Writer-director Sally Potter opens her tender new drama, “The Roads Not Taken,” in a rather unusual way — with strictly audio on a blank screen. During this time, we hear car horns and other street traffic. As we get comfortable with that familiar chaos, the director brings us to a man lying serenely in bed as the noise from outside filters through his open window.
It is precisely this clash of sounds and spaces that Potter to which continually points us throughout the movie. Javier Bardem plays Leo, a man suffering from an unknown (and virtually unspoken of) mental illness. He constantly floats in and out of his bustling New York City reality to rural Mexico where he grieves the loss of a child with his partner, Dolores (Salma Hayek). He also drifts over to a vague Greek island where he struggles to find inspiration as a writer. It’s these luscious,...
It is precisely this clash of sounds and spaces that Potter to which continually points us throughout the movie. Javier Bardem plays Leo, a man suffering from an unknown (and virtually unspoken of) mental illness. He constantly floats in and out of his bustling New York City reality to rural Mexico where he grieves the loss of a child with his partner, Dolores (Salma Hayek). He also drifts over to a vague Greek island where he struggles to find inspiration as a writer. It’s these luscious,...
- 3/12/2020
- by Candice Frederick
- The Wrap
In 2013, Sally Potter lost her younger brother, artist and musician Nic Potter, to early onset dementia, although the disease is so cruel, one could say that she began losing him a couple years earlier — that he started to disappear on her in 2010 — and that her film “The Roads Not Taken” is the celebrated director’s abstract way of coping with his death. The time Potter spent caring for Nic no doubt inspired the character of Leo, played by Javier Bardem, in a film in which the actor works awfully hard at communicating things that neither the audience nor his on-screen daughter Molly (Elle Fanning) can reasonably understand.
The movie is an exasperating puzzle with most of the pieces missing, set over the course of one day, and centered on the idea that while Leo looks braindead to everyone around him — everyone but Molly, whose sympathy reads more like an irresponsible...
The movie is an exasperating puzzle with most of the pieces missing, set over the course of one day, and centered on the idea that while Leo looks braindead to everyone around him — everyone but Molly, whose sympathy reads more like an irresponsible...
- 2/26/2020
- by Peter Debruge
- Variety Film + TV
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