Hoop Dreams (1994) - This whole thing is revolving around money.

It's the fifth Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme seven, part one - one of Spike Lee's essential films for aspiring directors!

(Chosen by me.)

Some personal context: I ran cross country and track in high school.  Had done so since middle school on recommendation from my parents I find some extracurricular activity, and kept at it until graduation through sheer inertia.  I'd run all through the last few years and somehow not quit, why stop now?  In retrospect, sticking it out was a poor idea, because bad experiences with the team, my coach, my self-esteem, and pretty much anything and everything related to running now comprise the majority of my memories about high school, and play a big part in my reticence to think about that period of my life as anything other than an amorphous mass I wish hadn't happened.  Snapping in the middle of a race and trying to punch a teammate for cheering me from the sidelines, trying in vain year after year to stop the team from hazing new members, almost getting pushed off a cliff during a practice run as a joke, undergoing multiple breakdowns at running camp that probably predicted my more extreme breaks in university, the generally poor recurring impression of someone yelling at or lecturing you for not trying harder when you'd genuinely given your all.  Doubtless there are good experiences in there too, of managing a personal best sub-11 minute two mile race or briefly feeling like part of a cohesive social unit, but it's all overwhelmed by the lingering echo of being flat-out told my life would go nowhere because I didn't get an athletic scholarship for college or getting practically run over by a crowd eager to cross the course without considering the person running last place.  I do not like being reminded of my high school athletic career, and would much prefer it fade from memory entirely.

So, for my part, Hoop Dreams plays as a three-hour protracted reminder of such, and I need to power through these personal issues to discuss its contents.  Regardless of differing circumstances, many of these images and incidents resonate nonetheless.  William Gates' summer sporting camp was a prestigious recruiting program for potential college talent where mine was something run by friendly coaches to keep the team bond high over break, but the sense memory of being angrily lectured over how you have to meet your potential or else you'll amount to nothing stings all the same.  Arthur Agee shows far more potential as a varsity player on his basketball team than I ever did as a member of the JV squad for cross country, yet I still remember the pressure to perform academically and physically.  I never had a talent scout single me out as special while their entire story is predicated on such potential uplift, I took well to study where they struggled, I came from a financially and emotionally stable household where they both felt the impact of poverty around the corner and frequently absent fathers, I'm white and could treat sports as just a thing to do, they're black and got caught in a system where sports were presented as the only avenue to personal advancement.  And despite all of this, despite my lack of serious injury and promise of greatness and any direct parallel beyond "I played a sport in high school," the recurring sight of their coaches getting aggressive in a heated moment was enough to make the majority of Hoop Dreams a very much unwanted trip down Traumatic Memory Lane.

Let us therefore set all this aside, and discuss Hoop Dreams on its own terms, for it is still a remarkable feat of documentary filmmaking that deserves consideration beyond the context of my baggage.  This is, above all else, a remarkably empathetic picture, one originally conceived as a thirty-minute television program for PBS before producer/director saw the potential in his subjects' story well beyond his original commission for a piece about playground basketball.  Such an expansion in scope could easily become like any other documentary following a promising or interesting subject through an atypical period of their life, either fully focused on the subject to exclusion of all else, or filtering other people in their circles as relevant only in how they relate back to the main story.  With Hoop Dreams, James and his crew took advantage of their increased prerogative to film and edit a view into high school athletics and black urban life with an eye for giving everyone in the story a say.  One can be cynical and claim Spike Lee lists this as an essential film for personal reasons (he pulls a brief appearance as a speaker at Gates' summer camp, and audio from Do the Right Thing appears on a radio program), but I believe any aspiring directors should take the film's commitment to a complete picture to heart.

