Ray Pride

Russian émigré Julia Loktev’s fiercely controlled, compellingly opaque, gorgeously austere "Day Night Day Night" pares and parses sound and image as she quietly, methodically, observes a polite, tiny young woman of indeterminate ethnicity, speaking with flat, compliant American inflection, in the hours before a suicide mission in an unnamed city. (Loktev says she was inspired by the similar story of a Chechen bomber.) There’s tension, absurdity, comedy and, ultimately, silence. What are her politics? Who are her compatriots? Loktev’s background is in documentary and video installation, and much of her prior work depends on banality and repetition, yet as shot in mostly handheld high-definition video by Benoît Debie ("Joshua," "Irreversible"), the features of her unnamed protagonist (former copy editor Luisa Williams) attain as much power as Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s "Joan of Arc." (Really.) When you realize where she is and what she intends to do, all you can do is watch her face, and what Loktev gives you is her character’s face: sharp-featured, haunted, beautiful, lost, ready to die, ready to kill. (Perhaps not so ready to die.) Leslie Schatz’s impeccable sound design is a brilliant thrill, a glossary of how to create imagery without visuals, another necessary component of Loktev’s clinical intimacy. 94m.

"Day Night Day Night" opens Friday at Landmark Century.

(2007-08-07)

Also by Ray Pride

Life after Life
Charles Burnett’s great, fluky, lyrical, post-neo-realist, nearly lost, eighty-minute valentine of verisimilitude to 1970s Watts and to the struggles of the American working class is a 16mm student film, black-and-white with offhanded yet lyrical photography (yet always of documentary intensity), shot over a year of weekends for about $10,000, but it is a loving, attentive dream, detailed with the rhythms of a life almost none of us have lived
(2007-07-31)

Tip of the Week
Injustice to resist and a quest redemption are powerful components to make a documentary dramatic, memorable and necessary, and Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg’s powerful, infuriating, ennobling advocacy doc, "The Trials of Darryl Hunt," about a North Carolina man who was wrongfully convicted of murder and rape, imprisoned for twenty years and was later freed through DNA testing, draws on two decades of footage
(2007-07-31)

Somewhere Over the Rainbo
A reformed Rainbo Club regular visiting from out of town always calls this Ukrainian Village mainstay a "self-selecting slum-ocracy," but on his current visit he’s fixed on but one thing: "The ugly bus pulled up outside, and it’s got big wheels"
(2007-07-24)

The Odyssey
While almost all of the roaring eighty-eight minutes of "The Simpsons Movie" was fresh to me, the reason why is also the reason why some fast-moving bits and details were lost to me: I’ve seldom seen more than five minutes of the series in all its years on the air
(2007-07-24)

Tip of the Week
(2007-07-24)

Space Odyssey
(2007-07-17)

Tip of the Week
(2007-07-17)

Bombs Away
(2007-07-13)

iPhone Has a Home
(2007-07-10)

Tip of the Week
(2007-07-10)

Well Enough in the Margins
(2007-07-10)

Bay Watching
(2007-07-02)

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