(2016) Casablanca

It's hard to find out what made Casablanca age so ridiculously well. It's the movie that feels like something I watched at grandma's when they still had a black-and-white TV. While there's a chance I have actually seen Casablanca with its censored Hungarian dub, and the music probably evokes nostalgia in me, it still wouldn’t explain why does it feel fresher and more dynamic than anything else I've seen (and enjoyed) so far from the black-and-white era. The reviews didn't help me much on this matter, but I Umberto Eco's essay was well worth reading. While I'm not sure if I'm affected by the “cult” aspect (I don't even have favourite parts or quotes), his ideas about the massive appearance of filmic archetypes make a lot of sense. Personally, I'm not sure if it's really about the interaction between – and the cumulative effects of – these archetypes, or there are simply so many of them that they practically make up the whole movie, so at any given moment, no viewer is left without something they can closely relate to. Even though Eco explicitly refused to claim any psychoanalytic connotation to the term “archetype”, I'd think there are several Jungian archetypal images involved in very clear, idealized forms, which would give further explanation as to why Casablanca moves us more than other old cinema, more or less regardless to cultural background. There’s also one aspect I didn’t find in Eco's paper: the older the movie gets, and the further we get from 1942, the less obvious the mannered acting becomes for the casual viewer, who may find it increasingly easier to believe that people actually behaved like that in the 40's. Several years ago, when I was watching Casablanca for the first time, it was that mannered acting that I found really captivating, and it never crossed my mind that it might not be realistic. I bet this mistake was at least a bit harder to make in 1942.