Written and Directed by Natalja Deng
Reviewed by A Moofe Lurver for Stationary Rock
This new offering by Deng is a quirky, but tragic, take on the Matrix. In this film we find the protagonist, Bardon, musing about the apparent monotony of life. As he quips at one point, it’s just one thing after another: a ceaseless parade of the dull, the uninteresting, the tedious.
Bardon longs for excitement, and reasons that the monotony must be mere illusion. There must be something better that stands behind the tedium. Underneath it all, he thinks, there must be something genuinely dynamical.
So we follow Bardon as he spends his life looking for dynamism. Bardon has no time for friends or family; he has no time to find a satisfying job. For he is always on the hunt for dynamism: always sure that what he sees is not what, really, there is.
The tragedy of this film is that there is no Matrix. There is just one thing after another. At the end of the film we find Bardon, an old man without a home, friend, or family, still searching in vain for dynamism, having completely failed to engage with the things that happen, one after another. Sad but compulsive viewing. Three Stars.