In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (2013) User Reviews

A Life Too Ordinary

[MogwaiMovieReviews · 6/10 · 23 April 2021]

A camera follows an elderly artist around as he clears out his New York apartment.

Leiter seems a very minor photographer, as he himself acknowledges, and so this is perhaps an appropriately minor documentary, but it's still very shapeless and poorly constructed. It's nice to spend some time with him and hear what he has to say but we never really get to understand why he is being filmed in the first place. Narration might have helped, as the fundamental problem is that too much knowledge is assumed of this person almost no-one knows anything about, and so in that sense the film has to be judged something of a failure. Some nice photos here and there along the way of course, but you can find those and dwell upon them at greater length and in more appropriate detail elsewhere.

6¾

Thirteen kinds of comment

[anthonydavis26 · 9/10 · 30 June 2013]

* Contains spoilers *

I had not expected simply to enjoy Tomas Leach's documentary so much.

These comments are a snapshot why – if they speak to you at all, I hope that you will see this film :

1. Leiter has a cat – the cat was deliberately incorporated into the film (although not introduced), as if to say something about him, e.g. when comically spread on its back with its paws in the air

2. The stills that we were shown, full screen against black, were very, very effective, very beautiful

3. We were shown Leiter taking photographs, but the temptation was resisted to show us what he took, although he did show us – on the preview screen of his camera – the brilliant shots that he captured of the knees of the girls on the bench

4. We were treated as if this were a feature, and who Soames (Bantry) was, and what she meant to Leiter, was carefully revealed

5. There was a candid provisionality in the shooting as to whether Leiter would approve and allow what we knew that we were watching (and therefore that he must have done)

6. Leiter is an immense trickster, with an unfailing comic timing, which put the largely impeccable Woody Allen in relief

7. We were allowed to watch, but not to forget that we were watching with a licence, with permission – that mattered, and counted

8. The slightly off-putting – because seeming pretentious – sub-title about lessons in life just meant that the film was delicately punctuated by thirteen innocuous captions, often after a moment that had made my companion and me roar aloud

9. This was a better portrait than of Morten Lauridsen (Shining Night (2012)), because Leiter's humour was infectious, his candour and humanity to the forefront

10. At the same time, Leiter's putting things off, of piling things up, of not throwing things away, was a greater treasure, and he was noble and honest in revealing how such things defeat him, if he starts on a clear-out

11. And all those photographs, those boxes, those contact-sheets – the integrity of keeping on creating, but the immensity of the task of seeking to order it all

12. That inchoate state mirrored Leiter's willingness to be filmed as incoherent, to start a sentence that he could not finish, or which he interrupted to death

13. Finally, just his photographs again, those aching pictures of his father, his mother, of Soames, with a different intensity from his equally wonderful fashion portraits

Thank you, Tomas and Saul !