Brief Crossing

There are plenty of good writers, at least it seems so. But not very many good filmmakers.

Obviously, this is somewhat due to the nature of film-making being a collaborative enterprise that involves large numbers of people. Where it seems to impinge most is in beginnings and endings. Readers need to make only a little adjustment to be coaxed into a different space, and the unwinding or knotting at the end is also easier, though more challenging.

Film requires the viewer to make more severe adjustments in entering the world that's fabricated. And very few seem to have been able to figure out endings that work.

Put this together and you'll see why we have some filmmakers that have great skills at creating "middles" but are disasters elsewhere. Brelliat is one of these, possibly the most fascinating. Set aside that all her films explore the same space. That's not fatal. When she gets us to where she wants, she can often assemble a tableau that is as effective as anything in film.

Very troubling and touching stuff, that. Immediate and emotional. But she takes such a torturous route to set it up and place it in that special zone. Lots of uncinematic talking and preparatory narrative. Then we'll have her sometimes sublime state.

And then without fail, we'll have a messy ending. Not well conceived. So she plays the youth card and does something shocking and sometimes violent. It mars that special space of a thousand desired needlepricks she so carefully laces.

She knows this. So in this movie, a study really, she focuses on the ending. Everything is designed to give her a real ending, one that sets those needles and leaves them in after you leave the theater. Good for her. This and "Sex is Comedy" shows that she is surrounding her own limitations in public essays. Taken together, they're powerful stuff.

The story here is a woman and a boy, and a dance, an episode and then an ending that reveals intentions.

This is hard work all of this. You need to know something of her other work, of her life. And of the bankrupt nature of French film-making right now, and the analogies some make with the impossibilities that real love can exist.

Also some notion of how we build desire in our lives, the immediate part, out of cinematic components to be eaten as it it were a meal.

Yes, it is hard work. And you'll have to live through lots of bad endings. Like life, like love.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.