Our core focus is very much on William and Arthur as they are accepted to the prestigious Saint Joseph High School on the strength of their basketball talent, only for William's skill on the court to earn him a sponsor who helps him stick it out to the end despite debilitating knee injuries andnear-misses at greatness, while Arthur's supposed lesser potential costs him a scholarship and forces him back into public education with the private school holding his transcripts and future hostage.  Despite more than half of the story's timeline playing out in the first thirty minutes before James received a grant for true larger scope filming, the film makes the most of its glimpse into these four years by expanding its focus beyond whether or not William and Arthur will perform well in their respective leagues and graduate on time.  It is as much their story as those of Emma Gates and Sheila Agee trying to keep their families afloat amidst long periods of unemployment and uncertain marriages, as of Bo Agee's struggles to stay on the right side of the law for the sake of his wife and children, as of William Crawford attempting to live vicariously through his son's achievements, as of William's girlfriend Catherine and their newborn child.  Its concerns lie not only in the realm of success on the court, but on the exhaustion and frustrations inherent to an underfunded education system, the dual-faced nature of private schools' supposed altruistic uplifting, the unfair pressure to perform, the difficulty of accepting something less when you were promised the world, trying to be more than just your valued physicality.  It will ask and explore questions of just how fair its entire premise is when considered against the value of more substantial social reform just as readily as it will buy into the dream of making the NBA as something worth watching every shot of the semi-finals over.

And importantly, vitally, it does not make villains of its participants, nor martyrs of its subjects.  Regardless of how often Bo slips back into near-compulsive crime, were asked to understand him as a man trying to do right by his family, not a failure or criminal.  William Crawford's relationship to his son is more tragic than disgusting, as we see him a man who missed his shot and never found his center again.  Coach Pangborn of Saint Joseph's is a far, FAR more aggressive, abrasive coach than Coach Bedford of Marshall High, and Bedford's accusations of Pangborn screwing over Arthur because he couldn't profit off the boy as much as he'd have liked land hard and true, yet we also see enough of Pangborn's function as head coach and lead staffer at the private school to understand he goes through such a story with every potential talent he encounters.  There are actions aplenty to flay these people alive over, and justifiably so, if only doing so wouldn't cost Hoop Dreams its vision of William and Arthur as kids doing their best under less than ideal circumstances.  Even without knowing as we do now that neither achieved their golden dream of matching Isiah Thomas and playing for the majors, the film places careful emphasis on how important it is they live their lives according to what's best for them now and in the future, and not forever wallow in the bog of what might've been.  To demonize those who let them down or complicated their lives would be to consequently place shine on them beyond just being teenagers doing their level best - make Pangborn or Bo look worse through open condemnation, and you place William or Arthur on pedestals above what they are.

Certainly, through its willingness to present just how needlessly harsh and punitive student athletic programs can be towards those they tempted with promises of glory, Hoop Dreams isn't at all wishy-washy for its refusal to condemn.  I mean not to claim it thinks the systemic or personal wrongs it observes and presents as guiltless or morally neutral.  Rather, I mean it refuses these moral judgments out of fidelity to the goal of completeness.  Everything here is meant to come across on the same level of persons grappling with their own issues, never invalidating those who cross its camera or implying their personal benefit or punishment would meaningfully change things for those caught in the same situation.  There's temptation aplenty over the course of three hours to find someone who can play the bad guy, and yet we reach William and Arthur's graduations with a lasting sense of these lives as nuanced REAL lives.  All will continue on best they can, regardless of where the road takes them (or took them, in the case of those gone too soon in the following years), and make what comes  their way into worthwhile lives all the same.  Dreams of stardom can motivate one to reach beyond, it it's important to take what you actually grasp no matter what it is, and I believe Hoop Dreams imparts this with a successful totality of purpose better than most documentaries.

It's a withering, difficult film for me thanks to my excess high school baggage, yet I believe it hits so hard precisely because its rounded, detailed portraits of all participants shortens distance and makes the commonalities stand out all the more.

Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman (2016) - *Vageuly sexual bullet removal noises*

Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-2020! Theme six, part three- a South American film!

(Chosen by John!)

Low-budget Chilean fimmaker Ernesto Díaz Espinoza has the start of a good idea in Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman: take a standard crime-action plot about a gutless loser caught in a mob hit, and reflect his video game obsession by styling portions of the film after the Grand Theft Auto series. As such, the tale of Santiago hunting down the Machine Gun Woman in twenty-four hours lest he find himself at the business end of a gangster's gun is punctuated with little flourishes either lifted directly from or inspired by Rockstar's popular franchise. Characters' names and bounties are flashed onscreen as means of introduction, Santiago racks up higher bounties with the crimes he commits, and segments are divided by shots of a car driving with the exact angle and framing you'd see in San Andreas, complete with GTA-font announcing upcoming missions and their success or failure. At first, it's enough to patch over the film's lack of money for proper sets or lighting by making it all feel like a big ol' piss-take on this type of exploitation send-up. Sort've a, "Haha, this dweeb's in way over his head and trying to feel like a badass by viewing things through a gaming lens, ain't it funny?" and it IS plenty amusing for a while. Genuinely seems like we're actively aware of how Santiago is this pathetic dork trying to play it smooth with hot informants way out of his league and buying an Airsoft pistol to bluff his way through a hit, and it works to great effect, for a time.

