Reviews (1)
In his first American film, Gorin does not hide that he is a European intellectual and apprentice of Godard during the Maoist period. It is not that the movie is political-philosophical experimental agitprop, but because it explores fundamental questions of language and identity (the golden age of the linguistic turn in social sciences), social exclusion (the story of the daughters from a poor, half-immigrant family on the outskirts of San Diego's agglomeration is truly not just about cognitive psychology and linguistics...), and presents it all to the viewer in the sophisticated and playful form of a highly personal documentary - Gorin, just like during the times of the Dziga Vertov group, breaks the (pseudo)documentary norm of a separate object and narrator, enters the plot, comments on it, etc. Yet that alone would not be all that exceptional, but from the period less than ten years ago, Gorin also retained a feeling for the multi-layered construction of a narrative combining different media (the initial sequences combining Gorin's reflections and the initial introduction of the central theme with children's immigrant comics seem as if they came directly from the turn of the 1960s and 1970s) and especially the excellent separation of the visual and sound components, which is crucial for Gorin's meticulous tracing of the speech of both girls. It turns out that the discontinuous and disjointed composition of sound and image can also serve in the documentary field. /// However, Gorin did not overlook the socio-critical dimension, even though it is hidden under the guise of a peculiar nostalgia - the disappearance of a unique relationship and a unique language, accompanied by the adoption of the dominant language, doubles the fate of the entire family, which is sinking deeper and deeper on the social ladder as it adopts a foreign dominant language of social conduct...
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