The Hottest August (Brett Story, 2019)
Added 2019-03-04 17:13:23 +0000 UTC
In what strikes me as a rather direct nod to Chris Marker and Edgar Morin's classic Le Joli Mai, Brett Story's new film has her traveling around New York City asking semi-random individuals whether they are optimistic about the future, and what they think it holds. Although the question provokes some interesting answers, and finds that people are perhaps not so much distributed along a political spectrum as across a complex ideological web, the results are rather disjointed. Story can sometimes be heard on the soundtrack asking her questions, and she pops in four times with a poetic, almost Laurie Andersonesque voiceover.
But there is a certain randomness to the proceedings, especially from a formalist standpoint. Person-on-the-street conversations are mixed in with obviously prearranged sit-downs with artists, engineers, and financiers. Sometimes it seems that climate change is the overarching theme of The Hottest August, and the primary determinant of what the future will look like, but at other times that specter simply evaporates from the film. Some encounters are singular, whereas a few interviewees recur at intervals. There is a strange sense in which everything that could possibly give a determinate shape to The Hottest August is suggested and then abandoned by Story. It's diffuse to the point of having little lasting impact. But it does have its moments of enlightenment, so maybe Story wanted to create a film that we feel in the moment but that quickly dissipates, like the sun on our faces before it moves behind a cloud.
