Becoming A
Becoming B
An abstract, minimalistic showpiece of late structuralist film made up of 360-degree pans across a children’s playground – and to one of the gods of his cinephilic pantheon, Anthony Mann. In concrete terms, he alludes here to a scene in Mann’s Glenn Miller Story in which black-and-white documentary material from the Second World War is in experimental film fashion nightmarishly intercut into a scene, breaking with Hollywood conventions.
Perrone switches back to color and chooses European painting as the space for his tale and as his land of experimentation. The stage: paintings by Manet, Monet, Renoir, among other chosen artists; still, open-air landscapes put together through their similarities. The characters who move there: two men, two women, two hunters, two ominous creatures (one of them a tiny creature of the night with two eyes and a brutish and wild human body). Divided in 18 acts, the narrative of this film is limited to showing brief episodes about desire and violence as the fuel of human endeavors, while its characters roam in the woods. With no words at all, Perrone wagers all on the juxtaposition of textures, on superimpositions, and on the power of face close-ups – these are his main arguments.