Lance Hammer, 2008
There’s something wonderfully grand about even the humblest and littlest of overtures, and this U.S. Dardennes re-up opens, grandly, with a humble and indeed little overture: a boy, walking through a field, sets in flight an armada of birds with a few steps; this minute-long single-shot verily this austere work’s central thesis made symbolic - from the merest of action comes all manner of reaction.
Ostensibly a majorly affected tone piece, first-time helmer Hammer’s visual style is imported close to wholly, his take on the Dardennes’ “2.35 Realism” straight-up replicated, though actually finding a closer thematic and idiomatic relative in Sandrine Veysset’s transcendental realist works, principally her 2001 ’consolation’ paean Martha…Martha. However, Hammer’s understanding of ‘minimalist’ seemingly reads ’stifling’, and the excruciatingly spare aural landscape he maps - little dialogue and no music, of course, but overcompensated with a somewhat staccato montage of room-tone hiss and canal-shattering wind - seems to signify a directorial timidity rather than a bleak conjecture, architecture grad Hammer’s rationale for inclusion often chokingly spartan and, at times, the overwhelming restraint rings a little inauthentic.
Structurally, though, Hammer’s rejection of easy redemption in favour of messier and less resolved arcs is to the work’s betterment, and ultimately this decentralised three-hander about a family’s inability to reconcile could so easily have become so much miserablist bourgeois fare, but its own meek hope is actually its truest quality, and its saving grace.
Also, finally: the overture’s perfect dramatic complement is, perhaps, the neatly razored coda, and, again, this work comes fully equipped; its almost surprisingly sudden and, again, overly restrained final image speaking generously (though not generously) to the need for forgiveness and reconciliation.
