Promises written in the water

24/30

Vincent Gallo with his Promises in the Water brings a very visually descriptive note on the fragility of the body and its protection as a promise.

The long length and freeze frame shots, where close shots play the role of portraits of a mood, direct the film in a quiet attentiveness. Its black and white stills can be referential of a journey within memory. It's the memory, while it's intrinsically related to photography, that this movie is about. Preserving the memory of a living body through the creation of its image. Preserving each fragment, all the visible surface of this body, even trying to get inside its organicity, even trying to reproduce the inside parts where the camera is not allowed to go.

However the camera is most of the time directed to just a character, Kevin (Vincent Gallo), as a continuous auto-focus on his sentiments, actions and expectations, representing all the sides (in a double sense) of this character, as a trip to his big interiority.

At the end, the blow-up image - a pixelized image - in a framing placed on the floor and the image of the woman paralyzed in the bed mix up in a sense of the idea of photography as an eternal fixation of an instant, that can never be performed again. This blow-up is the urge to discover deeper and deeper each time, however what photography can give is the pictorial surface only re-actualized and recreated by the eyes of the viewer and not as an eternal redemption of the body.  

07:09:2010