Movie 666

Review of  Julian Scaff’s “Tales of a Highway”

By Jamal Salibi

With “Tales of a Highway” director Julian H. Scaff reaffirms his status as the cleverest weaver of fiction and documentary genres today. Don’t misunderstand me, this is not a fake documentary. It’s quite real and serious. But Scaff manages to entwine elements of fiction in such a way that actually increase the authenticity of the film and reveal deeper truths about his subject matter. (article continues after ads)

In spite of being a film about a highway, it resists the urge to drive fast, moving gracefully to contemplate the Dutch landscape and people. The moments of stillness are appropriate, since at the start of the movie our main female protagonist, Machteld Aardse, seems to have arrived at a point of stasis in her life that can only be overcome by a road trip. One inclined toward psychoanalyzing might suggest that she was depressed. In any case, as she embarks on her journey we can surmise that neither she nor the road are inert or at rest. They are both moving forward, bisecting and compressing the landscape.

As our heroine Ms. Aardse visits in turn a bartender, a sheep-herder and a farmer all living in the shadow of the ever-present highway, a group of engineers, architects and artists travel by bus and bicycle both parallel and perpendicular to her journey. Although their proximate reasons for doing so are different, they all have the same goal: to uncover hidden truths buried beneath the tarmac.

Does Ms. Aarse find what she was looking for? I can’t really say, and only partly because I don’t want to spoil the movie. The belief that one can perceive what is truth about oneself or the world is a concept the movie seems in many ways to admire but not necessary advocate. We watch movies expecting life to be tied up in a tidy orderly bundle. But the best films, the ones that crawl into our brains and haunt our consciousness, thwart that assumption.

“Tales of a Highway” is positively beautiful, as subtly captivating and alluring as the music by the experimental trio The Al Breckenridge International Three. Mr. Scaff has a distinctive visual style reminiscent of Russian constructivist art, and his cinematography is full of curious, beckoning details and poetic images, such as a slow-motion shot of a crow taking flight as traffic speeds by.

Mr. Scaff also has a very literary sense of invention. But he neither goes for the obvious emotion nor sacrifices authenticity for narrative, favoring the organic establishment of place and character to heavy-handed plot construction. Like a love affair that ends sooner than you would like, it’s felicity comes with an understated ache of melancholy that leaves you wanting more. Like life, the film doesn’t really end when the screen goes dark but keeps flowing on in the imagination.

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