C'mon C'mon and the power of silence

Talking about the end of the world doesn't have to feel like a screaming competition

C'mon C'mon (2021) written and directed by Mike Mills, cinematography by Robbie Ryan, music by the Dessner twin brothers from The National, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Gaby Hoffmann, Scoot McNairy, Molly Webster, Jaboukie Young-White, and Woody Norman.

“Kids tend to think freely”

I haven’t processed it fully yet. It felt like it was made out of the substance of dreams, or clouds. It was soft, like the tender touch of a child’s hand. But never naive or superficial, on the contrary it was deeply aware and poetically pragmatic. “Between mindreading and flying”.

It was like a gift, whose value can’t be quantified. There was something ethereal and eternal about it, Mike Mills talked about this in an interview at NYFF59; he said that this is one of the reasons why the film is in black and white : “I love black and white films, I adore them, I feel like they’re a slightly different species and I’ve always wanted to go play with that species […] so yeah, this film has a lot of documentary qualities to it and it’s very much in the real now to me, but it’s also like a fable. I kept seeing the figure of the big man and the kid together and it felt like an archetypal image […] and I wanted to enhance that, (and it’s as) if black and white pulls you out of reality, it’s an abstraction”.

It’s true, this story works on many scales, it’s definitely small and sort of gathered, cozy, but it has this undertone that seems to be talking about humanity on a bigger scale, of our destiny, and the act of loving, accepting, living with other people, in such a universal way that it makes you think about the true questions : what’s really important? What is life about? Why are we here?

Camus once wrote : "the absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world".

There is something beautiful that a kid says at the very end, it's one of the voice overs we hear while the credits are rolling, she was talking about the afterlife I think, and she simply said: “why would we be made to just like die? there’s probably not a reason... but there might be a reason behind it”.

The whole movie is like this, tenderly poignant, light but powerful. It feels like it’s playing all the time and yet there is something so subtly real and crucial that pushes the story forward. This sense of quest, of search, of importance and urgency.

And at the very end, when the kid simply leaves with his mum, it’s just perfect : it doesn’t mean he didn’t love his uncle dearly or that he didn’t want to stay with him, it just means that as a child he did not feel the obligations to be in more than one place at a time, he was pure in his living in the moment, and the moment was now his mother, and his time with his uncle stays in the past - and maybe in the future - but does not take away from the present. This film is exactly like that, it's a moment that means everything, but knows when to end.

In the same interview - in the same answer actually - Mike Mills explains the film : “It’s like a drawing not a painting […] it’s very quick, it’s ephemeral, it’s intimate”.

The black and white makes every place look like a totally different place. There is something “stranger” about the way cities look in black and white. It makes it feel unknown and slightly unsafe, like a path you’ve never walked, uncertain, intimidating, but also inviting and alluring.

It’s so subtle in its way of making you think about the world.

At one point a boy, during one of the interviews during the closing titles, says “maybe humanity ends? i don’t know if it’s a good or a bad thing” with no concern for the implications of that affirmation. But this carelessness is just apparent, cause deeply this film wants you to ask yourself these questions, it just does it with class and respect for its viewers. Compared to the crazy, loud, so-American Don’t Look Up, it’s simply not shoving it down your throat, but letting you make sense of it in your own time. And in my opinion, all of this, is what makes this a great movie.