38th edition 2023 feature films
An Evening Song (for Three Voices)
Graham Swon
1939, somewhere in the American Midwest: to combat former child-prodigy writer Barbara Fowler's debilitating agoraphobia, she and her pulp-fiction scribe husband Richard move to the countryside where they become entwined in a love triangle with their deeply religious maid in this trance-like melodrama.
Graham Swon is an American producer, writer and director. He produces the films by Matías Piñeiro, Ted Fendt, Joanna Arnow and Ricky D’Ambrose. His first feature film, The World is Full of Secrets was selected in Entrevues in 2018.
- Scénario
- Graham SWON
- Photographie
- Barton CORTRIGHT
- Son
- Leibowitz LEIBOWITZ
- Montage
- Graham SWON
- Décors
- Rae SWON
- Production
- Graham SWON, Lio SIGERSON, Jeremy UNGAR, Mustafa UZUNER
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A word from the selection committee :
Perpetuating the logorrhoea of his first feature The World is full of secrets, Graham Swon is back with a new foray into the powers of fiction. At first sight the form might seem more classical, steering clear from monologues in long fixed shots of the first feature, yet dialogues are by no means less literary or profuse, especially in those long surges of voice-over (said “three voices”), evocative of Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness or closer to us used by Richard Powers – another musically and botanically obsessed author.
Classicism is the big question stirring the film from the inside: set in a 1939 misty Midwest the story is largely inspired by melodrama, mainly through the – stale?- choice of the three-way love affair.
But the classicism displayed in this song is a rhizomatic one, all echoes and vivid subterranean digressions, which distorts the story with its impactful double exposures, and luxurious, swathing soundscape.
To extend the botanical metaphor, we could very well be witnessing the first case of fungal melodrama.
- Victor Bournerias