This is the type of film which depending on your point of view:
Offers a transcendent view of humanity
Gives art cinema a bad name
Only exists as a result of the existence of a festival circuit.
Of all those, the third is perhaps the hardest to argue with. The opening shot, which might be five minutes long, of a man staring out of a window as a storm rages outside, unseen, sets the tone. The film is composed of single shots, most lasting at least 90 seconds, if not much more. A man prepares food. A man has some kind of acupuncture treatment. A man has a massage. For the first half of the film I speculated that this was all leading towards some kind of revelatory finale. The man is a boxer or a hitman or an astronaut. In fact, the denouement is the ten minute (?) massage scene. The man then pays his masseuse, and then finds himself missing him. Apart from the slightly salacious aspects of the massage, which is far from erotic, there is no pay-off, no denouement. The film marches on with its rigid, inflexible portrait of humanity, tightly managed within the single shot, with no need for dialogue or artistry. It’s painting by numbers, rudimentary, tedious, perhaps revelatory. Only the act of memory will determine the film’s true impact.
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