** (Two stars)
Wielding his camera as a magnifying lens, director Mark Street turns to far-flung urban centers for a fetishistic glare into daily street life. We follow him to Hanoi, Vietnam; Dakar, Senegal; Marseille, France; and Santiago, Chile, where long, uninterrupted shots are interspersed with text snippets mentioning past revolutionaries like Ho Chi Minh and Salvador Allende. Some of the notes also reveal bits of personal insight by the director. The visual collage uses a light touch to paint a world of small, seemingly inconsequential interactions, but to what end? Perhaps Street had some eureka moment while taping and culling his footage, but he fails to give us ours. Street offers the viewer only a wisp of motive. What might otherwise be a pure and placid visual meditation instead leaves us wondering why Street never fully injects his point of view into his own picture.—Jeff Quinn, designer
[This is a TONY staff review, written for the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. It is not considered an official review and should not be read as such. Please think of it as a casual impression from a movie-loving friend.]