rock style

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Karolina Karbownikphoto: ITI Cinema

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I enTered The CIemna room To waTCh a movIe abouT a guy who looKed lIKe roberT SmITh.

I lefT CInema afTer havIng waTChed "ThIS muST be The PlaCe", a fanTaSTIC movIe abouT a man who SeTS off for a journey

To looK for Somebody and fIndS hImSelf.

Chey

enne

geT hIgh wITh

to break her husband’s everyday routine by finding different activities for him. Above all the couple likes playing pelota in their swimming pool reservoir. Cheyenne finds it more at-tractive than swimming. When he asks his wife why there is a French sign cuisine hanging on kitchen’s wall as he knows it’s kitchen already, Jane replies that it is to make his surround-ing more varied. Besides playing pelota and watching Jamie Olivier TV show, Cheyenne spends his days shopping, seeing his friends and playing the stock market (he follows Tesco shares). He also finds a new mission to complete: marrying off two young people.

What eventually breaks up Cheyenne’s routine is the news about his father being terminally ill. Cheyenne hasn’t seen his father for 30 years. His everyday life doesn’t go upside down just yet. The man isn’t in hurry – because of his fear of fly-ing, he decides to go to New York, where his father lives, by ship. A funny scene takes place on the ship: Cheyenne advises women how to apply a lipstick to make it long lasting. Yes, the lipstick becomes him. Seeing him close-up, backstage, I un-derstood just how beautiful and touching contradictions in a human being can be. A fifty-year-old who still completely iden-tified with a look which, by definition, is that of an adolescent. But there was nothing pathetic about it. There was just this one thing that, in the movies and in life, creates an incredible feeling of wonder: the extraordinary, a unique and thrilling ex-ception. Months later I had the same extraordinary experience when, on a very hot July day in New York, we did the first make-up and costume tryouts with Sean Penn. A minor miracle hap-pened before my eyes as I silently watched the actor Sean Penn

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Cheyenne, who has Sean Penn’s face and Robert Smith’s image, has been looking at us from movie posters for over a month. Perfectly modeled physically on The Cure’s leader: black hair, lipstick, eyeliner, Dr. Martens

black boots, black pants, shirt, bracelet with a Maltese cross, an earring and necklace. His moves, face expression and the way he spoke reminded me of Ozzy Osbourne.

At the beginning of the movie I thought that there would be almost 120 minutes of a pretty silly comedy to watch. I agreed for that because I have already loved Cheyenne. A comedy? No, not at all. Yes, there are many funny moments which not only make me smile but laugh as well. Cheyenne is funny with his every move, gesture and glance. However, he has a second face too. The face of a guy who hides a drama, who wants to find himself, who misses something, who hides regrets…

Cheyenne is childish, but not capricious – the director, Paolo Sorrentino tells about the main character. Like many adults who remain anchored in their childhood he has a knack of maintaining only the limpid, touching and bearable qualities of kids. His prematurely quitting the scene, due to a trauma, has obliged him to live a life that he can’t bring into focus. It drags along, oscillating between boredom and slight depression.

Cheyenne is recognized either in a local mall or in an Ameri-can province. It was many years ago when his band, Cheyenne and the Fellows (inspired by Siouxie and the Banshees) was on the top and played with artists like Rolling Stones.Chey-enne’s wife, Jane (phenomenal Frences McDormand) wants

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being steadily transformed, step by step, first with lipstick, then mascara and the costumes and finally as he moved around – in a natural way but at the same time different from the way he usually moves – and becoming a completely different person: Cheyenne.

Music is a very important part of the movie. It was David By-rne, the vocalist of Talking Heads, whom Sorrentino made re-sponsible for music. David Byrne also appears as himself in a short, but important scene. We also can hear Talking Heads music several times: band performing live, being covered by a

young band The Pieces of Shit and played on an acoustic gui-tar by Cheyenne. We can also hear Iggi Pop’s The Passenger and other soft rock tracks.

A journey across United States, a journey through good music and a journey inside an interesting personality of a man who loves lemonade. Recommended to all adults who still like to wear motocycle boots, play on the market stocks and polish their nails with black. And also, to all white collars who had to cut their hair. �