Writer-director Theodore Schaefer’s black-and-white anthology piece stands as a nicely oddball addition to this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival.
Set against a Manhattan backdrop and accompanied by an energetic, ever-changing score from composer . Subversive and off-kilter, the film begins as it means to go on with a frenetic opening montage filled with whip pans of New York landmarks before finally lingering on one of its main characters, an elderly lady known only as The Woman with the Suitcase. She wanders the city’s streets in search of her doppelgänger – some mystery woman who’s out to steal her life.
‘You know life sucks when the best thing you can aspire to be is a waitress…’
From there, we’re thrown into a completely different story happening in some far-flung corner of Manhattan: the Auto Shooter Arcade. We join Violet, one of the arcade’s young workers, played by Gus Birney, who, disgruntled with the place’s poor management and dreaming of a job as a waitress (of all things), teams up with her coworker to try and turn things around.
Together, the pair hatch a scheme that might just work, if they can manage to get away from the arcade’s archaic patrons who hobble about demanding the most expensive of ticket prizes and bafflingly shooting hoops better than I ever could.
With spoiling anything, things go interestingly awry for our two young professionals and before we know it, we’re once again whisked off to another part of the city. This time, we’re embroiled in the hush-hush love affair between an English professor (again, strangely played by Birney) and one of her partner’s best friends.
Despite sharing Violet’s face, Birney’s second character seems, to all the world, like an entirely new woman: Sinopia. She eschews her predecessor’s earnest qualms about the world of work and instead offers philosophical musings, at one point narrating over a slow shot of a swirling mug of tea.
The film’s occasional pauses for introspective monologues can be hit or miss – some land a little like an ‘Insert Thought-provoking Commentary Here’ placeholder, almost too artsy for their own good – but there’s still good fun to be had in the creativity and knowing winks on offer to the audience elsewhere in the picture, none of which I’ll spoil for you here. To that end, the quirkiness feels purposeful more often than not, and the film did feel, over time, like more of a journey with twists and turns than I’d originally expected from an anthology.
Our third and final story introduces us to yet another woman with Birney’s face. This time, she’s Jade, a cunning and cool young huckster who knows how to handle a mark. She could probably give Violet a few pointers, but first she’ll take a stab at helping out a stranger in need, with results straight out of a film noir. Again, the film plays around with our expectations and offers interesting little details like a noisy, crackly filter popping over an otherwise orthodox conversation, as if we’re watching something only partly recovered from warped, older reels. Some might see an inclusion like that as just pure window dressing, but it didn’t feel nearly as egregious as it might’ve; just eye-catching rather than distracting.
If you’re in the market for clear answers and resolutions to overarching questions, then this really isn’t the celluloid you’re looking for. For better or for worse, The Arrow at Rest at Every Instant of its Flight makes no attempt to explain its wider narrative at any instant of its 81-minute runtime, but as a quirky little festival offering, I appreciated having come along for the ride. The ending leaves you with plenty of questions, which may well frustrate you, but it felt, to me, like a strong final note to end on.
This film has an age rating of 15.
The Arrow at Rest at Every Instant of its Flight is showing at EIFF on 15 August. It has yet to confirm a wider UK release.
