Nolan's film The Prestige
Christopher Nolan's The Prestige: story, artistic vision, and critique
Incredibly, after the huge success of Batman Begins, in 2006 Nolan decided to embark on a more personal project with Warner, based on a science fiction novel by Christopher Priest. Paradoxically costing less than the hit film Insomnia and written in collaboration with his brother Jonathan, Christopher Nolan crafted one of his most complete and mature works with The Prestige.
In this film, he demonstrates his full love for cinema and the illusion it represents, surprisingly constructing a meta-cinematic work without explicitly referencing cinema, and above all, reflecting on the artist's role in approaching their own art through a sleight of hand so refined that it gives the film its title.
The Prestige: story and characters
The story focuses on two young London illusionists at the end of the 19th century, Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman), both beginners but eager to pursue ambitious careers as professional illusionists.
After gaining some experience, one day, during a magic show, Angier's wife dies as a result of a stage accident, plunging the young illusionist into misery and despair, and blaming his colleague Borden for the tragic event.
From this episode, a rivalry arises between the two former colleagues, both attempting to perform the best illusion, clashing in city theaters not only creatively but also physically, sabotaging each other's shows with numerous incidents that will mark them forever.
The turning point occurs when Borden successfully performs the trick he had been preparing for forever, "The Transported Man," in which he magically teleports from a closed door to another. Angier, clearly obsessed with discovering his rival's trick, enlists his engineer Mr. Cutter to copy the trick and make it commercially more sophisticated than his rival's initial "humble" shows, also involving his new stage assistant and lover, whom he asks to infiltrate Borden's shows.
It is from this obsession with "The Transported Man" that a morbid competition ensues between the two 19th-century illusionists. To outdo each other with their illusions, they will push beyond their "earthly" limits, sacrificing without too much scruple everyone who helps and loves them, all in the name of the art of illusion and magic.
The Prestige or cinema according to Christopher Nolan
To construct the entire fascinating structure of The Prestige, the director returns to the brilliance of Memento by managing a non-linear narrative mixing past, present, and future events. This time, however, he adopts a completely different style to highlight the three essential elements underlying any illusionist, which will in fact be the three acts of the film: the pledge, the turn, and the prestige.
The historical context
Based on this theoretical structure, Nolan constructs, like an illusionist, the thrilling and visceral duel between the two illusionists set in the extraordinary late 19th-century London, the filmmaker's hometown, which he carefully and meticulously portrays during its most glorious period, distinguishing it from the rest of the world thanks to its avant-garde inventions created by extraordinary artists and scientists capable of truly surprising people of the era.
The fascinating meta-cinematic and meta-artistic discourse of the film thus starts from this premise, in which the director inserts these two 19th-century pawns into a perfectly contemporary discourse, demonstrating that theatrical illusionist shows were nothing more than the spectacle we enjoy so much in cinema today. The historical context is also emblematic in highlighting this similarity, as it was at the end of the 19th century that cinema was born and, over the centuries, surpassed popular entertainment.
At the same time, however, Nolan seeks a return to the analog classicism of the past to show contemporary audiences the intrinsic spectacular nature of cinema. This is also composed of brilliant industrial tricks, but also of passionate artists obsessed with their own art.
The artistic vision
One of the most interesting elements of the feature film then comes into play: the discourse on the obsession with the artistic process, which perfectly matches the British director's sensibility and which he beautifully sculpts through the two protagonists of the feature film with illusions.
The conflict between Alfred Borden and Robert Angier thus represents the director's inner dilemma, who sees in the former the more industrious soul unable to compromise his artistic passion, while in the latter, he sees the soul more devoted to spectacle and the impossible.
The Prestige: Alfred Borden vs Robert Angier
Both are two sides of the same coin, who, in their frenetic passion and competition, go so far as to cross normal "human" barriers to achieve the perfect trick, the definitive prestige that will immortalize them in History, the worldwide fame that will consecrate them in the eyes of the public. This unbridled ambition imbued with vain glory is obviously one of the elements that will lead the two artists to become slaves to their own art and to lose everything they hold dearest.
The critique of hedonism is also omnipresent in Nolan's discourse, which shows how ruthless competition in any artistic or scientific field can lead to the annihilation of the individual, such as cloning oneself only to continually kill oneself in Angier's case, or exploiting one's twin to perform perfect illusions, at the cost of one's private life in Borden's case.
Dramaturgy and historiography
The parallel between the rivalry of the two illusionists and that between Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison in The Prestige is an additional historiographical depth that takes a backseat but gains importance in the film's dramaturgy.
The problematic nature of fatherhood that emerges in The Prestige is clearly artistic, where, despite the fact that the two illusionists almost self-destruct in a nihilistic existentialism, from the very first shot, their love for the illusions they create shines through. These being the only "daughters" they have truly loved, but which have undoubtedly turned against them, like Tesla's device for cloning and teleporting, which at this point, however, transcends illusion itself and becomes true magic.
The dangerous fatherhood of this horrific device is indeed denied and rejected by Tesla himself, who is now aware of having been a genius, but perhaps also a monster and a slave to his own creations, just like the two rival illusionists. The theme of the double, more present on a psychic level in Memento, is literally revealed in The Prestige, however, following the reflection of the rational self and the mad self that constantly guide man in search of absolute perfection in a seemingly perfect world, but which collapses with the revelation of the final prestige that brings the final catharsis back to a more earthly condition.
The Prestige: Christopher Nolan's masterpiece
The Prestige thus represents the perfect synthesis of Nolan's cinema, which, through a story seemingly distant in time, actually manages to perfectly reflect our contemporaneity and cinema itself, the latter constituting the perfect "technical" tool to investigate our imperfections.
It is this cinematic framework that forms the basis of Nolan's poetics, which I personally find very warm in its approach to man, but as the latter is constantly immersed in a cold and often too perfect world, it requires a glacial and surgical staging. This is what allows for this emotional and formal contrast where men, like pawns in a game larger than themselves, must find the strength to go beyond the world they reflect. And they don't always succeed, crushed by their own ambitions. A characteristic that also applies to Nolan, who here creates his most autobiographical film.