Last night I dreamt I was in a noisy and crowded room, much like a high school cafeteria, and an unfamiliar professor appeared, gloating with malicious intent, and forced me to take my doctoral certification exam as a ‘pop quiz.’ To add insult to injury, the examination was on Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics,. Sheesh. Could this have anything to do with the fact that yesterday evening, for the first time in years, I took a drag on a cigarette? Or is it just a sign of the slow sociological warping of my mind?
Anyway, regarding dreams: in my last post I reviewed Joachim Trier’s film ‘Reprise,’ but I was remiss in not mentioning that the movie was his first feature film. In this respect it recalls the equally audacious debut by Erich Zonka, whose 1998 movie ‘The Dreamlife of Angels‘ was so !@$# brilliant that I still recall whole scenes from it, ten years later. Like ‘Reprise,’ it focuses on two young individuals, here working-class women in northern France, conveying the giddying sense of a developing friendship before going on to show its slow fraying and finally devastating end. Incredibly enough, I went onto Netflix and found out that there’s no DVD version of this film out as of yet, so this clip will have to satisfy. If you haven’t seen it yet, watch the first minute or so to get a flavor of the film, but don’t watch it to the end if you want to remain in suspense as to its conclusion. The camera work in the first minute or so is just fascinating; note how it plays with distance as the emotional registers change.
Zonka’s apparently a slow and deliberate worker; since ‘Dreamlife’ came out, he’s produced one short 60-minute film in the years since, assuming his IMDB profile is up to date. This spring, though, he directed an English-language feature starring Tilda Swinton called ‘Julia,’ apparently an homage if not a remake of one of my favorite films, John Cassavetes’ Gloria, starring Gena Rowlands. I couldn’t find any information, however, about the possibility of a U.S. release for the movie. (The thought that a Tilda Swinton movie could not make it to these shores is incredible, and therefore banished.)
