Recensioni de* critic*

Beyond being among the most crystalline and perfectly realised films of Garrel, very exact in its materialist abstraction (what year is it set in? how much fictional time does it cover?), Frontier of Dawn is also profound in its truly psychoanalytic insight into what haunts any ‘life transition.'

There are a million conceivable ways to render this material trite, melodramatic, and laughable, but Garrel perfectly brings forth its eerie fatalism and its testament to love’s inextricably deceptive power to destroy.

It’s a lovely work, suffused with a deep melancholy that seems etched into each of its beautifully lighted images.

Garrel père reunites with Garrel fils for this frequently tedious rumination on rabid passion that still manages to linger in the mind.

The singularity in  Frontier of Dawn creates a detached, fabular atmosphere that detracts from the implicit emotional intensity given the story's autofictional premise, resulting instead in a film with quintessential Garrelian elements that, like the film's alterego, seems content with sleepwalking through familiar haunts and gestures.

Whether the choice of death is the ultimate kind of faith or the weakest of all is not something Frontier of Dawn is powerful enough to answer, but it asks vital, terrifying questions, transposed to a forlorn, gloriously star-crossed romanticism.