Souvenir

A haunting debut from Shamberg, hitherto a producer of music videos for the likes of New Order. Shot in Paris, it chronicles a couple of distracted days in the life of Orlando (Miranda), an American sports journalist, during which her near-incestuous obsession with her late brother finally prompts her French lover to pack his bags and split. Little else happens: she misses a deadline (Scott Thomas cameos as her editor), meets a basketball team in their locker room and replays some of her brother's old smell-o-vision software (designed by Chris Marker). But Shamberg uses digital editing to seamlessly integrate her memories/fantasies and larger reflections on the film's themes into the minimal narrative, generating images of uncommon density and beauty and turning the film into a kind of nervous rhapsody. The ending consolidates the various levels of paradox, bringing us back to earth with an elegiac bump.