PG ★★★☆☆
MARK Cousins has made a career of bringing a deeply personal and intimate touch to his documentary work, whether it’s the epic film history series The Story of Film: An Odyssey, the intensely individual I Am Belfast or poetic Mexican road trip What Is This Film Called Love?, to name but a recent few.
This unique, melancholic film functions as both his fiction feature debut and a wandering love letter to Sweden’s capital city, the birthplace of musician Neneh Cherry who makes her acting debut here and features in almost every moment.
The whole thing is almost aggressively anti-narrative, merely following Neneh’s architect Ava around her beloved home city as she narrates what it means to her, how her life as progressed over the years and trying to come to terms with a terrible car accident that she was involved in a year prior.
She finds solace in the familiarity of the city, in the bold architecture and landmarks, in the very idea of your birthplace always holding that special place no matter how far and wide you travel. It may be a personal journey but we’re made to feel like we know how she feels.
Her voyage on foot around the city is captured in appealing light by acclaimed cinematographer Christopher Doyle (reteaming with Cousins after I Am Belfast), conjuring beautiful images out of the smallest of moments, while the eclectic soundtrack that ranges from new jazz by Cherry herself to centuries old orchestral movements helps flavour this unique concoction.
It’s an at once playful and reflective cinematic blurring of the lines between what’s fact and what’s fiction, from the general docu-drama style to the intentional confusion between who is the real Neneh and who is simply a scripted construct; you wonder just how much actual acting is really going on here.
Its wide-eyed wandering does lapse into mere rambling on occasion – a tighter focus might have helped its lasting effect. But it’s an endearingly peculiar little odyssey that, if you’re willing to embrace the quirks, warmly welcomes you along.
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