In last year’s piece on this very subject, I wrote about Dry Leaf and how true cinematic innovation in this day and age might require dead technology and muddled images. And while I still believe that, I learned during NYFF that you might not need conventional images at all. Jacqueline Lentzou’s gorgeous coming-of-death tale A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra follows teenager Jo on her last day on Earth. Most conceptions of death depict it as removed from life, as if the two aren’t inextricably linked; Lentzou presupposes that all of consciousness, living and dead, swirls into itself.
Key objects in Jo’s life float in nebulous stasis. Jo’s father disappears into thin air. Time stretches out forever in some moments, then contracts in others. In depicting death, Lentzou performs her most stunning magic trick. Jo ascends into the afterlife, and we’re dropped into a prolonged sequence of, well, nothing. You can make out shapes, maybe. Colors blur into the abyss. Yet time and space stand still. Lentzou’s depiction of death is unlike anything cinema has ever captured—because here, it wasn’t captured. At least, not through traditional means.
By removing her lens, Lentzou seeks to detach what we see from our sense of the camera’s very presence in cinema. If death is the soul’s detachment from the body, shouldn’t a film about this experience reflect that? Defying traditional image capture is almost moving, in a way—because it shows the medium can still rejuvenate, yes, but it’s deeper than that. Rendering “nothing into something soothes the part of your brain that believes death is the end. Lentzou’s movie magic suggests otherwise, even if you can’t process it on this plane of existence. BS