Love triangles have long delighted cinema, literature and the tabloids. For his second film (after The World is Full of Secrets, which explored the workings of fear), Graham Swon uses this simple plot as the basis for a highly original cinematic experience. Somewhere in the Midwest at the end of the 1930s, an intimate portrait of three protagonists: Barbara, a writer forbidden from writing in her youth; her husband Richard, author of airport novels of limited success; and their dedicated maid Martha (the bewitching Deragh Campbell). With these ingredients of a provincial, bourgeois melodrama (the film never completely relinquishes them), along with a few dashes of political critique (men fare better socially), Graham Swon leads his film a long way from naturalism.
The three voices, interwoven like swansongs, explore the recesses and secrets of memory, of fantasized lives, of restorative thoughts and dreams.
Obsessions, superimposed lives, thwarted or tragic destinies, the narrative is fluid and changing, playing with superimpositions and fades, overplaying hushed, sweet, ethereal, and nocturnal atmospheres to the point of dizziness, as well as revisited stylistic elements of pre-war cinema. Streams of consciousness (reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves) come together to dissolve as much as to lead us astray. These stories of love and frustration evoke a certain past America, but also a whole field of cinema, carried to faraway shores.
Nicolas Feodoroff
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