I Believe in Unicorns (2014)

I Believe in Unicorns: Directed by Leah Meyerhoff. With Natalia Dyer, Peter Vack, Julia Garner, Amy Seimetz. A road trip through the stunning and complex landscape of troubled young love.

“Experience, indeed, defies representation or articulate expression. Just as a photograph only captures one shot of a smooth manifold aggregate of lived phenomena, so language can only restrictedly encapsulate vibrancy. But oneu0026#39;d hope that a sequence of such photographs enables one to peer into that share of moments, brightening up memory and trajectories of thoughts, absorbing anew the cultivating spectrum of lived emotions. Breathe.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe opening credits alone immediately capture the spirit of this pure coming-of-age masterpiece. Ignoring the excusable whiny music, it alone was already so great and lingering that oneu0026#39;d want to stop and muse. Submergence into water necessitates the synergy of the liquid wateru0026#39;s flows with the likewise fluid and variedly current half-obscured memories of growth intertwined with decay. Stopping for an instance, retreating below the surface, divine Davina feels the impact of the past. Itu0026#39;s her birthday, but sheu0026#39;s not yet ready to face it. Brooding on the past can perhaps help, before lurching further into uncertain future terrains, that will eventually also continually expand the mindu0026#39;s horizons.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eFilm itself captures the process. An acoustic-visual artificial succession of events, melded with and moulded by memory, fantasy, by movements of objects that defy physical laws. Stop-motion and time-lapse show the productive capabilities of the unconscious factory, and the fragmentary apprehension of spacetime. Shades of lights correspond to different intensities. One traverses heterogenous planes, exploring natural strata, and sensing the world. The hair billows through the wind, the skateboard grinds across the concrete, the clouds, the grass, crops, trees, endless telephone wires, … they all reverberate, grafted from their respective denotations to dance within the partial subjective perspectives, poetic experimentation and flows. Stream of consciousness.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eDivine Davina is in a state of becoming. The creation of memories contrasts with the stagnancy and deterioration of her mother. Touching her mother instills stifling anxieties of death and decomposition, the limit of possibilities – u0026quot;la forme et lu0026#39;essence divine / De mes amours décomposésu0026quot;. She still has a life ahead, and hence must venture into those fairy tales and badlands.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eBecoming the nomadic voyager, wandering about. Dreaming and playing. Feeling the full spectrum of emotions. The unicorn and the dragon. Multivariate and recombining flinches of desire, sadness, happiness, loneliness, abandonment, comfort, disappointment, surprise, danger, warmth, coldness, excitement, pain, pleasure, … transitions between various intensive states and interactions with a significant other, whou0026#39;s active and feeling too, differently, but reciprocally, within a changeable complex relationship.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eFinally one has to digest the trip, make time for thought. The past becomes another series of photographs, pages of diaries, details, conclusions, and material mementos. And then one continues on, indefinitely.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eu0026quot;Thereu0026#39;s so much I want to say. But I donu0026#39;t know where to start.u0026quot;”