Once he crosses paths with the Machine Gun Woman, though? The movie starts to wobble and come undone at the seams. It's able to ride the goodwill of its first act for a fair way's, but one quickly realizes it's not going to do anything more with the GTA-theming beyond allow Santiago to fail missions every now and again. What worked as a clever twist on a standard grindhouse send-up reveals itself as a thin coat of paint to disguise the transition into "Nobody schlub falls for ultra-hot assassin chick who could kill him in seconds but she's actually into it." There are... attempts to make the relationship between the two work - Fernanda Urrejola definitely plays things like she's just toying with him to see if he's got anything substantial to match the gall necessary to pull a toy gun on Chile's best assassin, and they don't get together in the end, which is nice. The film still drifts away from playing with video game conventions in favor of stuff like a badly shot post-bullet removal sex scene in a car and asking Urrejola to play a betrayal scene with some really unearned slow-mo puppy dog eyes. It feels trapped between goofing on Santiago and its own premise for a quick lark, and fully embracing the power fantasy to jerk off on your face.

Push the video game weirdness further, and I'm far readier to go along with Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman. The film already cold opens on the Machine Gun Woman taking out some colorful assassins in a convenience store, including a one-man band whose drums come outfitted with guns. It already has heightened moments like a man blowing his scalp sky high with a shotgun to the chin after he's shot in the leg, or a crusty old fucker with some mad HTML skills for his character-select page on HireAnAssassin Dot Org. We've room aplenty to push the bounty thing further by having Santiago rack up incremental pesos for petty crimes along the way, or even lose wanted money for particularly wimpy actions. Show things from the Machine Gun Woman's side, give us some insight on what a video game world's like for someone who's essentially an untouchable top-ranked player. Get in more carjacking to build up to Santiago finally stealing a high-class sports car at the end and instantly losing it, maybe playing on the constant shittiness of the vehicles he nabs. Hell, if you really wanna make the sex scene work, just cram a Hot Coffee joke in there somehow. Once you start looking for ways to get these bits and bobs into the film, it becomes ridiculously easy to get even more ridiculous without spending THAT much more money.

I'm aware my saying "the best way to improve this movie is to double down on the gimmick!" doesn't make the film sound like it has much potential on its own merits, and... yeah, Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman is trash no matter what you do with it. Important thing is, the GTA stuff has the potential to make it unique trash, fun trash, the kind of trash you don't mind getting in your mouth while you're wallowing neck-deep. It's definitely got that appeal going for the first twenty-five minutes or so, before slowly bleeding as it becomes more about the standard, boring trash of 0/10 dork falls for 10/10 killer without as much gaminess to stem the flow. I'll champion appealing, enjoyable trash, and if you can make less engaging garbage into more exciting rubbish by mucking around with game concepts, then yeah, I'm down. Making it a bit clearer that we're kicking a power fantasy in the face rather than full-on indulging one would be nice too, but I believe going "Yeah, it's Vice City or whatever but it's a Chilean movie," would help achieve the same effect along the way. Just gimme my full-impact stupid viddy bootleg movie already.

(It's almost impressive how they captured the look of driving in GTA so perfectly, and then use an awful-looking first-person view where someone's hand takes up 90% of the screen for the gunplay. The Goldeneye 007 rip-off movie is shooting two streets down, guys.)

2.5/5

Neruda (2016) - It's more fun to help a communist than call the cops.

Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-2020!  Theme six, part two- a South American film!

(Chosen by Jackie!)

(This review will contain spoilers.)

