Critics reviews

Many were those who spoke of Diaz's inability to retain the power Shakespeare's words will eternally deliver, overall there was a feeling of unworthiness tainting the air. ‘Why?,' I heard a girl ask her friend after the screening. Within his complex body of work cinephiles all over the world are be aware of, I found Diaz's tiny dystopia—inside Oberhausen's evident search for an emotional utopia—to be an intermission for the beauty and focused urgency of memory and time once again grappled.

The film, which at 16 minutes is very likely Diaz's shortest, condensed his tendency to mix jaw-dropping imagery with forced profundity, here the clumsy contrivance of having actors recite lines from Shakespeare plays, seemingly chosen at random. These scenes, though, were rescued by more atmospheric shots of the same individuals walking through alleyways or sitting in cafes, and by the film's end, a brooding, otherworldly sequence of people wading through waist-high flood waters.

It simply shows how adroit Diaz' filmic intelligence is—duration in his long films does not mark dead time, as in a certain strand of festival cinema, but is a deliberate choice to accurately (re)present particular sensual and spiritual experiences.

Above all, image is made king: gorgeous, high-contrast black and white photography, like light blooming from street lamps, sparks in the night, a cyclist in the rain. The final monsoon, which yields some remarkable imagery of its own, quite literally threatens to wash the poetry away. But the peaceful coda (the day after the end?) is an absolutely sublime note for a film or a series to finish on. Who can say what will last—but there's always a chance to create more.