That Cold Dead Look in Your Eyes

A sense of despair, paranoia and hedonistic revelry permeates this story that resembles our times very much, for its own misfortune or grace. There are no characters to empathize with or follow like in the traditional "hero's journey." There is more shared compassion, seeing ourselves in a kind of audiovisual mirror, in garish color for the past, in glossy black-and-white for the present, as director Onur Tukel tells us the story of Leonard, a cook on the verge of 40 years old, who sees his sentimental relationship vanish due to a single act of infidelity (and disloyalty).

At the same time that his girl pressures him from afar to vacate the apartment, Leonard loses his culinary touch and scares away the clients of the restaurant where he works with his increasingly despicable dishes, he has to cope with the visit of his old father-in-law and decadent photographer that entangles him in his gay adventures, and he hallucinates in New York, with visions that do not allow him to distinguish between the real and the illusory, between the dead and the living. In addition to this, the sinister "theta" boxes scattered throughout the city record the activity of all mortals on foot or motorized.

The film connects us to that very contemporary sensation of being under surveillance, the feeling that we are losers or failures for not being "up to" so much capitalist pressure (like an echo of George Orwell's «1984») and seeing how we become something worse than robots: zombies. Here there is no rose-colored hope of bourgeois melodrama, which fills us with tension and then comforts us, so that everything remains the same. Instead, there is lucidity in the approach to its central issues and our connection by immediate identification. A rare, unusual film, made in the United States in French, which deserves exposition to a wider audience.