Tuesday, April 19, 2016

In Brief: Icaros:A Vision (2016) Tribeca 2016


American woman travels into the Peruvian Amazon in order to find shamans using the ayahuasca plant in order to heal herself. Along the way she makes the acquaintance of various people looking at their own crisis and meanings.

Occasionally visually arresting film only infrequently manages to rise to the level of profundity that it is seeking to engender becoming a slow moving tale that seems in many ways to be like other better films. In particular this film reminded me of the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who manages more often then not to get the right mix of mystical and reality. Here the film seems to be either mystical or real with the two worlds clashing.

Mostly the film seems to be a series of  scenes where people don't say a hell of a lot, but what is said seems to have a deep meaning, even if its something banal. Occasionally we'll see some the vision that one of people in the film is having, but these are not always that profound.

To be honest it's not a bad film but we've been here before any number of times before. Worse the pacing is so low key that I found myself drifting off as I waited for something to happen. Nothing ever did, or at least not enough for me to recommend this film.

(In fairness I did speak with a couple of fellow writers who like the arty pretentious sort of film and they they spoke highly of it. Sometimes they are on target but in the present instance I believe we will agree to disagree.)


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