Reviews

The first Chris Petit film I watched was London Orbital a complement to Ian Sinclair's book of the same name. A much later film.

I grew up near South Mymm's services and was in my later teens early twenties '89 through '02, so it was good to live there given the times.

The Scarp (area covered by Nick Papadimitriou's book of that name) was my hunting ground. As this is a road movie I remember buying an old Cortina from a scrapyard off the road by the Mill Hill school playing fields for £100, and then later that day getting it to do over a ton down the A10. That kind of 'skylarking' by vehicle.

I'd already seen that Patrik Keiller Robinson trilogy, so I had enjoyed watching Mr Petit's London Orbital soon after.

I'm also a fan of the docu-film Patience: After Seebald, and also the Irish film about a sound recordist by Pat Collins 'Silence'

And I am a big Get Carter fan too.

I have also previously worked with suicidal people for the charities Rethink and Mind as well as the NHS (and sadly lost some too, an old school fried I hadn't seen since '91, took his own life two years ago, despite my work since I saw him, it still left me taken aback how the loss got to me)

Needless to say this grounding, this groundwork for a metaphysics of watching Radio On, leaves me to say this about the film:

The pace, the distracted 'ennui' and the relaxed, melancholy if slightly world weary for characters so young, of this film with periods of mild tension, distant conversation between passing characters in a moderately bleak world, is well...

Throughly enjoyable!

A very different take to suicide to Norwegian Wood, depsite the similar tempo.

Both have good soundtracks!

A most amazing and engaging festival of hurt, anguish, happiness, co-operation, enjoyment, celebration and transformation.

The film starts with a scene involving mine workers, then brings in an inter-sex character, who then goes on a journey, meeting several characters before we end up in a futurist collective living in a kind of self-sufficient farm commune, discussing their activism.

There are elements for those who need more Western references of Sun Ra, bass music, the type of collective discussion as discussed in hip hop and jazz literature such as Heble and Fischlin's Otherside of Nowhere, especially the chapter A Way Out of No Way Out by Mark Alexander Neal (a clue without too much of a spoiler - they don't necessarily make it out)

But really it should be watched as a film based in Burundi performed by Burundians telling the world about themselves.

It has song and dance throughout. And is a joy to watch.

I had the Haruki Murakami book a while before I watched this film. I remember the opening line of the book grabbing me straight away, always a good sign of a great book.

And so the story goes the film never matches the book, right?

Wrong.

Not in this case anyway. Unless, of course, this film is the exception that proves the rule.

I won't go into any faithfulness of script to book, instead I will go into atmosphere. It matched my feeling of reading the book throughout, so both had a good syntonic sense throughout the film.

The story in this film's case is a boyfriend of a woman whom he loves struggling with her emotional breakdown.

She eventually kills herself. And whilst the book caught with me with its opening line, the film's end with the male protagonist on a beach with waves crashing, in total despair at the loss of his lover brought me to tears too.

I will say that 20 years before watching this film, I had volunteered for a helpline where I supported people who were suicidal. I fielded over 600 calls in 2 years, and I lost 2, who refused to let me know who they were or where they were so I could not phone support for them, and so I supported them whilst they died instead.

I then blocked that out for 20 years. My daughter was born 10 years ago with a genetic condition (I watched this film around 2014) and required a lot of skull surgery. Each time she went under the knife she had a 1/1400 chance of dying. The chance in the UK of dying in a road accident is 29 in a million. But my daughter went under the knife for her condition at least once a year, so by the time I had watched this film at least 4 times.

Something had to give, and after watching this film (and Interstellar as it happens, as well as Five by Abbas Kiarostami), I remembered the phone calls after all those years, and went through some catharsis about death to get over this fear of death to better support my daughter, and my wife, her mum.

THIS WAS A GOOD THING!

If you ever want to know the importance of great literature and great film, this is it!

This is why we watch emotional films! Catharsis for those inevitable emotional blocks that occur because we care for others.

A fantastic film.

Thoroughly enjoyable. The set up of strange goings on outside the 'weekend retreat' mixed with the "date's" (who you know has already murdered someone) narcissistic language and behaviour was a good tension builder before the inevitable rampage of Feminist tormenting revenge psyching out upon the toxic masculine 'villain' leading to hallucinatory breakdown. With an 'acting out' at the end watched on a by a stone cold killer.

An exploration of trust issues in dating, and issues of what is and isn't vulnerability taken to torturous extremes for silver screen (and/or home video entertainment) extremes.

And outstanding performance from Sarah Lind, Josh Rubin and Malin Barr.

Fun!

This film is a slow-build romance, a conversation based meander through life of two lost souls (Lucy Liu and Tenoch Huerta), both with confidants who have their own relations (Tamlyn Tomita and John Cothran respectively).

The performance from all four is strong. The elective affinities (not too unlike Goethe's novel of the same name) between the characters is strong.

Lucy Liu's character Susan is a film maker working on a film looking at subway suicides, that it turns out are driven by a personal tragedy. She needs to interview subway workers to find this out, but they as they are migrants, they are often refuse interviews.

However, in researching and interviewing these workers, she makes a friendship with a migrant window cleaner.

These two play a short cat and mouse game that becomes a friendship and then a short romance.

So a lot of the film is these two breaking down cultural barriers to make a connection.

However this character play is solidly weighted by both Lucy Liu having her sister (played by Tomita) as a confidant working through their parents relationship, especially her father, his secret relationship after their mother died, and her father's later suicide.

Whereas Tenoch's confidant Phil, played by John Cothran is his maudlin but wise New Yorker who has cleaned windows all his life.

There is a gentleness to this film that reminds me of the French film 38 Shots of Rum, a film about French-Africans and a father-daughter relationship that also involves a railway suicide, that again despite that tragedy is an incredibly sweet (doux) conversational-style relationship film (the relationships don't work out in this film either ,and are also about lostness, alienation and anomies as well as dislocation).

I will say this film ticks a lot of boxes for me personally, despite being British, born in London, there was a lot in my life I can relate to.

I have volunteered as a mental health worker and lost three people to suicide, so this was a cathartic film for me.

I also have a good friend who is a Rwandan refugee who survived the genocide there. We became firm friends (still are) and before we both got married later in life, back in 2000 we spent a lot of time wondering around Brighton in the UK together, trying to piece our own separate lives together, whilst wondering around chatting about our own histories (currently trying to write my own screenplay about this experience). Tenoch's character reminded me a lot of my friend, although I was a John Cochrane friend for him instead, him telling me about his struggles relating to English women.

I am from a shopfitting background, but my Granddad was a scaffolder, so there is a link with being high up buildings there of a sort. Although my own father was absent, i was raised with a lot of woman around me, and strangely my own younger sister works in editing and workflow in the film industry.

And having worked both for my dad in the shopfitting industry from the age of 16, mostly as a labourer, but also as a cab driver in three UK cities, I found the male character's very relatable.

And then there is Lucy Liu herself, who in this comes across as a character or person who can create space for you to feel, a break from all that everyday stuff we repress.

I am currently separated from my wife of 15 years and kids, and of all things this film released was a good cry about missing my 14 year old son, currently training to be a blacksmith. That though was to do with Tenoch's character's desire to 'go and sort his life out back home'.

So ultimately whilst the main character performance is solid, credit must also go to Ricardo Benet for weaving this story together, creating the mis-en-scene's that set up a well constructed narrative underpinning, that still portrays a lostness at home, rather than abroad (at least for Lucy's character) in Lost In Translation, using cuts from scene to scene, as well as often panoramic views of New York localities, followed by intimate conversations.

Anyway, I guess it goes without saying, highly recommended!