Dry Leaf comes heavy laden with praise. It had its World Premiere at Locarno last year and has since screened at Toronto, New York, Busan, London and a host of other places including Sydney where the program note advised us the film was "Shot entirely on an old phone to mesmerising effect" and that it's "One of the boldest formal experiments in recent cinema, Dry Leaf finds striking beauty in the low-res and lo-fi." Actually I dont think it was so lo-fi. The music was crystal clear and the dubbed dialogue quite distinct.
Soon it will be at MIFF where there are two screenings scheduled. It is three + hours long. Jessica Kiang in Variety is frequently quoted in program notes saying it is "A pioneering use of old, ephemeral tech to invent new, eternal cinema.” That's some Andrew Sarris-like phrase-making, but I really hope not. I really hope this does not become a thing although Koberidze has now done it twice.
Call me old-fashioned but peering at pixillating out of focus images for three hours is not my idea of fun. (I found the same lack of fun watching Hong Sang-soo's out of focus opus In Water). Filming a story about a father searching for his apparently estranged daughter in the backblocks of Georgia, where the only clue is that she was taking photographs of football grounds, not coming across a single person who has seen her, ruminating through idle chat with locals and interposing landscape shots that basically abstract themselves did not deliver fulfilment. A sequence where the car is washed is filmed in real time from the vehicle's interior had some abstract fascination but it wasn't often repeated.
But it takes all kinds and the fifty or so punters who came out for the opening evening at Le Grand Action on rue des Ecoles sat through it silently. None walked out early. Many were paused on the footpath outside around 11.00 pm apparently discussing it.
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