Rudolph was one of those maverick North Americans, like John Sayles, whose films attracted stars but never broke out. Fine directors who, had their careers occurred at another point in time, or perhaps in another country, might have been feted more than they ever were. I remember watching a film of his back in the eighties with Keith Carradine as a laconic outsider who had once published a volume of poetry amongst other unheralded achievements and thinking that could be me in a couple of decades. At its best there’s a romanticism to his work which offers a more mannered vision of the world than cinema’s typical social realist bent.
Equinox is a tale of twins separated at birth, yin to each other’s yan, destined to meet one day, which they do. The film is set in a futuristic city beset by social upheaval and petty crime, offering hints of Blade Runner without the design bravura. It feels as though its striving for a kind of transcendence it never quite achieves and in truth, it’s not Rudolph’s greatest film, rather one that suggests where he might have gone had he had the budgets to indulge his imagination further. Which perhaps might not have been for the best, as it’s his low-key, intimate films which allow him to dwell on his oddball characters that felt most distinctive. (Interesting to note that Rudolph was another one of those directors who built up his own stable of actors.)
On another note, this was seen on the Monday and by Wednesday, Cinemateca had once again shut its doors, for a third time, due to the pandemic. This time, in Montevideo, it feels as though the threat is far closer than it ever has been before. The great war of Cinema vs Plague continues. (Not to mention theatre, dance, art and so on.) On the streets of Ciudad Vieja, hundreds of film crews jockey for position, sent from all over South America, but the net is closing in. Maybe the vaccines will save us. Maybe the equinox has passed. The question then remains: which equinox?
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