This is a film that hasn't got a story, just the idea of an actual
story: It's about a small fry conman, gangster, embezzler and gambler who
seems to be on the run constantly. He has several affairs with several
women which usually end badly, and he usually loses at gambling (mostly
cards and betting), but doesn't seem to learn from these experiences. The
whole story (if you want to call it that) is not told with actual actors
or anything, but via good old-fashioned stop motion animation of vintage
comicbooks and magazine cutouts, playing cards, betting slips, cheap
plastic toys, leaves and even wallpapers, and the like, and special
attention is paid to all of these thingss surfaces, their textures
(especially if the texture is scratched or something), and also the
interaction of different textures and the relations between foreground and
background. The result is fascinating, as is the marriage of narrative
cinema and the radically experimental approach - but it also becomes a tad
taxing after a while (and the movie runs 65 minutes), especially during a
long and stormy sequence towards the end when the narration is totally
dropped for a while, and some sequences are a bit too repetitive to remain
fresh, but in all it's still a fascinating experience, even if you just
come to see the vintage cutouts (which are beyond great by the way) - you
just need to know beforehands that you will not be watching a traditional
narrative movie!
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