s defense – it’s not as though his review is going to seriously hurt the film, for people would have to actually read film criticism for that to be the case – but I believe that all art deserves its due consideration, and a film as abrasive to contemporary cinematic convention as Seven Sunrises needs its champion. Perhaps readers will think I have misread the film and agree with the charges of hollowness and banality. But if such readers are at least driven to see the film, then I have done my job.