Marriage Story (Jessica Dunn Rovinelli, 2020)

Dunn Rovinelli's So Pretty was a dense, complicated feature film that encompassed literary concerns, gender identity, the difficulties of collective resistance, and the entire question of whether all of those things could serve as a broad ethic for life itself, or were interruptions of a "life" that lay elsewhere. It's heady stuff, and by contrast, Dunn Rovinelli's latest is a model of simplicity. A nine-minute film comprised of just four shots, Marriage Story is a non-narrative work that examines the director's own relationship with poet Anika Kash, and the domestic space they share, as poetic events in themselves.

There is a visual refrain that defines Marriage Story. Dunn Rovinelli sets up the shots with a still camera, the shots are relatively long (often including the director herself moving in front of the camera), and each shot gradually shifts from natural color to a bright, searing red, and back again. The effect is much like watching the filaments heat up in a toaster or convection oven, then cool off again. We see a naked Dunn Rovinelli in the kitchen making coffee on the stove, and then repair to the living room where she and Kash grope and grind on the couch.

In the final shot, we see Kash from the neck down, seated on a chair. Next to her is a video monitor showing her face, as she reads an erotic poem that describes her experience of sex with another woman as a continual union of bodies, a space in which she has discovered the boundaries and being of her own person. Kash's verbal description of what we have (partially) witnessed on the couch contrasts with the pure visual intensity of Marriage Story up to this point. So part of what makes Marriage Story successful is Dunn Rovinelli's skill in carefully separating her film's basic elements: sound, color, movement, stillness. This formal acuity is what provides the viewer a pathway into the work, whereas so much erotically-themed artwork, I find, tends to shut out its audience (ironically) with an excess of intimacy.