Dazzle

Dutch filmmaking provocateur Cyrus Frisch opens his new film Dazzle with a pixilated shot of a man walking down a sun-glistening beach, revealing the current world in a fractured state, but with slight glimmers of hope lingering in the background. Frisch's cinematic kaleidoscope presents a voyeuristic look at a city's many scattered, sidelined street dwellers from the view of a girl's apartment. The twentysomething girl is hardly seen, but her voice is overlaid on the disparate-essentially documentary-video recordings taken throughout Amsterdam as she feverishly rants on the phone with a doctor who initially calls to speak to a friend. Her disembodied voice proves a telling vehicle, almost God-like, and as she looks on from above, judging the desperate fools who sit on her block corner, guilt takes over her mind. The film's images are supplied by everything from a camera phone to a movie camera, and as he sporadically cuts to a starkly black, void-like frame, Frisch uses negative space to suggest a kind of sanctuary from the ugly dirge of street life, sufficiently establishing a dire mood wherever a city's lost souls congregate and their unclean bodies fester. The filmmaker melds together a myriad of archival footage, deftly exhibiting a gritty, grainy texture on the screen, which cements the dour tone of this compelling work. Frisch sees the well-meaning girl and doctor who converse over the phone as deeply concerned observers, sharing maddening descriptions of decay and, in effect, narrating the routine existence of the countless meandering, displaced vagabonds who deal drugs in the daytime and howl in the streets when the darkness settles. As abstract modes manifest a deluge of unearthly creatures and madness, Dazzle reveals the crack in the walls of humanity, delicately reflecting upon man's inability to survive when emotional burden becomes too much to handle. Review by Adam Keleman, filmmaker/critic.

Frisch's experimental editing and camera work will initially challenge you as you struggle to understand what you are watching. As Frisch's cinéma-vérité style storytelling and Georgina Verbaan's voice and mesmerizing performance draw you in, you will begin to find yourself engulfed in a world that is simultaneously repellant and beautiful. Her telephone conversation with a perfectly gravel voiced stranger, voiced by Rutger Hauer, moves from an awkward accidental call into an intimate and compelling poetic exploration of relationships and the human condition. Their conversation is illustrated by cinéma-vérité moments that reflect their emotional and mental states. Their disillusionment with their lives and the world around them, is reflected in the images of the broken people that inhabit the neighbourhood where Verbaan's character lives. A truly original piece of cinema that uses simple tools more effectively than most directors would be able to achieve with infinite resources. A must watch.

This was an impressive film, with totally unique style and some big ideas about the world and about cinema. Thoughtful performances and lots of experimental use of image.

This technically experimental film by Dutch filmmaker Cyrus Frisch is a wildly unconventional love story with elements of suspense. Frisch is known for bold and challenging filming techniques and controversial topics. At the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, he presented "Why didn't anyone tell me it was going to get this bad in Afghanistan," which he shot with a mobile phone. In Dazzle, an accidental phone call from a distant stranger transforms the life of a reclusive and emotionally fragile woman. What begins as a boding intrusion from a disembodied voice on the other end of the telephone develops into an intimate, lyrical meaning-of-life meandering exchange with redemptive discoveries that border on the fantastic. Mixing in elements of film noir, Magical Realism and French Impressionist Cinema, Frisch interprets the dialogue between the conversation partners with poetic visual metaphors. Disjointed from the dialogue, the metaphors appear confusing at first. However, once the flow of the narrative is established, they effectively serve to underline the protagonists' psychic states and emotional interiorities. For instance, a take of a helicopter losing control in the sky effectively accompanies a conversation about the sensations experienced with falling in love The beginning of the film is straining because of a camera that moves restlessly and seemingly arbitrarily - as well as protracted moments of unsettling dialogue that occur on a black screen. Apart from the unusual dialogue and the artistic idiosyncrasies, the film also touches upon meaningful social and moral questions. Common, every day social postures and attitudes that have become reflexive in the post-industrial West such as indifference toward the suffering of others, "looking the other way" and "going back to sleep" are called into question in ways that are both provocative and refreshing.

Review by Elena Mancini, art critic.