A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra

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davidehrlich4.0

“Send her the dream.”This is how it starts. A teenage girl lies supine in a field of grass, a hand on her belly, her breathing filling the soundtrack as if the film itself were her lungs. Then she’s asleep, and a pair of disembodied voices — from within her own mind or perhaps another dimension, whatever that difference might be — begin to discuss what images to screen on the back of her eyelids. Wind chimes. A Colorado Avalanche hat has a wing sticking out on each side for some reason. A bullet casing. They debate that last symbol, but ultimately decide it’s OK. The girl won’t know what it means yet.How can the voices divine such portents themselves? Perhaps the girl’s life is like a movie they’ve both seen before. Then again, the self-possessed originality that fills every frame of Jacqueline Lentzou’s unforgettable “A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra” makes that supposition feel almost impossible. That feeling doesn’t last. By the end of this profound but ethereal wisp of a film, a slender cut of pure cinema that defies convention with the blithe inventiveness of a Björk lyric (or some other brilliant poet writing in their second language), the possibilities seem as boundless as life itself. Maybe even more so.Needless to say, the “Moon, 66 Questions” writer-director’s remarkable second feature isn’t a typical coming-of-age movie, even if it might sound like one on paper. The usual markers abound, like plenty of angst and music (the songs ranging from Vashti Bunyan and Daniel Johnston to Bryan Ferry and… Vincent Gallo?). Drugs. Dancing. Idle gossip. Self-discovery. Hallway makeouts at school and fights with mom at home. It all smacks of lived experience, and the film’s sketch of a story was inspired by a terrible incident in Lentzou’s native Athens when she was a teenager.But this is most definitely not a movie about growing up. Cleaving much closer in spirit to the existential unease of Gus van Sant’s “Death Trilogy” than it does to the mottled survivalism that runs through everything from “The Breakfast Club” to “Lady Bird” (though it somehow feels lighter than any of those films), “A Day in the Life of Jo” is less interested in adolescence as a crucible than it is as a transitory state of being — a vulnerable in-between where people are in the process of becoming themselves, winnowing their identities down to one at the same time as they’re pushed towards the sheer infinity of what this world might have in store for them. The indwelling light of Lantzou’s style stretches that time into a microcosm of life itself, reimagining the “ephemeral performance” of being a teenager as the work of a soul on Earth.~this review continues on IndieWire~

George Carmi

quietly mogged everyone in that theater by not reading a single subtitle.