ultra slow cinema lensed in heavy use of focus depth, shifting between blurry and sharp through the entire experience. experience is the right word rather then film I guess. the first scene is amazing, a few shots of the Armenian landscapes mesmerizing. I kind of digged the 25 minute music sequence in the last third of the film. then again you gotta admit it's a lot of lazy work put in here - the filmmaker was admitting that she had written the script within a few days and then even discarded huge parts of it. so it's essentially a "let's go out there and shoot" intuition thingy which is fine enough, but the heavy aestheticism kind of refers to a bigger focus on style, that is never paid into as alleged. wasn't too surprised to learn that 1.) Carlos Reygadas produced the film and 2.) the filmmaker is actually an US american film student "reconnecting" with her roots. yeah yeah.
The Fog of War — tried to clean my glasses maybe five times before realizing that the consistent blur on screen was an intentional part of the film, which deftly realized the inherent haze of memory; beautiful formalism and a rare treat for me, as an Armenian, to see my people and our culture on a big screen
[Experimenting with sharing my reviews on here]From Berlinale 2025:In her self-assured first feature, Christine Haroutounian transforms a seemingly simple road trip into a complex odyssey across the Armenian landscape. It begins with the mistaken killing of a well-digger, whose family doesn’t want to break the news to his teenage daughter Claudette (Veronika Poghosyan). So, they enlist disaffected soldier Atom (Davit Beybutyan) to drive her far away until the funeral is over, leading to an intimate and unexpected relationship. However, this seemingly straightforward plot is quickly subsumed by a stream-of-consciousness approach to the narrative, enhanced by an equally ethereal photographic aesthetic.The result is a dreamlike film that floats on air, while keeping the sharp fall beneath it in constant view. For many in the Armenian diaspora — including, presumably, the Los Angeles-born Haroutounian — their cultural identity and connection to the land itself are fraught, given the numerous conflicts in the region leading to the expulsion of ethnic Armenians. This feeling of instability is baked into the film’s unfurling, owing to how and when it was conceived. Its story, punctuated by the sensation of war as a disorienting constant, first took shape in 2019, only for the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War to shape it further the following year — eventually leading to the displacement of over a hundred thousand Armenians in 2023.The film, however, bears no clear timeline, other than the vague notion of modernity. It is, quite fittingly, a work of temporal displacement, buoyed by occasionally surreal imagery, and repetitive, poetic dialogue that plays like a stuck record — like history repeating itself while skipping beats. Shot with a floating, hand-held camera, the dramatic compositions it yields are oblique, but entirely novel. As Atom and Claudine traverse the countryside and meet various other characters (cast mostly from non-professional actors), the frame takes on a spectral presence. This is largely owed to its dizzying use of focus, with parts of the frame blurred laterally, à la the works of Julian Schnabel, rather than across three dimensions, resulting in a painterly visual tilt-shift. The film’s ghostly images are at once flattened and alive, hovering in visual purgatory as scenes begin to feel not only like fever dreams, but out-of-body observations of the dreamers themselves.Haroutounian and cinematographer Evgeny Rodin achieve this liminal approach to character by separating the lens from the camera, all but embodying the sense of dissociation underlying the movie’s drama...Read more at Variety: variety.com/2025/film/reviews/after-dreaming-review-1236307175/
