What Genre Is Machiavelli Hangman?

By Author: Robert Mortenson
Total Articles: 1
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How can anybody categorize Machiavelli Hangman into a single genre? There are those films that you watch and you immediately can tell that they will be thrown into the same box as Pulp Fiction or Memento or Usual Suspects. Others will fall into the quiet road-trip flicks like Almost Famous, Thelma and Louise, Stand by Me. Then, there are the big Hollywood flicks like War of the Worlds, Jurassic Park, Batman Begins, Superman Returns.

Before seeing the film, I had the strong sense that Machiavelli Hangman was going to be an exact replica of Pulp Fiction because all the articles referred to it as a Quentin Tarantino-esque picture. They couldn't have been further from the truth. Originally, I thought that the filmmakers would attempt at impersonating the director of Reservoir Dogs like so many have before (a prime example was the awful Go). Usually, it either is Tarantino dialogue or it's crap and knowing for a fact that Tarantino had nothing to do with Machiavelli Hangman (http://www.hangmanmovie.com), I went in automatically thinking it was going to be crap.

Which brings us back to what we were just discussing ...
... about how there are some films that you can't categorize. The Raiders of the Lost Arch (beside the other Indiana Jones installments) was one of those films because it was not just an action-adventure film. It had a great deal of comedy and at the same time some very dramatic elements infused into the storyline.

These days it seems that most films stick to their genre and they go with it without trying to give their stories any additional depth. After all, movies are like people and as human beings, we not all just sad, or all just happy.

Machiavelli Hangman blew me away in that it transcended every type of categorization and it became so human in its approach that it moved me beyond words. It was the best of those comedies like Some Like It Hot while being a great drama like Crash and still managing to feed the minds of those arthouse film lovers - it is up there with Mullholland Drive and Memento without losing its audience like the previous two did.

Shervin Youssefian (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1352346/), whom many have already started calling the next Alain Resnais or Jean-Luc Goddard, takes a single event and he stretches it over a period of two days and as an audience we get to see the subtle exchanges between the characters. While a film like Armageddon doesn't leave you enough breathing space in between the thunder-fast editing, Machiavelli Hangman understands and uses the power of silence and music to convey secrets.

In the test-screening theatre, there were viewers between the ages of 14 and all the way to their late 70's who were equally entranced into the film, their eyes glued to the silver screen. When a film lives in this middle ground and can achieve such a universal appeal without categorization, then it is the true work of a master filmmaker and it will surely stand the test of time.

About the author:
Robert Mortenson is a movie reviewer.
Machiavelli Hangman
http://www.hangmanmovie.com