Last week I saw David Gordon Green’s film George Washington. Like All The Real Girls, this film is one that could have taken a more predictable turn, but instead focused on characters instead of obvious plotting. By this, I mean that it isn’t hard to see how the accidental death of a young man could have turned into a predictable Hollywood film.I think that overall All The Real Girls is probably the better of the two, but this one shares many of the later one’s positives, including a unique approach with dialogue, good characterization that avoids stereotypes, and a poetic approach to the presentation of images, where the eye can linger on a shot as it would on a poetic line.
Here is a snippet of Dan’s review of the film, where he discusses the narrative approach of the film, as well as how the film achieves its poetic effect in its contrast of dialogue and images.
“That said, this film is not really a narrative, more of a simple series of linked vignettes that trace a several week period over a summer, which opens with a dreamy panoramic and poetic monologue spoken by a young girl named Nasia (Candace Evanofski), that weaves poetry out of the banal snippets that drift in and out of even the most prosaic minds, such as, ‘I like to go to beautiful places where there’s waterfalls and empty fields.’ This is not immanently poetic, but juxtaposed with the camera work it takes on a heightened, almost ecstatic, state. Some criticize the film by stating real children do not speak that way, but, a) I’ve known them, and a read of Anne Of Green Gables shows they’ve always been around, and b) the poesy is not of the character, but what the character says in relation to her station on life.”
Here is a taste of the film courtesy of Youtube:
