负路径 Via Negativa

Somewhere undefined, half-way between empty office spaces and abandoned shopping mall, a young man drops to the ground in slow motion. Walls rot, the mail piles up behind closed doorsteps. Peering through window panes, another young man observes an enigmatic ballet as two elegant young women invert the urban desert and make it into a playground for their subversive imagination. Under cover of re-appropriating the deserted apartments and offices, they engage in strange poetico-political acts, part situationist, part Oulipian. They slip papers and pink, yellow, and green chips under the doors, sowing existential formulas on clothes tags… Negative Path’s minimal intrigue amounts to the boy’s initiation to the rites and mysteries of the secret society, and the playful seduction it allows for. Script and direction work through subtraction : of drama, of weightiness, of any kind of explanation to the situation. A strangely worrying end-of-the-world atmosphere pervades the empty city, but the catastrophe has already taken place. A few signs hint at its nature : an economy in full and definitive decrepitude, like a collapsological extrapolation of the repeated crises that have struck Argentina. The film’s singular beauty owes to the contrast between the portrait of a world in the terminal stages of its collapse, and the supreme elegance, the high-fashion care with which Alan Martin Segal tailors his shots, sets up the frame, lighting, and sounds. But don’t let that trick you : under their fun and chic appearance, the negative path taken by the film and its characters is of the highest political consequence. Let the world run to its end to regain life. Create nothingness, then give shape to nothingness. Undo the world, empty it, and make of your life a form moving through free space. Elegance as the ultimate resistance. (Cyril Neyrat)