An Evening Song (for three voices) (Graham Swon, 2023)

Words cannot do any justice to the mesmerizing visual lyricism of Graham Swon’s sophomore feature, yet I’m going to give it a stab anyway. Hazy and incredibly soft, the dreamy look is achieved with the help of a specially built setup which allows the capturing of glass projections, through an old bellows camera and a digital one. The resulting images are comparable to those of half-remembered memories, or vague visions conceived in the reader’s mind while fully immersed in an unfilmable book. Their gauzy / liquid / crystalline texture, along with blurry focus and oft-darkened corners, is wonderfully attuned to Rachel Evans’ and Alex Lane’s haunting tapestry of sounds – ethereal drones gently interwoven with nature’s own whispers.

Further underlining the oneiric quality of highly impressionistic compositions (and the way they reach your subconscious) is Swon’s fetishization of cross-fades, as well as the monologue-heavy ‘song’ performed by the three leads – a married couple of young writers and their pious maid whose face was likely disfigured in a fire. They can be viewed as personifications of mind, body and spirit, their meditative ‘lyrics’ resonating with the themes of desire, beauty, identity, existence and, above all, disappearance (the film takes cues from the life of child-prodigy novelist Barbara Newhall Follett, born in 1914, who mysteriously disappeared in 1939 when the story is set). As the diverse sensibilities of Deragh Campbell, Hannah Gross and Peter Vack coalesce into a sparkling, stream-of-consciousness tone poem, their characters’ perspectives overlapping in a mellifluous cacophony, we are exposed to the warmth of the unknowable, its elusive (non) presence imbuing our experience with transcendental calm...

Nothing short of a milestone in the American indie cinema, An Evening Song is as unconventional as it gets; a meeting point between most sensual moments of Ronald Chase’s cinema, and elliptical meandering of Terrence Malick, evoking the surreal melancholy of Johnny Clyde (The Forgotten Colours of Dreams).