The Duchess of Zion
2022 · 10m · USA
Directed by Horace Martins
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Anna, born into opulence, drifts through a plagued dream-state in the aftermath of her parents' separation, surrounded by memory and projection. Wealth as gilded paralysis.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Films about the rich are usually unbearable — this one earns its opulence by treating the dream as a prison. The image-making does the argument.
Inherited privilege as haunted condition rather than backdrop is a specific and rarely held thesis — Sofia Coppola through Apichatpong is ambitious shorthand. Promising.
Wealthy-girl dream-state experimental film about beauty-and-decay can easily collapse into perfume-ad languor; the snake-fire-meadow imagery is evocative but I need to see whether the haunting earns itself. Cautious.
Reviews
A striking experimental film capturing a life of beauty and decay, a mix of the haunted and the ethereal.