Yepeto

'It's my duty as a teacher to bore people,' declares the eponymous professor - drinking, cussing, all polonecks and solitary anger - as he seeks to do the exact opposite, testing extra-curricular friendship, jealousy and the generation gap with a pair of students. Dumont's is a spirited and unconventional part, not especially endearing, but clearly committed to the project we call living. He writes a novel, it affects those around him. Visually unremarkable but imbued with a reasonable melancholy, this captures well the loneliness beneath the surface of city life and is successful in creating a palpable sense of the ambiguous possibilities of the urban night. Long on longing, short on innovation, it's a familiar tale but does the job, questioning fiction and life, and even hinting occasionally at a fetish of reading.