Two Short Takes (Patreon)

Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome (Andrew Norman Wilson, 2019)

I enjoyed this structuralist mini-narrative quite a bit more than I liked Wilson's 2018 film Kodak, which was not at all. This one has much more in the way of visual interest. From a fixed viewpoint out a window, Wilson trains his camera on a single balcony of a rounded, modernist apartment block. Each time the zoom brings the space closer to us, there is a different object sitting on or hanging off the balcony (although many of them appear to be sculptural variations of wasp nests, providing the scenario a vague Matthew Barney ambiance). Eventually, the zoom "finds" a painted clay Pikachu on a pedestal. 

Wilson's high-speed narration involves architecture, urbanism, and above all the geopolitics of the Pokémon universe. We learn (although many of you no doubt know) that catchers contain their disembodied Pokémon inside a mirrored sphere, where they revert to energy form. But Pikachu never occupies this liminal space, for various reasons. Then we hear about a game location called Lavender Town, a Pokémon graveyard whose electronic theme became the basis for a creepypasta urban legend.

The text is driven more by clang associations than by logic. (We hear a few times about poké bowls, for instance.) It's all amusing, but it is very much like the work of James N. Kienitz Wilkins in terms of being aggressively text-driven, the visual elements being somewhat secondary. (JNKW is thanked in the credits.) The unreadable title (which I suspect may be a formula for calculating focal lengths on a zoom lens) only drives home the film's rather self-satisfied conceptualism.

Shakti (Martín Rejtman, 2019)

In its dense, masterful 19 minutes, Rejtman packs as much formal flair and narrative information as he does in his features, and in this regard he joins a fairly elite group that contains Guy Maddin and Nicolás Pereda. Employing a baleful, sarcastic voiceover that owes a little something to the wry persona Ron Howard adopted for Arrested Development, Shakti is a story about Federico (Ignacio Solomonese), a hapless intellectual whose plans to break up with his girlfriend are complicated by the death of his grandmother.

Like an Argentinian Larry David, Federico aims to use the tragedy to soften whatever blowback his dumping the girl may justifiably yield. But things don't go as he expects, leaving him aghast and indignant. Meanwhile, he meets Shakti (Laura Visconti), a "free spirit" who seems to be just what Fede wants after the rigors of long-term commitment. As we learn when Fede feeds her some of his grandmother's knishes, she is not as easygoing as he might have assumed.

Rejtman could plausibly use Shakti as a pilot for a very high-concept TV series, if he were so inclined. There is a steely formalism undergirding the comedic embarrassment, every composition as firm and sure as you'd find in Dreyer or Bresson. But of course, there is a diffidence that permeates this exactitude. It's as if Rejtman wants to tell us, the world is a finely tuned machine, and it is designed to work against you.