The Arrow at Rest at Every Instant of its Flight
Violet and her best friend Em are restless, caught in dead end jobs with no way out, no money and no options to steal beyond petty theft of small business which they feel is unethical, terrified they will become their own end-of-life customers at the amusement arcade, while intellectual Sinopia discusses lofty literature with her divorce lawyer lover Henry in his upper floor apartment behind the back of her boyfriend Richard, and at the statue of Philomena, patron saint of lost causes, Jade vows to help the stranger she has been following.
Its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival attended by director Theodore Schaefer and his co-writer Patrick Lawler alongside Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’s Jack Haven who appears as Em in the opening segment, The Arrow at Rest at Every Instant of its Flight is a New York movie, jittery, jazzy, monochrome and singularly obsessed with itself to the exclusion of all else.
Three stories starring Gus Birney, as Violet, Sinopia, and finally as Jade, with interludes of “the woman with suitcase,” Constance Schulman’s sole role embodying more character than the three her daughter plays, their clothes and circumstances changing but her mannerisms and too cool for school attitude marking each as substantially the same person, the constantly moving camera may be intended to disguise how little is happening.
Scott Lane’s soundtrack endless and intrusive, fighting the bland dialogue, the segments are individually and collectively numbing, quipping and quoting literature, some of it indicative of the title, “bring me my arrows of desire,” “a person without money is a bow without an arrow,” but it is the nominative rests which dominate, every scene feeling like a pause to reflect as lovers suffer ennui, the claw grabber forever reaching but always dropping the prize, a scam played on the scammers.
Violet and Em left to appease their whims, Sinopia joking that forever going up and down the lift operator should be named Sisyphus before she steps out of the fourth wall to dissect herself and her relationship, unaware that Henry James, namesake of the author of Portrait of a Lady, lead character Isabelle Archer, and dentist Richard (John Early and Daniel Zolghadri) are also sleeping together, is there any cliché more tired than a high stakes game where the underdog pulls a fast one on the card sharks?
A comedy of manners told with the ironic detached assurance with which only the comfortable middle class can connect which makes Woody Allen’s introspective self-examinations of New York neuroses and egos seem profoundly relevant, The Arrow at Rest at Every Instant of its Flight is blunt and falls short of any target, a swirling teacup suspended and half served, the suitcase lady perhaps right to be concerned that she is losing herself, her identity fading in existential reflections as her clocks march onward in different time zones.
Edinburgh International Film Festival continues until Wednesday 19th August
