Cobb: Building a dream from your memory is the easiest way to lose your grasp of what’s real and what is a dream.
Adriadne: Is that what happened to you?
One of the myriad delirious pleasures of Inception is how Nolan draws the audience into the notion of dreams infused with memories by playing on the cinematic echos in our own minds. I had a vague sense of d√©j√† vu from the trailer when Ariadne was under the Paris Metro tracks. But it wasn’t until she turned those elegant rows of stanchions into a hall of mirrors when it clicked that this had been the setting for another turbulent Franco-American romance. And is it just me, or did Inception’s climatic sequence on Fortress Mountain in Alberta tingle with fond nostalgia for Blofield’s remote refuge in the Swiss Alps? (from one of my top 3 favorite Bond films, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, illustrated after the cut.)
Hard to think of another film this year with production design that’s so intrinsic to the plot. This emphasis on “designing the dreams” could cast the right mood lighting on Guy Dyas (Production Design) and Lisa Chugg (Set Decoration) come time to pass out this year’s ornamental statuettes. I’m looking forward to finding more clever design connections when my synapses snap in repeat viewings. Let me know what to look for. I don’t mind some guidance, because Inception is all about sharing dreams in our collective subconscious.
(click to supersize)
(yes, I have a big picture book called “The Secret World of 007” …So?)
High up in the Swiss Alps, accessible only by cable car and heilicopter, lay Piz Gloria. On the surface, Blofield’s lair was an allergy clinic. Yet, curiously, all the patients were beautiful women. Bond stumbled onto the truth — they were being brainwashed into carrying deadly viruses, manufactured in Piz Gloria’s secret labs.