Sir,

I write with growing dismay regarding your recent critical enthusiasm for the so-called new film genre, Arthouse-Action. If this term is unfamiliar, allow me to clarify: it is an unholy marriage of cinema’s two most incompatible instincts,the contemplative sigh of the arthouse film and the explosive grunt of the action thriller.

The result is exactly what one might expect from such a union: aesthetic confusion, emotional incoherence, and a deeply irritating two hours spent watching people whisper about love and childhood trauma in the middle of a car chase.

The Longueurs,those slow, meditative stretches that once defined the arthouse tradition,are now routinely interrupted by inexplicable gunfire. Just as one begins to engage with the silent despair of a man peeling an orange in real time, someone drives a motorcycle through a stained glass window. This does not deepen the narrative. It merely distracts.

Conversely, the action,when it arrives,is rendered impotent by indulgent soliloquies. One cannot enjoy a simple rooftop shootout anymore without the assassin pausing to quote Rilke at length, or discuss the philosophical implications of his job. I saw one poor actor hesitate mid-punch to recall a scent he remembered from 1983. The target escaped. So did my patience.

If one seeks gunplay and spectacle, let us have it. If one desires long tracking shots of a man walking slowly through fog, fair enough. But let us not combine the two.

In short, Arthouse-Action pleases no one. It is too loud for the brooding aesthete and far too moody for the thrill-seeker. Each side is ruined by the other. It is like trying to eat a full cooked breakfast while base jumping,possible, perhaps, but unpleasant for all involved and likely to end in trouble.

Yours in bewilderment,

Gerald B. Pinn

Wembley-on-Sea

Reviewed by: Ludovica Anxley, Cinema Correspondent-at-Large

Dir: Sylvain Jasper-Fuchs

Runtime: 143 minutes

Language: Bulgarian (mostly whispered)

Sylvain Jasper-Fuchs’s Fragile Velocity announces itself like a bailiff and proceeds to unfold precisely as one might expect: slowly, beautifully, inexplicably, and, given it is of the new art house-action genre, with a fair amount of gunfire in a monastery.

Set in an unnamed Eastern European city, the film follows Ivan (played with blank intensity by Lithuanian glassworker-turned-actor Linas Drukis), a retired ballet dancer turned sniper. Ivan is dragged back into the violent world he once pirouetted out of when a mysterious courier delivers a cassette tape. He then spends much of the film searching for a cassette player.

The plot,such as it exists,is less about narrative than mood. Jasper-Fuchs structures the film around a series of increasingly elliptical action sequences. A brutal ambush in a crumbling opera house is staged entirely in silhouette. A motorway chase unfolds in reverse. At one point, a gunfight is interrupted by a 7-minute “Dance of the Assasins”, representing, according to the director, “the futility of death.”

That said, Fragile Velocity is not for everyone. Those seeking coherence, emotion, or audible dialogue may feel punished. The pacing is glacial, once halting altogether to contemplate the emotional life of a bullet. Action purists will be bewildered by scenes in which the protagonist pauses mid-swordfight to reflect on the epistemological failings of Google Translate. Arthouse aficionados, meanwhile, will likely choke on the inclusion of not one but three exploding helicopters.

And yet… there’s something magnetic in the madness. It’s as if Tarkovsky were reincarnated as a stunt coordinator and was told to make a film, in Esperanto, using only a fog machine, two pigeons, and a copy of Call of Duty.

The sound design, by legendary foley artist Delphine Quibbe, is worth the price of admission alone. Every footstep echoes with the memory memories of the end of holidays. Several gunshots sound like a cello being murdered. The twist, to my mind, arrives late and makes no sense, but the box office disagrees – this film had a huge opening weekend and will probably encourage imitators.

Audacious, preposterous, occasionally transcendent. Like watching a Chuck Norris movie underwater while someone reads Rimbaud into your left ear

In a candlelit café somewhere near Kreuzberg, I meet Fernanda Lübeck,the elusive Brazilian-Swiss director whose work in the emerging Arthouse-Action genre of films has quietly detonated expectations of what a fight scene can mean. Dressed in a red jumpsuit, Lübeck greets me with a normal right-hand handshake, then a second, silent handshake with her left hand to symbolize the “one we didn’t have as children”. Straightaway it’s all very Lübeckian.

