Word: junkyard
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...training: the very phrase calls up the smell of plastic ashtrays, the clink of copper trinkets, the ennui of workshops crowded with delinquents manning lathes and squirting grease into crankcases. Vocational training should be a major source of steady employment for U.S. youths. Instead, it has become an educational junkyard for rejects from a college-geared society...
Spread out for almost half a mile along the banks of the Ohio River, the twisted pieces of rusted metal look like the junkman's answer to Lady Bird Johnson's beautification campaign. In fact, the giant junkyard is a painstaking attempt by a new federal agency to re-create the "Silver Bridge" that once connected Kanauga, Ohio, and Point Pleasant, W. Va., and determine why the bridge collapsed last December, carrying 46 people to their deaths in the river's numbing waters. The ugly jigsaw along the Ohio may have been the most visible effort...
...potential of Anastasia Vote, the ineffable potential of magic and mystery, Hunter destroys the narrative form, that apple-pie order march of elements we all know and love--elements like time, cause and effect, motivation (spell it out, son), resolution. Yes, they all break down. (Like the junkyard, like Anastasia--you've got it now, BREAKDOWN is the theme.) The threads of plot tempt you to join a surrealistic scavenger hunt. Don't. Don't fumble about for a catenary of explanation and logistic. You're likely to miss the vision, and the vision is Anastasia Vote...
...movie. It's impossible. Desire unfolds at a curious distance as if its people and actions were washed in the gideon colors of Dream. The salient elements of Dream are speed and deliberation. Desire approximates both. The plot careens arrogantly through a disequence of scenes, no connections provided: the junkyard; Twelvetrees in a hallway, in a bathroom; Anastasia on a long walk; Twelvetrees making love to Samantha; Blaine in his telephone booth. If we seize on any pattern, it may be a crazy spiral about Anastasia herself, about her diffuse Presence. But "spiral" promises too much. Montage is better, montage...
...that is, when the conversation is actually taking place on the screen. In general, filmed conversations are visually boring. A non-synchronized soundtrack permits Hunter to set his camera on exciting prospects -- Twelvetrees loping down the street toward Blaine--as the dialogue runs. (Unfortunately he didn't shoot the junkyard encounter between the two in the same way; we must suffer through a long silent discussion.) Enough of mechanics, however. The unsynchronized dialogue adds to Dream. Words when we don't expect them, silence when we do--it slips another strange note into Desire's distortion...