The uncertainty and fragmentation of the twenty-first century is threatening the narrative of continental solidarity that held European identity strong through the 1990's.
All of which, many viewers will feel, is far too heavy a burden to lay on a movie like this, with its so-so acting, its cruddy special effects, and the daftness that threatens the narrative at every turn.
Somewhere in the middle of it all there's a sub-Night Porter narrative threatening to break ground, but writer/director Lola Doillon seems unsure quite how to handle the more transgressive elements of what is largely a pent-up two-hander with co-star Pio Marmaï.
While touching on the challenge of making modern, savvy readers satisfactorily terrified, he expressed the belief that people can still be reliably scared by a narrative threatening characters they've come to love.
But others resisted these narratives as threatening to agrarian notions of the value of rural landscapes: notions rooted in a potent agrarian discourse of national identity.
It's the perfect counter to the old narrative that threatens us today, the narrative based on corruption, grievances, ignorance, fear, economic injustice and bad leadership.
Jiri Schneider, director of the Prague Security Studies Institute, noted that two competing narratives threatened to clash during the Obama-Medvedev visit.
But things get complicated, though no less compelling, when his artistic narratives threaten to overtake a subject's life.
At times the narrative threatens to get lost as it roams through the characters' bewildering memories and Wreaking's disorienting corridors.
Hats off, however, to Irvine, whose vocal inflections carefully prefigure those of Firth's older man, drawing the intersecting threads together even as the narrative threatens to unravel.
