Remainder ***
Video artist Omer
Fast’s adaptation of Tom McCarthy’s 2001 novel is a coolly ambiguous offering
from the swelling cinema-does-memory file. Tom Sturridge’s shifty blank emerges
from a freak accident with amnesia and a seven-figure payout that permits him
to reconstruct some small corner of his identity; he does this not with tattoos
or Post-It notes, rather by restaging events using actual people and places.
(Painstakingly rehearsing a bank robbery, he resembles Philip Seymour Hoffman’s
writer-cum-worldbuilder in Synecdoche,
New York.) Fast lends this process distinctive textures and atmosphere,
achieving a heightened reality by working on recognisable London streets: we’re
surely watching a form of gentrification, as plummy white male Sturridge
snaffles property so as to regain control over his surroundings. It’s clever
but chilly, leaving the protagonist’s motivation (intentionally?) fuzzy: if
what he’s doing fascinates, his reasons for doing it can seem a touch opaque.
An assured headscratcher, nevertheless, full of ideas and images guaranteed to
lodge somewhere in your cranium.
Remainder is now playing in selected cinemas.
No comments:
Post a Comment