I am not here to review Pablo Neruda, noted Chilean communist, diplomat, and Nobel Laureate poet.  As it was with Van Gogh (reportedly an influence on today's film), I have done my level best in the last week to read up on his life, his accomplishments, his work, the controversial areas of his life, whatever I can manage between watching and writing about other films, working my job, and generally existing as a person who isn't 100% consumed by a single pursuit.  This subsequently means my perspective on the man is greatly limited, and to approach Neruda as wholly a film about the man and his mark would be to tackle the work from an angle lacking sufficient equipment and experience.  By the same token, Neruda, the 2016 film directed by Pablo Lerraín, written by Guillermo Calderón, and starring Luis Gnecco and Gael García Bernal that I AM here to review, is not wholly a film about Pablo Neruda.  It concerns a relatively brief period in his life, being the thirteen month period from Februar 1948 to March 1949 when he and wife Delia del Carril hid in various friends' safehouses across Chile to avoid arrest, during which time the Chilean Communist Party was banned and its members sent to concentration camps.  Much of Lerraín's film is content to treat these events as a distant possibility, in favor of following Neruda's attempts to remain active as an underground party representative and, most importantly to our discussion today, evade a lone policeman.

Gael García Bernal's Óscar Peluchonneau makes a fascinating presence in the film.  His first and most frequently felt role is that of disruptive narrator, sliding into scenes as little more than a voice that points out the inherent hypocrisy of the Communist Party's leadership, the hollow intent behind Neruda's words, the disgust one feels at watching a fat old man revel in his friends' collective wealth while espousing the values of a people's party in exile.  Ócar is practically omniscient in this role, which stands as intriguing contrast to his physical presence, in which he is charged to hunt down and arrest Neruda, and yet never seems capable of finishing the job.  Any time he arrives in a building where we the audience just saw Neruda entertaining with a poetic recital (cut down by Óscar as an easyily remembered, sloppily written early work that still placates the faux intellectuals in the crowd), the prey has slipped away and left behind only uncooperative witnesses.  Our intrepid lawman may ensnare a woman falsely claiming she's Neruda's wife, or corner an eager fan of Neruda's work who displays passionate love for his idol, or roughly interrogate a close colleague seen growing dissatisfied with his cohort's activities, but it's all for naught.  They'll refuse to say a bad word about Neruda on live radio at Óscar's behest, regale Óscar with scathing accounts of how fine and beautiful a man can never be understood by one so coarse and base, seem to break under intimidation without giving away anything.  He is, all told, a rather ineffectual presence, seemingly incapable of fulfilling his appointed task.

We also come to understand how, deep as Óscar's disdain for Neruda's hypocrisy runs through his veins, he too is a bundled mass of contradictions and selective views.  Where he criticizes Neruda for standing for and coming from nothing, Óscar is a man who only half-believes his father was a great officer of the law, without any real certainty that he too should hold such a title.  Óscar will tear down Neruda for using a poet's empty honeyed words, yet he is a man of great lyrical speech, inventing memorable turns of phrase with every other line and running a constant inner monologue in Gael García's gruff yet tonally pleasing voice.  Here we have a man professing an undying hatred of his mark's communist ideals whilst positioning himself as the people's will made manifest, chasing after a target he believes worthless and incompetent without making any headwind whatsoever.  And of course, we cannot ignore how his beautiful inner voice, already a strange quality for one who so despises a poet, fails him in one-on-one conversation, and he comes across a man of all bark no bite.

Limite (1931) - How would you feel if I told you she had leprosy?

Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-2020!  Theme six, part one - a South American film!

(Chosen by me!)

A preface: Limite shall not receive a numerical rating at this review's conclusion.  Though claiming, "You watched this movie wrong!" is typically anathema to my perspectives as a critic and film fan alike, reviewing my own reactions as the film unfolded led me to believe I did exactly this.  Per the Walter Salles video essay accompanying the film on Criterion Channel as of this writing, director Mário Peixoto came from an artistic background steeped in poetry and the numerous experimental film movements across Europe in the 1920s before anything we might consider the typical narrative cinematic form.  His goals in creating Limite thus reflect this by placing emphasis on mood and movement far above any semblance of story in the manner of so many arthouse pictures, though it is not entirely a clean break.  To make a quick comparison against Tabu and the larger F.W. Murnau oeuvre, where Murnau would use a subjective camera and non-literal filmic techniques to suggest more spiritual passages or plunge his world into total otherness whilst still telling a story, Peixoto deploys what few narrative elements he has in complete subservience to the emotional thematic explorations on-screen.  Someone with more modern expectations of how films with narrative passages function might see these moments, and feel inclined to extrapolate narrative structural intent where there is none.

Or, put in simpler terms: the framing device with the boat threw me for a loop, because I thought it was going to be important to discern how each of the three silent, morose passengers came to be there, and spent more of the movie trying to puzzle out a beat-to-beat structure than appreciating the imagery and poetry Pexioto conjures.  Limite is an incredibly difficult movie to sit through with this mindset, as its many exploratory and experimental passages come to feel like lengthy distractions that drag longer than one would like.  Fortunately, I came to appreciate the film's actual intent further into the picture, but by the time I did so, I'd become fidgety and somewhat agitated, and so know I did not get the full and proper Limite experience.  Trying to assign a rating under these circumstances would lead to an unfair and uninformed numerical score, one which threatens to stand out more than anything I have to say.  So, on this understanding, I'll spend the rest of this review trying to communicate my analytical perspective on what Limite is an how it functions, and hopefully we'll get something more worthwhile from the exercise than me focusing on how I was, in a word, more bored than I'd've liked while watching.

So, that framing device.  After we see a woman gazing into the camera with rough, handcuffed hands round her neck, visions of a distant, tumultuous sea dancing before her eyes, we fade (as we do for numerous shots across the whole film) to a ramshackle rowboat with three people inside, a man and two women.  The man is perpetually bent over in contemplation, occasionally accepting something to eat or sharing a glance with his companions, but primarily affecting an air of one who wishes to never talk again.  The first woman, dressed in white, though occasionally animate and friendly, soon comes to turn her back against her fellow seabound captives, and stare out at the waves without showing the camera her face for most of the film.  The second woman, this one in black, lies on the boat's floor for much of the introduction, soon comes to sit next to the man in much the same pose, though she seems somewhat distressed by how the first woman will not make eye-contact.  Towards the end of the film, the man spies something in the distance and dives off the boat to chase after it, and following a montage of foamy waves breaking against the rocks and one another, we find the first woman clinging to a board from the capsized boat, with no sign of her companions, or any human life for miles around.

The above represents the entirety of what Limite communicates about its characters in the framing device.  Over the course of the first hour or so, we learn the man was a fisher who fell in love with another man's wife, the first woman was an escaped convict, and the second woman left a dissatisfactory marriage.  This, now, represents the entirety of what Limite will tell us about its characters, for their attempts to recollect their experiences clash directly against the film's theme.  Oftentimes when we follow them into their memories, we will trace their steps as they traverse long distances, only for the camera to get caught up in panning across a recently logged stretch of forest and have to jog back a few paces to find its subject crouched and weeping by a gate, or else wander away from their perspective entirety to focus on the wavering of a half-blown-away dandelion.  Our camera is happy to sit behind one subject as she stares into a lake that appears to be a sky, only to go whirling through the air the second her attention is the tiniest bit distracted, pulling alley-oops and loop-de-loops through the sky in a total desynchronization with her literal experience.  Sometimes it will track upwards into the pure white of sky and remain lost there for a good minute, or pan down across the blurred, radiant light from a white newspaper and white dress reflecting the midday sun, or float away from them to view the already striking fauna in the area through a negative filter that bathes all these sharp black objects in a white halo.

These people are not the camera's primary concern in Limite, and yet we always come back to them.  When we do stick around to see what's going on, we find their lives little more than turbulent chaos.  The man streaks through a field in agony, screaming out for someone as the camera rapidly zooms in on his face on the same cut again and again until he's tripping over the grassy hillside and can no longer remain upright.  One woman is glimpsed at a sewing machine, the camera lingering over extreme close-ups of her various tools, before a tight view of her scissor blades finds her sliding a finger across the entire edge, and then cuts to black.  The other spends quite a considerable time trudging along a dusty path, only to confront a man at the top of the stairs with a long, withering glower, before trudging back out to who knows where.  And even still, when the camera bothers with a human perspective, it will leave these characters behind in favor of repeatedly zooming on a fountain hole spitting water, staring up at a pair of might carved crosses, or resting on a train wheel's pivot as it begins to spin away from the station.  As a whole, the film only breaks from purely visual expression to communicate with language a total of two times - once when we glimpse a newspaper headline, and once when the man is told some particular information about the woman he's running an affair with that could only come through dialogue.

All of these sequences, sympathetic to the characters' lives or no, recognizably human or wholly nature-focused, are presented as memories.  Flashbacks.  We fades to and from them from within the rowboat, and when the characters are unable to strike up conversation, set about to paddling anywhere (as one of the woman fails to at one point), or do anything save sit and glower, they resolve to sit and glower and remember some more.  And it must be understood, these are not typical filmic flashbacks, for your typical film will render a memory much the same way it renders literal, immediate reality; maybe you'll get a hazy filter or a hint of an unreliable narrator to differentiate the two states, but on the whole the effect is the same.  With Limite, Pexioto seems determined to do nothing short of capture the entire experience of a memory.

You're a person if you're reading this, you know how it goes.  The way your brain catalogs and retrieves information is not based in pure 1:1 recollection of events as they happened, and a memory is not ONLY the events as you perceived them.  There's a complex tangle of associated emotions, wandering thoughts, trivial recollections, a sense of a wider life lived beyond the context of this one event.  The most unimportant little moments stand out, and you may well recall the sight of a half-naked dandelion head dancing in the breeze better than your passage down a dusty road on a difficult day, or feel as if your head went spinning off a cliffside and into oblivion as you contemplated the last few hours, or remember the world as nothing but the view of a blinding white sky as you experience profound agony.  From a cinematic perspective, it is incredibly difficult to capture a feeling so deep into the emotionally subjective as to leave behind any recognizable human experience, so the best way to capture this is by following impulse, and crafting images well beyond anything recognizably empathetic or human in the midst of what you present as a memory.

There's really no use in trying to understand the three characters trapped on the rowboat, as we see with the aforementioned final montage of waves.  Much as listening to someone else recollect their dream can be boring because you don't have all the associations necessary to really GET it, watching someone remember as a film acknowledges the full extent of sensory ties and wandering thoughts tied to a memory is a difficult, frustrating exercise.  You'll gleam feeling far more readily than logical sense, so Limite feels a sad, disgruntled, cornered experience that can tell you what emotional peaks marked these characters' final decision to get into a boat together, but never what events marked the journey beyond some broad sense of who they are and where they came from.  Because this is completely divorced from the larger life experiences required to really grok their perspective, you see the limits of perception and communication come into sharp focus as the film goes on.

Trying to directly transplant a memory - not the words one would use to describe it, or the images one would use to represent the actual event it draws upon, but the full, complicated, messy extent of a memory, lengthy connective tendrils and all - is practically impossible.  You'll sooner break the cuffs round your own neck that restrain you from communicating the whole, undiluted, compromise-free experience of your own life than get these three people except as emotional entities.  Which, ultimately, is the best we can do in daily life anyhow.

I'm aware I do something like this any time I come across a really old film missing any part of itself, and I'm aware it's not entirely fair to either old silents fortunate enough to receive a full restoration or the ones completely lost to time, as it implies a nobility in being incomplete, but I think one can best understand Limite through the single scene Pereira de Mello and later the Mário Peixoto Archives were not able to restore.  In the early going, as the quality of film degrades and increasingly obscures our view of proceedings, the man turns to the woman lying on the floor in the rowboat, and we cut to an intertitle indicating he helps her in some way.  This represents one of the very few times the boatbound characters interact with each other in any meaningful way, and it is entirely obfuscated by footage too damaged to restore.  It may seem odd to consider a fortuitous loss, until one remembers the film's opening and closing shots heavily imply the rowboat scenes too are a recollection of the woman with another's cuffs round her neck.  Her back was turned to these events, and so the single most recognizably human event in the whole framing device is lost to the ages, the one meaningful moment of face-to-face interaction obliterated by there not being a memory to draw upon.  Limits of memory, limits of celluloid, pretty much one and the same.

Through all this, I think it worth remembering that while I can draw all this analysis from Limite, it was still a frustrating film for me to watch, even as someone who normally deeply enjoys experimental and silent features.  To anyone and everyone who seeks this out, be it through Criterion or one of the film's numerous YouTube uploads, I'd recommend the following - do not watch it as you would another film.  Set aside notions of narrative satiation at the door, regardless of what appearances tell you during the framing device.  Simply come to experience the imagery, internalize the feelings, empathize best you can with this deliberately splintered, obtuse attempt to explore how we can never fully grasp where these people came from and where they are going.  It will play infinitely better with this perspective in mind, and perhaps even produce understanding greater than my own.  Something like this deserves consideration on its own level, and while I've done my best to approximate an appreciation grounded at this altitude, my immediate, in-the-moment experience did not properly reflect this.  Best I can do is provide a guidepost for you the reader, and hope to see with clearer eyes whenever I next watch.