Two Gates of Sleep

While the film has some attractive imagery, it is effectively summarised as my title suggests. This short work, which played tonight at the London Film Festival, doesn't particularly satisfy in any area. The Mississippi landscape is nice enough, and some of the style works as good verite, but really the thing needs to re-cut to focus to give the film any centre whatsoever. I don't know whether I fully understood the little that was happening, and the intrusive soundtrack didn't help. While the film has no Antichrist moments that make you regret art-house cinema, this only makes the grade at a festival with slender merits. French subtitles merely added to the puzzlement.

Saw this on an otherwise gorgeous Saturday afternoon at the Philadelphia Cinefest. I have previously seen many other films at these "festivals", many of which were also made on a shoestring by "avant" creative teams. Some are hits, some misses, but this was junk IMO. Monosyllabic during its exciting nanoseconds (there were two such instances), characters about whom only their immediate relatives could care,incomprehensible "editing" probably with a chainsaw that seemed to cut out not only plot coherence (as if), but other characters (I think) that might have upgraded this from suffocating,to claustrophobic perhaps all the way up to boring. Two producers and one of the actors were in Philly for a Q and A and I became nauseated when they said they were going for "deconstructionist". A member of the audience had to actually ask (SPOILER ALERT I THINK) if one brother had in fact killed the other. That was (I guess) a dramatic highpoint of the film and even that was muddled and muddied (literally).Not that I or few others there cared. SPOILER ALERT #2: A better title would have been "Two Singularly Uninteresting Gooobers Chainsmoking, Posing,and having nothing whatsoever to Say". One good thing. After vivisection of what they claimed was "originally" a standard "90 page screenplay", the remaining running time was approx 79 minutes. Seemed like 79 years. And I missed a gorgeous Spring afternoon for this. The print of the film had French subtitles. Merde indeed.