Post by annee on Jun 21, 2006 16:46:20 GMT -5
From April Crossroads Film Festival:
“Four Corners”
Elizabeth Puccini, Feature, 104 minutes
Sat., Parkway Place Theatre, 7 p.m.
This debut film from Elizabeth Puccini centers around a group of young adults. There is Walt Samson, played with brooding passion by Paul Blackthorne, and his wife Rachel, played by Mädchen Amick. The scene is a cottage home with a stunning view the ocean on a New England island. Walt’s childhood friend Benjamin (Alec Newman) visits, with unsatisfied wanderlust and a broken heart. Rachel’s college friend Susan (Alice Evans) and her boyfriend soon join the three for late-night drinks, and the confessions ensue.
The film plays like an existential Bergman bedroom drama, with every character in search of essential, personal meaning. Walt was seduced by pity into his tepid marriage with Rachel and has begun a platonic affair. Benjamin is intelligent but melancholy. Susan is beautiful and crippled by how her beauty distorts every relationship she has.
“Four Corners” is evenly paced, but it suffers from being confined to a single night. By the last reel, the unending confessions and epiphanic monologues become exhausting. The dialogue is sometimes ponderous if not ridiculous, as when Benjamin expounds on how he read nothing but Rilke for two years. What it meant to him, God help us. And I pray I never have to endure another flaccid angel metaphor, in this case, Walt’s childhood belief that angels’ wings make the wind that moves the leaves.
Despite these excesses, “Four Corners” is a powerful debut. It is superbly shot, with both technical sophistication and artistic vision. At its best, “Four Corners” achieves a lyrical grace spiked with the majesty of emotional failure, when its characters finally relent from their prevarications. That honesty is searingly painful but also vividly real. This is not catharsis. This is renewal.
— Brian Johnson
Jackson Free Press
“Four Corners”
Elizabeth Puccini, Feature, 104 minutes
Sat., Parkway Place Theatre, 7 p.m.
This debut film from Elizabeth Puccini centers around a group of young adults. There is Walt Samson, played with brooding passion by Paul Blackthorne, and his wife Rachel, played by Mädchen Amick. The scene is a cottage home with a stunning view the ocean on a New England island. Walt’s childhood friend Benjamin (Alec Newman) visits, with unsatisfied wanderlust and a broken heart. Rachel’s college friend Susan (Alice Evans) and her boyfriend soon join the three for late-night drinks, and the confessions ensue.
The film plays like an existential Bergman bedroom drama, with every character in search of essential, personal meaning. Walt was seduced by pity into his tepid marriage with Rachel and has begun a platonic affair. Benjamin is intelligent but melancholy. Susan is beautiful and crippled by how her beauty distorts every relationship she has.
“Four Corners” is evenly paced, but it suffers from being confined to a single night. By the last reel, the unending confessions and epiphanic monologues become exhausting. The dialogue is sometimes ponderous if not ridiculous, as when Benjamin expounds on how he read nothing but Rilke for two years. What it meant to him, God help us. And I pray I never have to endure another flaccid angel metaphor, in this case, Walt’s childhood belief that angels’ wings make the wind that moves the leaves.
Despite these excesses, “Four Corners” is a powerful debut. It is superbly shot, with both technical sophistication and artistic vision. At its best, “Four Corners” achieves a lyrical grace spiked with the majesty of emotional failure, when its characters finally relent from their prevarications. That honesty is searingly painful but also vividly real. This is not catharsis. This is renewal.
— Brian Johnson
Jackson Free Press
