A man (Alexander Sloan McBryde) and a woman (Jillian Guerts) meet at a
train station, and without neither having anything to do really, they
decide to spend some time together, though they never really know what
they are to each other, chance encounters, close friends, lovers, a
one-night stand? However after partying together, they land in bed ... but
ultimately don't have sex because he can't get it up - which leaves her
decidedly less than disappointed. But this lack of emotional bond also
leaves their conversations oddly cold in their dedidedly impersonal
surroundings, perhaps a town they're both strangers to ... The
premise of The Algebra of Need is actually a very original
experiment, as this film doesn't feature any original dialogue but has its
lines patchworked from the works of arthouse darlings Jean-Luc Godard,
Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Angonioni, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Alain
Resnais, William S. Burroughs, Jean-Paul Sartre and Marguerite Duras (to
all of whom director David R. Williams apologizes in the credits), put
into a different context but filmed in a way (and in black and white)
that's closer to the French nouvelle vague than anything else. The result
might seem pretentious to some, blasphemous to others, but if you take the
film with a grain of salt, and see it as a film about two people unable to
converse normally and thus unable to have a normal relationship, then it
does work rather well, and on a pure visual level, Williams makes perfect
use of his often rather mundane sets and gets the most (aethetically) out
of them. Worth a look for sure, but you'll probably enjoy it more if you
have some foundations in vintage arthouse cinema (and no, I don't know
either where or who exactly most of the pieces of dialogue are from).
|