Films that might have fit this putative strand included the charming but overlong Timeless Stories, co-written and directed by Vasilis Raisis (and winner
of the Michael Cacoyannis Award for Best Greek Film), a story that follows a couple (played by different actors at different stages
of the characters» lives) across the temporal loop
of their will - they, won't - they relationship from childhood to middle age and back again — essentially Julio Medem - lite, or Looper rewritten by Richard Curtis; Michalis Giagkounidis's 4 Days, where the young antiheroine watches reruns
of Friends, works in an underpatronized café, freaks out her hairy
stalker by coming on to him, takes photographs and molests invalids as a means
of staving off millennial ennui, and causes ripples in the temporal fold, but the film is as dead as she is, so you hardly notice; Bob Byington's Infinity Baby, which may be a «science - fiction comedy» about a company providing foster parents with infants who never grow up, but is essentially the same
kind of lame, unambitious, conformist indie comedy that has characterized U.S. independent cinema for way too long — static, meticulously framed shots in pretentious black and white, amoral yet supposedly lovable characters played deadpan by the usual suspects (Kieran Culkin, Nick Offerman, Megan Mullally, Kevin Corrigan), reciting apparently nihilistic but essentially soft - center dialogue, jangly indie music at the end, and a pretty good, if belated, Dick Cheney joke; and Petter Lennstrand's loveably lo - fi Up in the Sky, shown in the Youth Screen section, about a young girl abandoned by overworked parents at a sinister recycling plant, who is reluctantly adopted by a reconstituted family
of misfits and marginalized (mostly puppets) who are secretly building a rocket — it's for anyone who has ever loved the Tintin moon adventures, books with resourceful heroines, narratives with oddball gangs, and the legendary episode
of Angel where David Boreanaz turned into a Muppet.
It is the
kind of allegorical, even spiritual, science fiction found in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris and
Stalker, or, more recently, in Natasha Kermani's Imitation Girl, in which characters are on a quest to find their identity in alterity, their self in otherness, and their innermost being in the alien.
Having your lead as a creepy
stalker is an interesting idea (this movie kind of ruined my upcoming screenplay, Stalker Sat
stalker is an interesting idea (this movie
kind of ruined my upcoming screenplay,
Stalker Sat
Stalker Saturday!)
And here's the thing: If Ana had been a student at my school and had come to my office and talked about her relationship with Christian (which is the
kind of thing that happens all the time), I would be mandated, under federal law, to report that to the campus police, because she'd be telling me about her
stalker.