“There is only today. Not tomorrow. Not yesterday. We live today.» So says Mark Forster, director of the new 007 film.
And his words sound quite Bond-like — like “tomorrow will never die” or “die, but not now” … But it seems to me that Forster is invigorating. His films are about irreversible and irrevocable. Halle Berry for the tragic role of the wife of an executed criminal and the mother of a deceased teenager in his «Monster’s Ball» received an Oscar. Ryan Gozling walked on the finest line, playing a hysteric about to commit suicide in his «Stay». Johnny Depp found an amazing — joyful, creative — way to experience the grief of loss in his «Fairyland». Before Bond, Mark Forster made films about pain. Pain is his main character. Pain is an essential part of existence. Forster knows what it is. His Swiss parents were irresistibly rushing around the world, and Mark spent his childhood with a nanny and a schizophrenic brother, who taught him to ask questions about the essence of being. Since then, Forster began to see the edges of the reasonable and the real as elastic and more than permeable. “I grew up trying to avoid everyday life,” he admits now. Then my brother committed suicide. And Forster firmly settled in the world of total relativity, where there was nothing absolute, except for loneliness and the pain of parting. They made him the director. And the way out in his films is always only in one thing — in the ability of an individual, lonely person to continue to live and feel, despite the shell shock experienced by grief.
Interestingly, we have two films by Forster coming out almost simultaneously. One — his own independent project «The Runner with the Wind» — is based on the touching and most popular novel by Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan, Californian and doctor who wrote about his childhood, about unbreakable childhood friendship, betrayal and redemption. True to himself, Forster did not make any concessions to «Hollywoodism» with its demand to shoot only stars. In one of the main roles, he involved an Iranian, and even a non-professional — the architect Homayoun Ershadi, who once played in Abbas Kiorastami’s Taste of Cherry, a film that created fame for the new Iranian cinema …
Well, the second Forster project, Quantum of Solace, is the 23rd Bond. It seems that we are being offered to set up an experiment — to see the deformation of the author under the influence of the multi-million dollar order-007. But I’m waiting for something else. I’m terribly curious how Mark Forster’s morbid muse deforms Bond himself. James Bond.