what can i say...it worked on me! laughed so many times. i'm enamored with mia threapleton. happy to get a glimpse of my problematic darling charlotte gainsbourg, however short. wished there was like 25 more minutes but i greatly enjoyed it. the bjorn reveal had me laughing loud as hell.

still totally enamored with how aggressively digital rasoulof's images are. performances were excellent and really given a lot of space to just stretch out by the patient writing. lacked some inertia but i was still enjoying it. the back half of the film had me gripping my seat. mahsa rostami...you are the moment.

i am not really interested in being normal or level-headed about this. right now it's my favorite movie. i got jim crow. i got the blues. i got the lineage of black american musical history (with some peking opera imagery on the side). i got wunmi mosaku. this is basically a Bollywood film. this is basically everything. i felt like the movies were real again. they won't let a black person direct a movie at this scale again for a long time after this, so i'm soaking it all in while i can.

i don't know how right i am, but i see a lot of nineteenth-century fantasy literature and mid-twentieth century Japanese postwar existential literature in this. fabulous in its flurry of signs and signals which reach such a fever pitch that their density becomes its own texture. a monument to a kind of film which very well may not exist anymore in a few years.