TNoteworthy important British writer and independent film manufacturer Chris Petit, creator of Downbeat classics such as Radio in 1979 and an inappropriate job for a woman from 1982, may not be on days when It is easy to get an outlet for his work; This will appear to be its first feature of credit for 15 years. But he and co-director, editor and partner Emma Matthews appear with a deep personal film: painful, complicated, challenging and engaging.
Petit and Matthews riff and unrelated to memory themes, memory loss and the moving image in video and celluloid, but in the middle of it is an urgent story from their own lives. In his early teens, their son Louis, now 22, an actor and musician talent, began to have epileptic seizures that wiped his childhood memories; Some of them are in the kind of “Alice in Wonderland” syndrome because of the resulting misconception of time and space -even though they are scary, oppressive and brutal experiences that are different from the world of Lewis Carroll.
The heartless medical bureaucracy in the UK has not helped, a consultant advises Louis’s parents to “mourn for the child he used to be”. But the medical cannabis of the type of NHS has refused to give, and where they are now origin in Europe means that his seizures have stopped, even though the payment for it is still a concern.
Using a third-person voiceover narrative read by Jodhi May, and home videos taken by Louis’ parents showing the disgusting reality of his seizures, as well as clips from early cinema, tried Nina Petit and Matthews to negotiate in a creative way through this suffering, which is related to Louis’s courageous relationship with his incomplete personal history in their own continuous projects, and makes Louis’s story that is part of their own psychogeography.
Petit appears to be working on a film project that connects those who set up -set -setrs William Burroughs and James Jesus Angleton, head of CIA during the postwar period -and is now connecting to Louis to them. Burroughs are BROOD on the concept of a “pre-record universe”, a master tape of reality in a place beyond our immediate understanding, where our actual experience is fragment and realigned versions , and it can be linked to Louis’s experience. In his hat and glasses, the petit looks a bit like burroughs.
As for Angleton, he is the shady figure behind all the hidden black operations and dirty tricks, including LSD experiments-and this, too, reflects Petit’s destruction of the medical-pharmaceutical complex that lowers the his son. I have to point out that Petit’s interest in conspiracy theories is an innocent liberal pre-to-old form, the second shooter JFK is not an anti-vaxx type, though I’m not sure I agree when the narrator says of the movie “everyone knows” the big pharma “is in the deadly addiction business”. Those of us are pleased with our anti-covid vaccines have a different perspective, but of course the narration is not direct the director’s voice.
The movie shows us Chris and Louis together on trips to Finland and the frozen north, which seems to be at Scout locations, but maybe also – or indeed, or just one, or just – as an exercise In bonding, part of the constant re -connecting. It is a soft and emotional family picture.
