Review of La rencontre

Cavalier dispenses with two of the cinema's most seductive tools: the human face, and conventional narrative. It's a film about (very loosely) a relationship, told entirely through voice-overs by the two participants, spoken over largely static images (of household objects, animals, parts of the body, rooms, landscapes etc.). At times an emotional direction emerges (an articulation of love, loss, frustration), then it retreats. At times the film seems to be about its own making; at others it seems merely to drift. It defeated my patience. For much of the time, it might as well be basing its art on the idea that a ton of bricks thrown up into the air would land in the shape of a house. You smell coherence, but suspect it's just a pattern in the clouds. Like a poem, it'd need multiple viewings (and being 75 minutes long helps in that respect anyway). But that's not how most of us watch movies. It's not necessarily that we want an easy fix, but we want the movie to breathe on screen, not just in our imaginations. Cavalier's film is deeply passive: it reduces cinema to a static, almost feeble medium. La Rencontre is several degrees of deprivation too many.