Angela Schanelec is a film-maker whose cool and mysterious refusal to render up meaning in the conventional sense has defeated me in the past, and her new movie is equally as opaque and enigmatic: an array of puzzle pieces whose shape shifts even as the audience wonders how or if they should be fitted together. It is a film that does not proceed in the narrative style and the title seems to suggest that we should think of it as a different art form entirely: a constellation of themes, ideas, tropes, moods in which the personae relate to each other as concepts rather than characters.
While unable honestly to claim to have understood it, I have to concede the movie’s artistry, its conviction, even its brilliance. Schanelec is in command of a film-making language which compels attention, although there is something strenuous in the way the film appears to be showing us the key to some locked cabinet of significance but won’t quite let us use it.