She burst onto the scene with 2024’s The Noose That Reloads, a hallucinatory neo-Western set in a post-emotion society where gunshots trigger flashbacks rather than wounds. Her work is dense, lyrical, often absurd,and surprisingly violent. Yet the violence always feels personal, even poetic. Her upcoming film, Twelve Apostrophes in a Gun, has already sparked interest from both the Oban Film Festival and an underground mime syndicate in Belgium.

MARIUS DELACOURT:

Fernanda, thank you for agreeing to this conversation. You’re notoriously reclusive. Some say you don’t exist at all!

FERNANDA LÜBECK:

Hello. I think I do.

DELACOURT:

You’ve been called the “Chekhov of gunfights.” How do you respond to that?

LÜBECK:

Guns are just monologues we haven’t translated yet. Every time someone fires a pistol in my films, they are expressing something repressed,love, loss, the memory of a grandmother, a hurriedly eaten sandwich, etc.

DELACOURT:

Your breakthrough film, The Noose That Reloads, features a 19-minute duel where both characters are asleep. What was your intention with that sequence?

LÜBECK:

Sleep is the only honest choreography. When people are awake, they pose. When they’re asleep, they reveal. I choreographed the duel based on the dreams I had when I was in my twenties. The bullets represent intrusive thoughts.

DELACOURT:

You once said, “The most powerful action scenes are the ones that resist action.” Can you elaborate?

LÜBECK:

Of course. In Twelve Apostrophes in a Gun, there is a moment when the protagonist raises his weapon and… doesn’t fire. For 12 minutes. He just holds it, trembling. Each apostrophe represents a hesitation, a fracture in the sentence of violence. Audiences weep, occasionally from confusion, but usually from recognition.

DELACOURT:

Your films often feature unconventional weapons: a flute filled with bees, a gun that only fires boiling chocolate, a sword made of drawing pins. What draws you to these choices?

LÜBECK:

Conventional weapons are boring. A Glock is too literal. But a cello bow? That has resonance. Literal and metaphorical. I once saw a man silently stab another with a spoon and thought, Finally, someone understands dialogue.

DELACOURT:

How do you work with actors? Many of them say they don’t receive complete scripts, only “Indications of a character”.

LÜBECK:

Correct. I give them only two things: a daily diary entry by their character and a scented envelope that smells like the emotion they should portray that day. For Noose, I made the cast live in an abandoned theme park with no mirrors. They had to learn to act without knowing what they looked like. I think that comes across in the film.

DELACOURT:

Your next film, Twelve Apostrophes in a Gun, is said to involve time travel, ecclesiastical typography, and a single uninterrupted explosion that lasts 47 minutes. What should we expect?

LÜBECK:

Expect nothing. It is a film about punctuation and penitence. It begins with a priest forgetting the word for “bullet,” and ends with a sentient typewriter choosing not to kill the Pope. The action scenes are composed entirely of implied motion. It’s the best Arthouse-Action script I’ve seen, I hope I’ve done it justice.

DELACOURT:

Do you think Arthouse-Action is here to stay?

LÜBECK:

Genres are mis-traced steps, ultimately leading nowhere. Arthouse-Action will persist as long as someone is willing to whisper during a car chase, or cry about their childhood while defusing a bomb.

DELACOURT:

Finally, is it true that you filmed your last movie entirely in reverse, and then burned the original memory cards?

LÜBECK:

Yes. Memory is the only reliable editor. If the audience remembers the film, it was good. If they misremember it, it was perfect.

DELACOURT:

Fernanda, thank you, this has been enlightening.

LÜBECK:

Don’t thank me, go and see my films at the cinema then buy them on dvd and Blu-ray, then pay to download them to each of your devices individually.

Fernanda Lübeck’s Twelve Apostrophes in a Gun premieres this fall at the Itrecht Film Festival and in several abandoned train stations around the world simultaneously.