Slow Moves

Jost has supplied his audience with plenty of reasons for avoiding this film. He freely admits that its characters make a pair of Mike Leigh marrieds look like Fun with Dick and Jane, and that the usual narrative trappings - backgrounds, personalities, events, causality - are obscured, that the film parts with its secrets only grudgingly. But with that established, it becomes a fascinating, oddly gripping, and often visually stunning film. It's not unlike a Peter Greenaway mystery translated to the dry, dusty heartland of Malick's Badlands, although here the emphasis is on spiritual paralysis rather than Greenaway's elegant intellectual conceits. It does have a similar wit - sly games with camera angles, image, dialogue and cliché - but unravelling them yourself is half what the movie is about. Jost's story of two charmless no-hopers, drifting through life without reason or direction, might sound like pure valium, but the gradual seepage of narrative turns it into all manner of movies.