NYFF 63: "Dry Leaf" is the dawn of the low-res epic poem

by Cláudio Alves

Alexandre Koberidze shot the most beautiful film of the year on a 2008 Sony Ericsson. That may sound like a hopelessly provocative hot take, the sort of dishonest hyperbole one flourishes in hopes of garnering attention, gasps of shock, mayhap the reputation of an iconoclast walking to the beat of their own drum. And yet, I come to you with utmost sincerity to say that Dry Leaf is beautiful indeed, the sort of film whose splendor makes me reconsider how I approach the art form itself and my own pre-conceived notions of what constitutes a valuable cinematic image. At a time when 4K restorations are all the rage, and large formats are back in style to the point of fetishistic fervor, the Georgian director best known for What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? has gone in the opposite direction and created a three-hour 240p masterpiece…

As befits such a formal experiment, the narrative of Dry Leaf is on the simpler side of things. Almost echoing Oliver Laxe's Cannes prize-winner Sirât, it concerns the odyssey of a father searching for a daughter who has disappeared into thin air. She's only left a letter, asking to be left alone, which the patriarch, Irakli, promptly rejects. A sports photographer by trade, Lisa was working on a new project, documenting football – or should I say soccer? – fields across the Georgian countryside, thus setting a trail for her father to pursue. Along for the ride comes Levani, her mysterious best friend, whom we never actually see. It's not that he's a ghost, but that the camera doesn't perceive him, leaving a blank space where a main character should be.

Still, an invisible player is far from the first shock Dry Leaf delivers to its audience. There's really no way to ignore the strangeness of watching 240p cellphone footage in this context, images glowing in patches of low-resolution digital, a limited manifestation of the new technological age and a future cinema we may be witnessing being born. However, this is not the technology of the now. Instead, it's something that feels new and old, a relic of the recent past, ossified before its time was up. There's a tension there, a remarkable crisscross of ideas contained within something as banal as the instability of a small video blown up big, threatening to defragment meaning into meaninglessness, on the verge of geometric abstraction.

And despite all this, the most shocking thing is that Dry Leaf is beautiful beyond belief from the get-go. Well, that's not the right way to phrase it, since the film doesn't reach its aesthetic sublimity despite Koberidze's chosen medium. Instead, it's this beautiful exactly because the director went with the pixelated mess that most would instinctively dismiss as imperfect, if not outright hideous. Consider one of Dry Leaf's early divagations, when the film itself seems to lose sight of the story, distracted by the vitality of all that exists around it, within and without. The shot I have in mind is of a river, water green and murky, and, initially, overexposed by the phone's automatic camera. 

But the cut doesn't come, and the phone's gaze lingers. Sony Ericsson's sensors adapt, slowly revealing the shadows of trees over the emerald and turquoise current. It's the negative impression of a landscape we cannot see but know is there. The entirety of Dry Leaf feels a lot like this experience, amplified to epic proportions. We're in Plato's cave, staring at a simulacrum of reality, recognizing the world through this limited, distorted vision. Though unlike the allegory's observers, Koberidze's audience is deeply aware of the picture's insufficiencies. And in that awareness, it finds something hard to describe. There's nothing more inauthentic than the pretension of realism, so overt falsity becomes a paradoxical truth. It's more real than real, it's pure cinema, and the closest it's come to impressionism in its digital age – my apologies to Mr. Turner. 

Because it denies the screen as a duplicate of human vision and even direct human experience, this film accepts and declares itself the dream of a machine – like all cinema is, though we rarely admit it. And in the feeling of essential wrongness and unreality this suggests, we reach something transcendental. At least, I did. Perhaps a simpler explanation would be that Dry Leaf is cinema reduced to lines, rough blotches of color swathed on a digital canvas by a broken phone paintbrush. Which places the onus of the screen's cinematic quality on the compositions, exquisite throughout and meticulously considered. So much so that it's hard to get bored, if you can believe it, for there's so much to appreciate with each new cut. The rational mind might drift, but the eye is always engaged, and so is the unconscious.

This sounds über academic, snobbishly impenetrable, yet my love for Dry Leaf is genuine, giddy even. Furthermore, it extends beyond merely considering the movie as a subject of intellectual reflection. It's a genuinely moving piece, especially in how it communicates the absence and the phantom connection established between father and daughter by both staring at the same landscapes, a photographic musing across time. It's a meeting of fascinations, getting to know someone, getting to fill the void they left behind, through a desperate approximation of how they might have looked at the world you now regard. The invisible character is a first hint, asking you to ponder not only what is in frame but also what is not contained within it, before a distracted gaze loses itself on animals by the side of the road, banks of fog, flowers by abandoned goalposts.

The music, composed by the director's brother, is gorgeous to boot, capable of transforming a montage into a spectacle, lending lightness to pensive contemplation and making the pictures dance in their immobile state - though the camera moves more in its third hour, static shots dominate Dry Leaf. The soundtrack is also charming in the oddness of its flavors, the kick of a classical sound with the seasonings of a 1990s Eastern European TV special. But the images, oh, it all comes back to them, low-res ambrosia to the eyes. Inexorably, one must always return to their mysterious power, so allow me a couple more indulgent descriptions. Trust that I could spend pages upon pages just trying to put down into words what Dry Leaf's seemingly endless tableaux made me feel, both in the moment and as they faded into memory. 

Like the cats, for example. I got to pay my respect to the cats. And the donkey, too. In an exercise of carefully pondered images, animals are the most unpredictable players, their mere presence adding a further instability to the already volatile image, the risk of defragmentation exacerbated by their unpredictable beastliness. It's all about the feeling you're standing on the edge of a ravine, looking down. Or, perhaps, like watching a trapeze artist, waiting for them to fall, fearing and desiring the catastrophe at the same time. Or maybe it's just about marveling at cute felines and a Bressonian ass. Another chaotic performer class is children, and, for sure, Koberidze throws them into his experiment for more unforgettable sights as well.

It's a fleeting moment when Irakli comes across two kids sleeping under the afternoon sun, basking in its light while resting on a mattress of grass so green it seems to glow. At a certain point, the lack of definition produces an even more haunting sight, as a shot of the trio walking through the trees seems to show them wandering into a wall of featureless black. For one shot, Dry Leaf stops being the corrupted file of a cellphone travelogue and becomes a dark fairytale, the sort of which where children would cross the forest toward a witch's hungry embrace. This, ladies and gentlemen and all those in between and beyond, is cinema at its most impish, most besotting, most perverse, peaceful, playful, trance-like, heavens know what else. It's movie magic. Indeed, I still feel myself spellbound.

Dry Leaf is playing at the New York Film Festival, part of its Currents section. It'll be distributed, stateside, by Cinema Guild.