Edgar Cochran ✝️’s review published on Letterboxd:
A spilled life, a vague reflection, the gradual fading of memory, the power of forgiveness, the yearning of what wasn’t, the uncertainty of the future, the love of a father, inner demons, the limited scope of the captured frames, and more reflections.
The core topic of this humble review is reflections.
Did you notice that the majority of the film is seen through filters, either liquid or crystalline? Beyond the allegory of the rave and the majestic closing 360° panning shot that covers three different times in a masterfully single seamless transition to make a statement about the perpetuity of memories, think about how reflections work, about the intent and limitations of filmed frames, and reflections in general.
There is a shocking number of shots where we see through objects that reflect or show images: windows, water, crystals on top of restaurant tables, swimming pools, water, a recording camera... All of these objects or artifacts show an image with boundaries, set to a time, or simply distort it through waves or blurriness. Sight, as well as the other senses, are a miracle of God. The fact that we can perceive reality in a three-dimensional space is astonishing, and the brain is a fascinating and endlessly complex organ. The creation of memories and dreams is an intangible curiosity that has bothered the spiritual and scientific spheres for years; concerning the latter, some psychiatrists argue that dreams are the residuals of the brain, just like the body expels residuals after absorbing the nutrients of food. I apologize for that reference, but that is a natural process of life. We expel material worthless to the body. However, other scientists, some of them belonging to the medical profession, argue that they tell a lot about both the conscious and the unconscious mind of the individual.
As a former psychiatric patient, I am a living proof of the second approach, as dreams were used to cure my anxieties, depressions, insomnia and personal phobias.
Throughout the development of the events, how we perceive images is key to understanding that we are exploring the child memoirs of an adult with her father when she was a girl, except we do see them like living in them. What if memory functioned in a tangible form, instead of intangible? What if we depended on a machine for remembering things and had to relive them, like embodying our past self, except you don’t control your movements, feelings or thoughts: your past self does. That is the alternative the film gives us.
The final key is to understand that these shots that use reflections show a progressive darkness as a crystal-clear (unintended pun) allegory of how memories fade with time: crystal doors (a notorious prolonged shot where the father dances while the daughter begins to gain sleep), windows, swimming pools, the water of public showers, camera recordings in low quality, crystal table surfaces, a bathroom window that’s been spit on, a turned-off TV showing their barely distinguishable figures interacting, a photograph that never acquires its full quality in the shot, and mud (no one is no longer visible). The figures are no longer reflected, and this is where the memories shown end. That’s when the father bares the daughter farewell. The reflections gradually turn darker until they become indiscernible. This is where the thematic resolution of the rave is intensified and the different times are merged into a troubled and painful present-day reality; as time went by, their time spent together also turned sadder, like the daughter performing a song alone, or even confronting his father with not making promises she knew he wouldn’t be able to fulfill because she knew her father well enough.
This is exactly how memories work: if you don’t write down something or don’t record something, you resort to something that will most probably fail you. For any reason, the mind can remember key phrases, the feeling during the moment, and can distort the rest visually, and can even create fake variations.
I haven’t seen my father in years, and that is what I retain everyday. Sometimes, my memories change, until I have a dream, or my family corrects a detail I had wrong. They gradually become blurrier as years go by, but others retain exactly the same mental quality than when I was 10 years old. The vital difference between artificially created memories and mind memories is that the former are the literal image, but cannot capture the moment, nor the rest of the senses. Moreover, the frame is more limited by physical definition than the peripheral sight. Memories function like flashes: they remember instances, and not something perpetual. This explains the constant photograph-like flashes of the rave.
And then there’s the significance of the two key songs in the film: Losing My Religion and Under Pressure, the first being, in the context of the film, about how a child idolizes the father figure and finds disappointment along the way as the child grows up, and the second one about how an unsuccessful father ends up undertaking responsibilities that he never properly measured or planned concerning what it entails.
On one side, we have:
“That's me in the corner
That's me in the spot-light
Losing my religion
Trying to keep up with you
And I don't know if I can do it
Oh no I've said too much
I haven't said enough
I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try
[…]
But that was just a dream
Try, cry, fly, try
That was just a dream
Just a dream”
On the other side, we have:
“Pressure pushin' down on me
Pressin' down on you, no man ask for
Under pressure that brings a building down
Splits a family in two, puts people on streets
[…]
'Cause love's such an old-fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves”
Blurriness is not only a concept used here to explain memories, but adult mysteries as well. What happened between the father and the mother? Was the father under depression? Why did he neglect to join her daughter to sing? What made him cry so hard to the point of desperation? What was what made him disappear forever? Just like in Zvyagintsev’s The Return (2003), we know as much as the child does, and it is meant to retain such disturbing mystery, because, as children, we also see reality through filters of hope and idealization, but also of honesty and sincerity, the ones we lose as adults. These questions, however, matter less under the relevance of the present day.
As far as father-and-daughter relationships films go, this is one of the finest ever made. It also helps substantially that the chemistry between Paul Mescal and Frankie Coro is perfect, and both act pretty much flawlessly, especially considering the seconds per shots ratio.
96/100
