ippypatterson

A Stand Alone and Essential American film. As if printed on dark velvet at twilight. Not a single white person here. Gorgeous black skin, low country fields, wooden frame houses, distant insects. The camera with its sensitive eye, subjective, loving, at times careening through an interior or tracing a body from below. The audience doesn't so much follow as absorb content, a beautiful stain. Sugarcane and its bitter historical/cultural repercussions. Every performance is brilliant. Answers to my narrative questions are personal and may be wrong, but I was grateful to the young filmmaker for keeping anything from being obvious. Bravo, Philip Youmans and team.

Could not get involved. The computer de-aging Kept me unhappily in the uncanny valley. It was most of what I thought about for the nearly 3 hours. Have no less love for these 3 titans but would have preferred watching them as they are. The camera can not dwell on the human face when it is rubbed away.

This is a sophisticated film where every clue counts. I watched it several times and appreciated it more and more with each viewing. Abbreviated narrative and lush cinematography, it tells a tale not easy to absorb, with performances both intensely explicit and highly nuanced. There is an escalation of almost unidentifiable tension, and yet, after the crescendo, no trivialization through judgement. A classic drama mingled with the sweetness of love, love between adolescents, between adults, and between a mix of the two. And the painful reality that a single incident can be irreversible, its consequence everlasting.