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Rewatched in English. Completely different experience. I can’t get over this film. I feel like I have to push myself against the boundaries of whatever language I have at my disposal to put together something that containerizes how much this moved me. It’s a film that keeps returning, that continues to unfold, and as you peel back one layer, you are met with at least seventeen more.

I hate referencing French last names to say what I want to say, because it feels to me like lazy writing. In any case, it feels like Gilles Deleuze’s ideas of the rhizome and of the multiplicity are put into practice here. Hope to write more about how this movie relates to Dewey’s Art as Experience and psychoanalytic theory. There is also definitely some Hegel and Derrida in this that I won’t scratch at.

The discursive motifs of the Oedipal nuclear bourgeois family cacophonizing with the bellowing and guttural car honks, with also the galloping train followed by the screeching brakes, I think, epitomizes what felt so special to me about viewing this film. 

It is precisely this idea that (and I may be projecting here) beaneath bourgeois social norms, the unrooted nomadism practiced by the new urban arrival can still be constrained by the nuclear family model that one may have sprouted from. The feeling of having to stomach the pain of friction against adjusting to the new city, detaching and “finding oneself” in a new environment,  restructuring the ego in a geography steeped with a new superego, yet still feeling the pressure of the old superego from which one departed from. 

In a more phenomenological sense, it’s this uncanny feeling that I think many people who have had to move away from home may have felt. It’s the feeling of having to remember that, as you sit on the bus, staring at cars that look like human faces out the window, your parents are living their lives, facing their problems, the problems you may have wanted to escape, that you may have constantly had to encounter, yet in the new urban environment, governed by a new superego, you don’t see or hear about it at all any more. And instead, those sounds are replaced by the screeching car brakes, the view of a graffitied mirror on the subway returning an image of yourself with a hot pink scribble over your face.