very compelling for a movie in which nothing happens

The Shelley Duvall narration really helps.

It's a bit like a Resnais picture - Last Year In Marienbad or something - still, there's an incredible amount of differences. It's undeniably French, in a bad way - at first a couple of minutes in I thought I was going to love it but then when the woman voice over comes in I find myself wanting her to shut up all the time. It didn't quite strike any good notes with me.

As the narration addresses a life of solitude, resignation and inertia, the photography is always alive with motion. I can't remember the last time I saw a camera glide through its world so effortlessly and beautifully, and the rare still frames are themselves filled with quiet movement. By the "climax" all this frantic movement begins to make some thematic sense, but I can't say I walked away from this feeling much of anything beyond aesthetic appreciation. Or was that the point?

I love what the film presents, but the way it does it doesn't always work for me. Rather than a narrative, or a traditional character study, the film relies entirely on narration that gets increasingly hectic and rambling as the film goes on. The emotional aspect works very well, capturing disjointed beats of solitude, but the lack of a solid anchor and the 3rd person narration make it a bit more inaccessible than it needs to be. Still, it's a unique and effective experiment.

Frosty the flim-flam glasses of snow-Beatles