January 19th
2024 · 11m
Directed by Jake Liban Pezzack
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In an elderly care home that feels like a waiting room, a woman named Nicky spends what may be the final hours of her long life reliving the hour before the magic show she once performed with her beloved. The narrative moves between the blue stillness of her present and vibrant home-video footage of a love that outlasted everything else.
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It's a memory film doing the most conventional thing possible—love as redemption, time as something precious—and yet somehow Pezzack refuses to sentimentalize it, which is either restraint or cowardice depending on your mood; I'm genuinely unsure which, and that ambivalence is the only interesting thing here.
The intercutting between the blue institutional present and the saturated home-video past is formally precise in the way it literalizes memory as texture and color; it sits naturally in a lineage of elegiac portraiture, executed with the kind of considered editorial discipline that distinguishes actual curation from earnestness.
The decision to let the home-video footage remain slightly degraded and overexposed rather than restore it—that imperfection becomes the entire emotional grammar of the piece, anchoring Nicky's recollection in the material fragility of what we actually keep.
Reviews
January 19th traces the shape of love around absence within a world that inherently pales in comparison by virtue of not being that other place, one which can only be imagined. The climax is in fact the crowning jewel of January 19th, its best moment that presents the transcendent nature of love in a haunting way.