asakusa

I didn't even know he was sick...

Thanks - was waiting for this one. S?n ?oòng Cave is truly one of the most fascinating places on Earth.

Peggy Cappy’s Easy Yoga for Diabetes arrives like a transmission from a parallel history of cinema, one where the lineage of cinema verité bypassed television entirely and instead found its apotheosis on the instructional DVD. To watch it today is to realize that the real heirs of Bresson, Akerman, and Duras may not be in contemporary festival circuits at all, but quietly producing wellness tapes for PBS pledge drives. Every posture Cappy assumes recalls the temporal dilations of Béla Tarr, the almost unbearable patience of Sátántangó, yet here the apocalypse is interior: the collapse of glucose levels rather than Hungarian collectivism. The camera’s refusal to cut, its unblinking stare, belongs less to the pedagogy of exercise than to the metaphysical durational cinema of Tsai Ming-liang. One begins to suspect that Peggy, like Tsai’s Lee Kang-sheng, is playing a role she has been condemned to repeat forever. There are frames where the mise-en-scène achieves the crystalline purity of Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas cycle, the fluorescent wash of a community center transfigured into something bordering on the sacred. In a single adjustment of posture one feels the echo of Straub-Huillet’s Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, the militant severity of form made flesh. And yet, beneath this severity, there is also an unexpected lyricism, a tenderness that recalls the late works of Oliveira, or the aching silences of Hu Bo. When she instructs us to breathe, we are reminded less of exercise than of Rivette’s conspiratorial ensembles: the sense that the real film is happening somewhere offscreen, in the circulation of bodies and the accumulation of time. It is tempting to laugh at the title, to dismiss it as disposable media. But one must remember: Ozu too filmed families eating at low tables. Denis too filmed bodies moving slowly through rooms. That no one has logged this on Letterboxd is less an indictment of the film than of us. Peggy Cappy has not made a yoga tape. She has made the greatest work of slow cinema of the 21st century.

Was looking forward to this one - thanks @FREEMAN