I was pleasantly surprised by this, since I went in with a healthy amount of skepticism. The cinematography is fantastic. The opening is stunning and looks like a Kenneth Anger film. The rest of the movie looks like it fell out of a wormhole straight from the '70s. Sometimes that's for better, sometimes for worse.
In some kind of BRAVE NEW WORLD / 1984 / FAHRENHEIT 451-style dystopian future where everyone still listens to vinyl, there's only one record called THE #1 RECORD and it's on the radio constantly. A girl buys an unlabeled, cover-less record in a used record shop and forms a literal relationship with it, where the two engage in long, didactic, repetitive conversations about consumerism. Meanwhile, she works in a factory mass-producing art by hand, painting a single stroke on each canvas. The entire movie is post-dubbed, in pitch-perfect, affectless style that alternates between a bad foreign dub and those terrible live translations of UN press conferences and pronouncements by foreign dictators.
When I say this film feels like it came straight out of the 60s or '70s, I mean it: the mise-en-scene, the couture, the anti-consumerism and the deadeningly obvious symbolism all seem straight out of the era, particularly the naïve conviction that the movie is about to blow some minds by preaching against corporate-mandated artistic hegemony. It's not that these ideas are *bad* per se, just terribly shopworn, and I can't say the film really brought much new to the table: basically, it's a masterclass in formal articulation of a thesis that feels like it was written by a sixth grader. The style manages to carry the film astonishingly far, but even at its abbreviated runtime, it starts to feel repetitive. It's nevertheless an impressive piece of work, but might have been better served by being an extra-long (45-55 minute) short. As is, it just manages to maintain the goodwill it generates despite its excesses, but cuts things mighty close.
