NEW YORK MOVIE JOURNAL (Feb.-Mar. 2017)

[Chris Knipp]

The Human Surge/El auge del humano (Edoardo Williams 2016). This Venice multiple prizewinner debut film included in prestigious festivals (Toronto, Berlin, NYFF), which made me think of Carlos Reygadas, is a deeply committed and original if zero-budget visual exploration of unemployed youth, movement, following three slim youths around in Argentina, Mozambique, and the Philippines successively, often literally running behind them. Much attention has been devoted to the ingenious ways Williams finds of transitioning from the first section to the second and from the second to the third, and the different looks of the three parts have been admired though, to a cold eye, they ma all three look cheap and grainy - perhaps an intentional vernacular look. Conversation is mysterious and puzzling. Themes returned to include trouble getting a working cell phone or connecting to the Internet, jobs, online sex for pay. A bathing hole in the Philippines and a ramble in a dark village looking for an open Internet café at the end followed by the coda of repetitious work in an electronic tablet factory. Like Reygadas' Post Tenebras Lux it has one brief ravishing landscape. A Variety review pointed out how distant this is: you never enter into the lives or feel warmth much, and there is no narrative thread. It's an hour and forty minutes and the first hour felt like one of the longest in my life. And yet there is something haunting. And for cinephiles this is a hint of something new and thought-provoking to come. Included in the "Projections" sidebar series of the 2016 NYFF, its US premiere, Oct. 9, 2016. Watched at a press screening at Metrograph Theater in Chinatown 23 Feb. 2017; it opens there 3 Mar. with wider US theatrical release to follow.