The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

Director: Orson Welles
Stars: John Huston, Oja Kodar, Peter Bogdanovich
Runtime: 122 minutes

Synopsis: A Hollywood director emerges from semi-exile with plans to complete work on an innovative motion picture.

Verdict: I don't think I've ever seen a film as fascinating as Orson Welles' "The Other Side of the Wind". It's a groundbreaking piece of experimental Cinema that oddly never received the attention it deserved upon its release on Netflix a couple of years ago. For those unfamiliar with it, the movie was supposed to mark Welles' Hollywood comeback in the early 1970s, but various complications refrained him from completing the project before his death in 1985 despite multiple attempts to do so, and the incomplete footage had been sitting in a vault ever since.

30 years later, in 2015, directors Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach launched a successful campaign aimed at gathering funds to finish Welles' long lost swan song based on the hundreds of raw footage and notes left by the auteur before his passing. The result will put off many due to its rather unconventional structure, but I for one was absorbed by what it had to offer.

It's very clearly a personal project for Welles, maybe even to an autobiographical extend, as it follows the last days of a semi-exiled Hollywood director (played by the excellent John Huston) struggling to finish his latest piece, which he hopes will revive his name in the industry. In this meta entry, we keep jumping from scenes of his unfinished film to a documentary-like feature following his interactions with his entourage and his views on many philosophical subjects, allowing us to understand the man that was Jake Hannaford. His struggles to adapt to the New Hollywood of the 1970s is a dominant theme throughout a film that truly is one of its kind in both its execution and production. Even when I wasn't completely immersed in its narrative, the mere history of the film kept me hooked to it.

"The Other Side of the Wind" is actually the film that convinced me to get a Netflix subscription a couple of years ago, but the fact that it sort of came and when made me completely forget about it. I'm glad that the title resurfaced on my home page (I suspect I owe David Fincher a thank you for that) to remind me of its existence, and I'm happy to have finally experienced it after all this time. It's not for everyone, that's for sure, but just like most of Orson Welles' projects that were released before it, I see it gaining in popularity as years go by.

FINAL GRADE: 9/10