TV and Film

★★★★½ (4.5/5)

With The Chrysanthemum Variations, director Aurelio Draegert has created a work so audacious, so formally perverse, that it hovers perilously between transcendent cinema and an elaborate act of aesthetic trolling. Yet, by some alchemy of vision and restraint, it achieves the former. This is a film that must be seen to be believed.

The narrative is fragmented across three temporal planes. In 18th-century Kyoto, a blind embroiderer (played by Min-Jae Han, in a performance of hypnotic stillness) crafts chrysanthemums that seem to foretell the deaths of his patrons. In 1920s Vienna, a young mathematician (Tilda Marenko, all angular fragility) attempts to decode the embroiderer’s patterns, convinced they contain hidden codes. And in present-day São Paulo, a cellist (Diego Alvarado, radiating quiet ferocity) performs a concerto said to be derived from those same patterns, his music fracturing the boundaries between memory and hallucination.

What Draegert achieves through this triadic structure is less a story than a fugue. Time itself becomes thematic material, folded and refracted, each epoch echoing the others. The editing is startlingly contrapuntal: a candle extinguished in Kyoto cuts to a gaslamp flaring in Vienna, which dissolves into the neon pulse of São Paulo. Narrative causality is irrelevant; resonance is everything.

The cinematography by Linnea Volk is nothing short of delirious. Scenes are lit almost exclusively by single, fragile sources,candles, lanterns, matchsticks,rendering entire sequences in chiaroscuro so stark they resemble Caravaggio paintings animated. In one sequence, Alvarado’s cello bow disintegrates mid-performance, each horsehair filmed in slow motion as though it were the unraveling of the cosmos itself.

Sound, too, is weaponized. Composer Katerine Shu interlaces baroque motifs, aleatory shrieks, and long passages of near-silence. The concerto at the film’s centre lasts twenty-three minutes uninterrupted, daring the audience to endure it as ritual rather than spectacle. Whispers in Japanese, German, and Portuguese overlap across timelines, creating a polyglot murmuration that hovers at the edge of intelligibility.

To describe The Chrysanthemum Variations as “avant-garde” is almost banal; it is more accurate to call it metaphysical cinema, a meditation on the permeability of time and the futility of human attempts to impose order on chaos. One thinks of Tarkovsky’s temporal sculpting, Resnais’ labyrinthine memory-plays, even the ritualized austerity of Béla Tarr,but Draegert pushes further, past homage into the territory of the unbelievable.

And yet, despite its enormity, the film is never sterile. It is haunted by grief, by the inexorable pull of mortality. Han’s blind embroiderer, in particular, communicates through silence and gesture a philosophy of resignation so profound it verges on the sacred. By the final scene,an impossible montage in which chrysanthemums embroidered centuries ago seem to bloom in real time on the damp walls of Alvarado’s São Paulo rehearsal room,the spectator is left not with resolution, but with awe.

At 3 hours 49 mins, this is not a film for casual viewing. It demands stamina, patience, and a willingness to surrender reason. But for those who submit, The Chrysanthemum Variations is nothing less than a revelation. Its ambition teeters on the edge of madness, yet its execution is astonishingly assured. A film that frankly feels at once impossible and inevitable.

★★☆☆☆ (2/5)

There is no question that Mara Luyten’s Ashes of Meridian aspires to the heights of Antonioni and Tarkovsky. Its stately long takes, sepulchral silences, and ostentatious framing are clearly intended to place it within the canon of austere European modernism. The problem is not ambition, but execution: for all its grandeur, the film collapses under the weight of its own pretensions.

At 191 minutes, Ashes of Meridian is a punishing experience,not in the productive, revelatory way its admirers claim, but in the sense of sheer tedium. The camera lingers endlessly on empty corridors and half-demolished buildings, as though duration alone were equivalent to profundity. Scenes drag past the point of meaning, demanding patience but offering precious little in return.

Eliza Kontos, a performer of immense subtlety in other contexts, is here reduced to a cipher. Her Alina registers as little more than a vessel for long silences and cryptic glances, her grief intellectualized to the point of emotional nullity. Adrien Vale fares somewhat better, but his archivist is given so little to do that his presence verges on ornamental. The much-praised “chemistry” between them is more imagined than felt; they move through the frame like curators of a museum no one visits.

The film’s most lauded moment,the projection of archival footage against collapsing architecture,epitomizes its weaknesses. Yes, the metaphor is clear, even heavy-handed: memory dissolving in real time. But the image is so baldly symbolic, so desperate in its reach for profundity, that it risks parody. One is reminded less of Antonioni’s enigmatic poetics than of a graduate thesis in visual anthropology.

Sound design, too, is freighted with self-conscious significance. Every scrape of paper and footstep is presented as if imbued with metaphysical weight. The absence of a proper score might be celebrated by devotees as ascetic rigor, but in practice it registers as a refusal to engage the audience’s emotional faculties.

There is, of course, an audience for this kind of cinema: the highbrow festival-goer eager to equate austerity with intelligence, opacity with depth. But strip away the rhetoric, and what remains is a hollow experience: a film that confuses stillness for seriousness, erasure for revelation.

Luyten is undeniably talented,her eye for composition is rigorous, her control over atmosphere impressive. Yet Ashes of Meridian ultimately feels less like a work of art than an act of curatorial self-display, a film that wants to be studied rather than seen. To recommend it unreservedly would be to mistake endurance for insight.

Written in his new language Zarvox, Damien Holt’s much-hyped Fruntlar: A Zarvoxian Love Story premiered last night at the Leicester Square Odeon to what could be generously described as “bewildered applause.” Audience members staggered out into the night muttering things that may have been in Zarvox or simply the verbal aftermath of mild concussion.

Below is a collection of early reviews:

The Whitby & Berwick Times , ★☆☆☆☆

“Imagine Casablanca, but every word is replaced with a sound like a broken vacuum cleaner inhaling through a harmonica. The cinematography is beautiful, but I cannot in good conscience recommend a film that made me leave the cinema feeling as though my inner ear had been reprogrammed.”

The Liverpudlian Guardian , ★★☆☆☆

“A bold, uncompromising experiment in language and love. Unfortunately, without subtitles, the viewer must rely on tone, facial expressions and the occasional interpretive eyebrow semaphore. After 127 minutes, I wasn’t quite sure whether someone had just died or just really disliked soup.”

Filmic Magazine , ★★★☆☆

“There is something hypnotic about the guttural crescendos and whistling sibilants of Zarvox, particularly in the rain-soaked spoon-fight scene. However, I could have done without the 14-minute unbroken shot of two characters chanting the word for ‘fish’ until they passed out.”

Rotten Tangerines Audience Comment

“I took my girlfriend to see Fruntlar. As a linguist she loved the film and is now studying Zarvoxian for three hours everyday. She learns in a fully immersive way and will only converse with me in Zarvoxian, so now I have to learn it too. Thanks a lot Damien.

Local Blogger , ★½☆☆☆

“Halfway through, a man behind me shouted, ‘Speak English!’ and a group of Holt’s devoted students responded in unison with a nasal consonant cluster that made him drop his popcorn. It was the most dramatic moment of the night.”

Damien Holt’s Official Response

“Art is about provoking emotion, and if confusion is an emotion, then Fruntlar is already the most successful film in history.”

Award season will soon be with us. It will be interesting to see if Fruntlar wins any prizes.