9/10
After watching Pedro Costa's first film recently (Ossos), I jumped ahead to his most recent because I thought it looked like something I would enjoy. It's a documentary in the loosest sense of the word, in that it's a movie featuring real people doing real things - in this case it's the French actress and vocalist Jeanne Balibar rehearsing, recording, and performing songs from a new album with her band. All conventional documentary elements (narration, interviews, background, context in general) are done away with, however. We're left with lengthy shots like this or this, with the start/stop soundtrack of a band attempting to coax music out of nothingness.
I guess how much you enjoy this hinges on how much you like the music but, despite having never heard anything from Balibar or her group before, I thought they were really interesting sonically, and Balibar has a great, smokey voice that lends perfectly to Costa's gorgeous black and white photography. The images and music together are extremely hypnotic, and I really liked the paradoxical dynamic Costa's shots induced...the studio space seems to be both claustrophobically enclosed and, because so much is cloaked in darkness, as wide open as the universe. I'd watch it again in a heartbeat.
The film started as a 12-minute short of the same name, which you can see on Youtube (part one here).
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