nanelikek

Just a few cameras placed in two or three spots in the courtroom. it is a court that deals with small crimes. The movie could so easily have been one of 'human drama' or 'human condition', or another easy cliché.

But the director tactfully avoids doing such a facile movie. In the silences, in the gazes exchanged you can see a black guy charged with marijuana dealing, be transformed from young boy to old man. you can actually see it in his eyes when his verdict is told. you can see what law does, and how it does it.

you can literally see class, gender and race in this simple movie. simple here is something that is attained after hundreds of hours of shooting, editing and a lot of thought. You can see how law with all the sincerity fails to deliver justice.

But most important is the pace of the movie, and the editing. First it gets us acquainted with the legal process, the characters are introduced, the judge, the prosecutors. We get familiarized with the setting, the bench, the process. These are done through the cases of characters that we can easily associate. Just when we are done we move to more complicated cases, that of the Arab thief, that of bans from France... It introduces us the process enough and leaves us at the right place to look through it ourselves. And the two conclusive sessions, of the nerdy sociologist -that just would not get what law is about- and of the guy who is just-too-honest-for-the-law are simply great. Such humor and mind boggling, simple, ambivalence.

It is a typical Hal Hartley in terms of the mood he creates. Long in-door shots, the disconcert between sound and sight. As always he uses cheap material. for instance one suspects that the black goggles that the cops wear -with the red light in the center- may be like a 10 dollar toy bought from Chinatown. But this combined with the camera moves and lights allows him to create a different world that is often visually convincing. Although I heard people in the audience murmur about the connection with the space being unconvincing, I totally disagree.

It is a meditation on capitalism where the term 'flesh market' gets literal. He weaves this theme in with reflections on the sense of the extremeness of the boundaries between individuals in modern capitalist society. How one feeds the other, in fact makes the other possible. I found it very successful although sometimes a bit didactic.