Josephine Decker's Butter On The Latch is an expressionistic nightmare, an impressive achievement for a first time feature that offers an oscillating trip into the psyche of a deeply fractured individual in Sarah, a character who seems to going through a lot of underlying trauma. Sarah has just arrived in the Californian forest of Mendocino and along with her friend Isolde they are attending a Balkan folk festival, where the two enjoy learning about the ancient folklore, mystical stories, and the traditions of this culture. Sharing a small cottage together, the friends seem to be bonding, reconnecting, and catching up on their own lives, as it's clear the two friends haven't spent much recent time with one and other. When Sarah meets a handsome stranger, her intimacy with this new-found man begins to cause a rift between her and Isolde, with this newly recreated form of alienation between the two friends triggering the past warts their relationship, inevitably leading to traumatic effects on the psyche of Sarah. Butter on the Latch is a film that will surely frustrate some viewers due to its refusal to spell out the circumstances of its characters, as Josephine Decker instead has created a film about mood and emotion, showcasing how the exact circumstances of this trauma are almost completely unnecessary in creating a powerful and intoxicating portrait of a fractured relationship. Butter in the Latch is intoxicating from the very beginning, opening up in an undefined city with Sarah, as she navigates her life. The aesthetic created by Decker in this opening is visceral and chaotic, exhibiting the volatility of this character in Sarah through playing with focus, aggressive handheld photography that gives off a dazed effect, and disorienting editing. Nothing is really defined in this opening sequence that almost feels like a series of character-defining vignettes, but thanks to the visual aesthetic, Butter on A Latch makes it very clear that Sarah suffers from some form of emotional stress, the exact reasons left intentionally vague. When Sarah reconnects with Isolde in the mountains is when Butter On The Latch really escalates its impressive visual storytelling, becoming far more subtle about the shared relationship, routinely and much more subtly using various cinematic tricks, such as burred compositions, obstructed framing, and other devices, to exhibit that relationship between these two characters has become somewhat fraught, regardless of their conversational decency. Everything in this story is told entirely from Sarah's point of view, and from this point on, Butter On The Latch is a film that becomes a walking dream, a film that blurs the line between reality and the expressionistic psyche of Sarah. Becoming increasingly claustrophobic and nightmarish as the film heads towards its conclusion, Butter On The Latch never spells things out even in its finale, only providing some hints as to what exactly happened in these two character's pasts. What is somewhat clear is that Sarah is a character who can be/has been neglectful to Isolde, as the current intimacy she partakes in with the handsome stranger appears to be just the most recent instance of how she alienates her friend. The star of Butter On The Latch is without question its director, Josephine Decker, who has crafted an intoxicating, expressionistic nightmare, one that refuses to spell out the exact struggles of its character, opting instead to simply present to raw powerful portrait of fractured relationship and the underlying effects and trauma it can have on the psyche of its characters.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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