She Came to Me. She Didn’t Conquer.

All aboard the sputtering Tugboat to nowhere

In one particularly corny part of She Came to Me (Rebecca Miller, 2023), opening the Berlinale in a fit of painful embarrassment, Peter Dinklage’s character, Steven Lauddem, a notable composer currently suffering from writer’s block and walking the dog to break out of fixed ways of thinking, reflects (out loud) that perhaps every story on the streets of New York is the material for an opera; a treacly, wishy-washy sentiment with perhaps a kernel of truth in it. 

The biggest problem is that She Came to Me, in its supposedly festival-ready format, is not the material for an opera. It’s the material for an expensive tax write-off. 

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema.