Alicia I love this movie so much

Micitype Pretty Good

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

chaos-rampant I'll use a scene from the movie to illustrate my problem with it: at some point we get a tracking shot starting from a girl reading a book, across her room over various objects of interest, bedsheets, Nike shoes thrown on the floor, a Cosmopolitan, then we hear stifled sobs off screen and we track back to the girl, now crying. The camera-work is beautiful, it's the slow sensual gliding that feels like choreography for a ballet ensemble or maybe like someone's hand slipping under the hem of a skirt, but I find the points of interest it brings together and the suggestions that emerge in this linking (in Jost's cinema as a whole or at least based on what I've seen) superficial and labored.Whereas in Frameup Jost's experimental technique got in the way of characters with a potentially interesting story waiting to be told, here I had the opposite reaction, interesting form beind sidetracked by flat uninteresting characters, possibly a story not worth the telling. The movie inhabits the lofts and galleries of Soho, the world of MoMa exhibitions and small coffee shops, its girls are sweet shy and cultured, they want to be actresses or sopranos and they care enough about the rainforest to call daddy and yell at him for bying stocks of gum companies in their name, and it's never quite clear where Jost sees himself in all this. His characters are self-involved and egopathic but his criticism against them is not as scathing (or as obvious) as in Frameup. The two male characters we see in the film are curious prototypes, the one is the angry artist throwing a temper tantrum because his agent won't lend him money, the other is the mature love interest, the stockbroker in the white horse come to sweep the young French girl off her feet.Of course it doesn't quite work this way, and it neither does for the movie. The story takes place in New York but it's not Woody Allen's Manhattan, it's not so much about finding or losing love, romance or even alienation, as it is about obligation, about our right to not be obliged to be anything if we don't want it, not even good or loyal or in love. The movie has the feeling of walking inside an art gallery, with some of that quality quiet and alert in the same time, with something cold and irrevocable like you're sitting on a bench and you can hear the echo of someone else's footsteps reverberating from a different room (they stop and it's quiet and then you can hear them again), punctuating the story with long neat tracking shots over polished mahogany floors and in endless dervish circles around marble pillars, with symmetrical shots arranged in orderly patterns, but Jost delivers his thing with perhaps a little too much minimalism, like he's too proud and 'left-field' to dramatize properly, so that even the premise of his movie slowly begins to hide from it.In the end Jost has to go looking for his premise. He finds it curled up in a dark corner of the museum, panting and naked, and he brings it kicking and screaming to the light. Our female protagonist begins narrating "the point of the movie" and Jost is literally speaking through her, hammering home an indifferent point in outrageous explanatory fashion, like all the subtlety of nuance that came before were but tools of their own destruction, so that we have 98% of a movie that is too vague and transparent and 2% that is anti-tank steel 5 inches thick. Maybe this is Jost the frustrated artist, who wants every last one in his audience to get him or maybe it was all an essay and he simply feels the need to conclude. From the tug-of-war between very carefully designed stylization and improv feel of acting and story, I think that Jost captures nice images, but he's not a storyteller.

TheExpatriate700 This literary, in many respects experimental film examines the parallels between the art world and the business world, through the relationship between an actress and a stockbroker who meet in the Vermeer Room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.The film is much more interesting for its cinematography and narrative style than its plot. In keeping with its subject matter, the photography tries to emulate Vermeer's paintings, with some shots of Emmanuelle Chaulet being particularly successful. Furthermore, rather than having a linear plot, the narrative takes the form of a mosaic linking the different characters, bringing to mind a minimalist short story.This is not to say the film is for all tastes. Some scenes, such as where Anna and the stockbroker first meet, drag on for too long. Furthermore, some of the dialogue, particularly Stephen Lack's, comes across as overly metaphorical and stilted, though this should not be a surprise given that it was supposedly improvised.On the whole, a film worth seeing for a look at when the art house film scene really was arty, before the indie film boom led to the scene being co-opted by corporations.

yaguex1010 This movie is as subtle as good champagne, as illuminating as a nova star and as poisonous as curare. The "it of it" is easily missed if you are poorly educated and/or badly informed. This is French existentialism on a collision course with capitalism-fueled post industrial deconstructionism. The parallels between the machinations and lies of Wall Street's deals and the morally derelict art world of galleries and art dealers is poignant. Also poignant are the excerpts in French which counterpoint a decadent civilization based on a materialistic narcissism out of control. The whole thing comes to a screeching pitch when the things in life that most people believe are really worth living and dying for (money, honor,love, God) become nothing but a series of meaningless mirages. In the end there is not even God to help us make sense of the dissolute lives we lead. The beautiful Ana, in spite of herself, becomes an exterminating angel for the man who thinks is in love with her. But even she has to run away from New York to save herself and her dreams. In the end the only thing worth holding on to is all the Vermeer's in New York. And remember, no one really knows who Vermeer was. Only his magical light remains on the canvas. - Also contains an unforgettable scene atop one of the now defunct Twin Towers. Sort of creepy foreshadowing of history.

busker-kevin Jon jost is an independent film-maker flying under the mainstream radar,quietly turning out masterpieces like this film.The plot is very simple, but this is really a film that is meant to be felt rather than thought about.The images are often breathtakingly beautiful-the camera's dance around the pillars is one of the most amazing sequences I've ever seen in any film-Jost can turn the mundane into poetry.And that's the point,Jost is a poet-not a craftsman.Like Lynch and Kubrick his films have a dream logic and work on a subconscious gut level.Turn off your mind relax and let this gorgeous,undiscovered gem of a film wash over you.A disturbing journey at times but always truthful and always beautiful.