• Martel’s 2nd film picks right up where here debut left off with the great staging and layering in the frame. Instead of the lounging drinking bourgeois we have professors at a crowded hotel/conference center and catholic school girls in school
  • Collage of a narrative more interested in discussions and the textured frames than story
  • Bunuel for sure is an influence- hypocrisy in the intellectual elite—but Martel is quieter in her critiques
  • Some surrealism moments and it’s a story of sexual awakenings
  • You have to get past the opening credits- which look like they were created in PowerPoint
  • Heavy close-ups and staggered heads peppered through the frame again and again
  • I felt a little bit of Sofia Coppola’s isolation and sexual awakening here with a group of girls with the virgin suicides— captured almost
  • shallow focus—goes with the surrealism scenes and close-up emphasis—a lot of the film is almost shot like the close-up whisper scene in lost in translation
  • The staging is very impressive- it’s a pure and dedicated aesthetic choice that would otherwise be tough to archive. Repeatedly shows characters in half of frame- detailed framing.
  • Weaving in and out of that narrative collage of different locations (school, conference hall, street with the scene and the sexual incident, cafeteria)
  • Unsatisfying overly understated ending in the swimming pool with the two girls. Wink to La Ciénaga
  • R/HR border