A connecting thread that invariably weaves throughout documentary filmmaker David Perlov’s organically unfolding, yet instinctively lucid, pensive, insightful, and intimately observed personal essay film, Diary is the recurrence of unconscious, naturally occurring patterns – at once, symmetric, convergent, and coincidental, but also paradoxically autonomous, singular, and bifurcated – that continue to resurface and permutate within […]
Something of a prelude to David Lynch’s explorations into the dark side of tinsel town (and in particular, the intersecting alternate realities of his sprawling metafilm Inland Empire), Frank Perry’s Play It As It Lays is a stark, fragmented, and disjointed, but instinctually cohesive, occasionally luminous (and humorous), and inevitably heartbreaking adaptation of Joan Didion’s […]
A quartet of deaf musicians rehearsing in a studio provides an appropriately lyrical and enchanting prelude to In the Land of the Deaf as they interpret an orchestral arrangement through a series of sweeping, rhythmic cadence: at times, in interacting and overlapping ‘instrumental’ solos, and at other points, in unison, as the articulated symphony intensifies […]
Under the Sun of Satan opens to an inherently solemn ritual as a senior priest, Canon Menou-Segrais (Mauric Pialat) shaves a spot on the top of the head of a pensive young priest named Father Donissan (Gérard Depardieu) who, in turn, uses the occasion to express his feelings of profound estrangement and inutility from the […]
Part autofiction in its reflexive tale of emotional abandonment and part social realism in its clinical illustration of the nation’s overtaxed foster care system, Maurice Pialat’s L’Enfance nue finds greater kinship with Jean Eustache’s studies on hybrid modes of representation than with a deconstructed cinéma du papa that François Truffaut’s involvement as the film’s co-producer […]
The sound of a rattling, mechanical alarm bell seemingly ushers a silent wave of anonymous, early morning commuters heading towards metropolitan Paris at the crack of dawn as they follow the ritualistic procession of informal queues leading to the subway station, pack into crowded, unconditioned trains, transfer through a coordinated maze of mass transportation, traverse […]