An academic exercise in audience manipulation. We should have guessed from the opening, CLAIRE DOLAN-like fetishisation of the urban grid - which is deliciously formal - that Moss's interest in the human drama would be far from sentimental. She tries to recover trauma and randomness in a world of such ordered planning.
A yuppie says goodbye to his wife and child, agreeing to meet them later. They seem to be the only animate objects in a crowd of virtual statues, and even their gestures seem a little inhuman, as if affection, among other things, has been mechanised by routine.
But routine is about to be shattered, and a courier driver knocks over and kills a pedestrian. The film stretches out the driver's agony, his horror at having killed someone, his guilt that he was to blame, his fear that he will lose his job, or worse. The film slows down, the takes are longer, the camera gaze more wearing. But equally, he just becomes part of the formal grid, part of the triangle connecting the husband and wife and child, a formal unit separated by a formal city, connected by a random tragedy.
The film crosscuts with the wife and child, terribly, heaving the tragic dramatic irony away (obviously) from them, to whom it concerns, on to us, as they go about their business, oblivious, seemingly happy, eagerly awaiting daddy. Without actually seeing who was run over, we assume it was him, through the cutting; we hope it is him, because it creates a connection, it stitches the breach that opened the film, which we cannot bear, which made even wider the loneliness of the city - we want the broken union fixed, even if it is by death.
All this is fascinating, if a little chill, but what, for me, was most enjoyable, was the creation of a monochrome world appropriate to the title, a blue and white film unseen since LE SAMOURAI. This could refer to the sadness inherent in the progress of Western capitalism, but it's more a case of its conformity, where the people look no different from the huge, faceless, modernist environment.
A yuppie says goodbye to his wife and child, agreeing to meet them later. They seem to be the only animate objects in a crowd of virtual statues, and even their gestures seem a little inhuman, as if affection, among other things, has been mechanised by routine.
But routine is about to be shattered, and a courier driver knocks over and kills a pedestrian. The film stretches out the driver's agony, his horror at having killed someone, his guilt that he was to blame, his fear that he will lose his job, or worse. The film slows down, the takes are longer, the camera gaze more wearing. But equally, he just becomes part of the formal grid, part of the triangle connecting the husband and wife and child, a formal unit separated by a formal city, connected by a random tragedy.
The film crosscuts with the wife and child, terribly, heaving the tragic dramatic irony away (obviously) from them, to whom it concerns, on to us, as they go about their business, oblivious, seemingly happy, eagerly awaiting daddy. Without actually seeing who was run over, we assume it was him, through the cutting; we hope it is him, because it creates a connection, it stitches the breach that opened the film, which we cannot bear, which made even wider the loneliness of the city - we want the broken union fixed, even if it is by death.
All this is fascinating, if a little chill, but what, for me, was most enjoyable, was the creation of a monochrome world appropriate to the title, a blue and white film unseen since LE SAMOURAI. This could refer to the sadness inherent in the progress of Western capitalism, but it's more a case of its conformity, where the people look no different from the huge, faceless, modernist environment.
