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Echoes

2002, Movie, NR, 72 mins

Echoes: Review

ECHOES
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Japanese-born writer-director Atsushi Funahashi's encouragingly accomplished debut feature hearkens back to the early films of Jim Jarmusch and the American independent film scene that sprang up around him. With its crisp B&W photography, long, patient takes and deadpan humor, Funahashi's film seems particularly inspired by Jarmusch's own debut, STRANGER THAN PARADISE (1984). The film opens in New York City's East Village where blond, twentysomething Leslie (Eden Rountree) stumbles on a mystery rooted in her own past. A directionless petty thief who isn't above lightening the wallets of her one-night stands, Leslie steals the purse of a young woman who's standing next to her at a crowded bar. Amid the usual junk, she finds a photograph — an old family portrait of a very young Leslie, her parents and a smiling little girl she's never seen before. Startled and unsettled, Leslie hitches a ride south with Luca (Joe Marino) and Marko (Paolo Pagliacolo), Italian cousins who are leaving New York for new lives as mechanics in a Pennsylvania garage. Once they arrive, Luca tells his cousin that there's only enough work for one of them, so Marko and Leslie pile back into the car. Leslie offers to drive back to New York, but the minute Marko falls asleep she makes a U-turn and heads south. When Marco wakes up, he finds himself at Leslie's childhood home, a cattle farm somewhere in the middle of Virginia. Confronting her estranged mother (Allison Wright) for the first time in six years, Leslie also confronts her own despondency and the mystery of the girl in the photograph. Funahashi himself is far too interested in the sense of alienation and isolation this intriguing riddle generates to actually solve it, so this beautifully shot, 70-minute black-and-white film remains deliberately inconclusive. Funahashi, who also produced and edited, is clearly enamoured with America's wide open spaces, its lonely highways and the lonely people who ride them, but miscalculates the appeal of his completely charmless central character. Leslie is a rude, thoroughly amoral opportunist, and her sneering anomie and sulking despair seem more the result of an unattractive personality than any modern urban condition. She's hardly the sort of person you'd want to join on a road trip, let alone a spiritual journey. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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