Jonny Come Lately
2016 · 10m · USA
Directed by Francesca Coppola
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
Jonny and Sam orbit each other through sparse dialogue and charged visual moments — a toy frog dropped in the East River, a caged snow leopard, a dance to Miles Davis. The film builds toward an explosive confrontation that shatters whatever fragile hope was left.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Deragh Campbell and Kentucker Audley do not show up for nothing. Coppola turns a breakup into a held-breath image catalog — caged snow leopards, toy frogs in the East River — and I'm in.
Coppola working in early Antonioni's repressed image-violence filtered through Kentucker Audley mumblecore — toy frog in the East River, caged snow leopard, Miles Davis. The almost-silent grammar is the relationship's collapse.
Toy frog in the East River, caged snow leopard, Miles Davis — Coppola building toward a relationship's collapse through an almost-silent grammar of withheld speech and freighted images. Deragh Campbell and Kentucker Audley in a laconic-poetic register is sturdy casting for this kind of repression-cinema.
Reviews
The beauty of the images is as repressed as it is mutely volatile; the camera holds on moments as beautiful as they are suffocating, with claustrophobic violence embedded in each interaction.