A sad and true account of how a rencontre fails

Rating: 7/10 (28 December 2009)

This feature is an off-beat, extremely sad and joyful elegy and an incarnation of the unlived life and an account of the failed encounter with the other.
Here I deliberately draw on the theories of Jacques Lacan, the french psychoanalyst, who said that every achieved encounter of two persons, is a failed one. This does not mean that they do not happen, just that a disastrous moment occurs, and amends are, or not, made.
In the film, after almost twenty years of pen-friendship, the two, at first by a perfect whim of chance-choice and then by a perfect giving-and-misgiving course of things, where the two protagonists are never mischievous between them, even when things go bad and hilarious for them and for their relationship, finally meet in person, and Max is found dead by Mary. It sounds grim, but in the end it's, not quite uplifting, unless it is for the gaze which reads Mary's letters on the ceiling. That is the moment amends are made, even if they involve just Mary.
Attention to the whimsy of detail is intimate, almost saturating.
As with the constant field of reality we encounter every day with its seams of unabashed humor and unapologetic banality. The choice of stop-motion is dead on, as if the clayness of the matter was the best vehicle of their, and, as it goes, our situation.