A First Look at Gilliam’s Imaginarium

The trailer for Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus–a.k.a. Heath Ledger’s Last Movie–was released late last week in the UK. It’s hard to make much sense of the plot from the clip, possibly because it doesn’t offer much information in the way of narrative, and possibly because the cast–Christopher Plumber, complete with eye-liner, Tom Waits as the bowler-hatted Devil, a radiant Lily Cole, and Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law in identical Tom Wolfe suits–is so collectively distracting. Much of the scenery and costuming recalls Gilliam’s 1988 The Adventures of the Baron of Munchausen by way of Super Mario World and costuming by Swedish pop group The Knife, but, for the sake of the infamously cursed director, we’ll suspend judgement at least until we can see a trailer cut for American audiences–assuming he can find a US distributor.