Music Box Hanna

After a phenomenal brunch at Good Enough to Eat on the Upper West Side, we headed to the Lincoln Square Theater (a truly Disney-fied wonder.. they can bury me there) to see the film Hanna.  My thoughts on the film:

Open the music box.  Inside, the ballerina is lethal.  She whirls to unheard music, feels nothing, just misses the heart.  Once upon a time, a girl with icy white eyebrows emerged from her enchanted house in the woods.  The rest is written in a fairy tale – the Grimm kind.

Hanna is extraordinary.  It was directed by Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, The Soloist).  I won't give away too much here because I like the idea of diving into this film and getting swept away.  It's an adrenaline flick, the kind of movie that catapults you out of your awareness.  It's a fairy tale that feels exotic, Grimm.    

The film focuses on a mysterious and icy cool young girl named Hanna (the ridiculously magical Saoirse Ronan) living and training with her father (a bearded and bedraggled Eric Bana) in the middle of nowhere.  Seriously, young Hanna guts a deer in the first 5 minutes of the film and you know she means business.  Hanna has no expression, no fear.  Her eyes radiate from a mummy mess of animal furs.  It's as if she was somehow formed in a world of ice.  She has luminous blue eyes -- an unrelenting and guiding force of the soul -- and a face that has been chipped away to reveal an ice-picked princess, a ghost.  She's a weapon: sheer, sharp, deadly cool and more like the coil that spins the music box than the ballerina trapped inside, endlessly spinning (imagine the vapid expression of a carved face-suddenly awakened). The film emerges from the forest at a high speed driven by the thumping heart of The Chemical Brothers score, pushing the narrative forward, cutting and whirring inside a box (a different world), whirling around inside itself.  

Hanna is pursued by a Cate Blanchett (the most stunning Big Bad Wolf in the history of the fairy tale) and that's essentially all I'm going to say about the plot:

A few quick associations:

Hanna reminded me of a Tom Tykwer film.  It had that femme-techno urgency a la Run Lola Run or The Princess and the Warrior (and Soairse Ronan's ravishingly washed out look is like the flip side of Franka Potente's eery angelic grace):

Also, check out Tykwer's short from the film, Paris Je T'aime (it has Hanna's whirring urgency and emotional tempo): 

Saoirse Ronan is so expressive and so lovely, it's hypnotic to watch her when she's still:

She was nominated for an Oscar for Wright's Atonement at the age of 13:

Wild and wielding a bow and arrow, I can absolutely see why Ronan was considered for the Katniss role in the upcoming film adaptation of the book, The Hunger Games.  And this is an interview with Ronan:

I was considering Ronan as a young Sarah Polley: 

And the deadly father-daughter dynamic reminded me of Kick-Ass:

or The Professional:

or even Paper Moon:

Let's think of Hanna as a world inside the music box.  Experience the film the same way you would the box.  It's not the typical movie that aims directly for the heart.  It appears to miss its target on purpose  It's cyclical.  It opens and shuts.  It begins and ends on the same moment - missing the heart (literally, figuratively).  Some said the film was lacking an emotional core, but I believe the emotion just slipped in at a different place (at a faster pace).  It felt the way music does.  It moved like music.  (Click here to read about the psychology of music.)  Music tells us how to feel.  The film-music's feeling drove us into the coil, pumped us through the techno-beating heart of Hanna.  It's an active barometer, intimate and unreal, seeping into plot and iris.  The music inside transports us, moves us.  And then we shut the box.  The music stops.  After all, what do you find at the heart of a music box?  Cranks and levers, a spinning doll.  Music.  

For the fanatic, here's an additional Hanna reading list - enjoy!

Click here to read: "Hanna: Saoirse Ronan, a Jason Bourne for the Glee generation" from the LA Times.

Click here to read: "Joe Wright and Saoirse Ronan Talk Hanna, Fairytale Violence and Girl Power" from The Finger Dandy.

Click here to read The Rolling Stone review of Hanna.

Click here to read Roger Ebert's Hanna review.