Slow
2011 · 13m · United States
Directed by Darius Clark Monroe
Tones: contemplative, provocative, tense
A blind man prepares dinner in his kitchen while waiting for his lover to arrive. When the lover enters and quickly undresses, the expected encounter stalls into a tense, silent standoff between one man's desire and the other's withholding refusal.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Monroe does the obvious subversion—queers the intimate encounter, makes desire itself the problem instead of the solution—but the real move is letting silence do all the work; most filmmakers would panic and underline the tension with music or reaction shots, and that's exactly why this one doesn't.
A disciplined study in negative space and withholding that recalls the Structural tradition's interest in duration and the body, though the LGBTQ+ intimacy angle keeps it from the austere remove such films typically demand—it wants to hurt, not just observe.
The entire film pivots on Monroe's decision to shoot the non-encounter in real time without cutting away: thirteen minutes of two bodies in a kitchen where nothing happens becomes everything, and that refusal to edit or escape is what transforms a premise about desire into something that actually accumulates weight.
Reviews
Par la radicalité de la mise en scène, investissant des plans longs, laissant aux acteurs la tâche d'exhumer une étrangeté reconnaissable à travers un palpable tension amoureuse, le film invente un espace de réalité et se tourne vers une problématique morale. Dépassant le flou érotisant pour montrer la brutalité nette d'une relation bancale, le dialogue physique offert par « Slow » brise ainsi toutes les attentes.