Poor The Congress. Too unapologetic to be bad, too bad to work without apology. One’s appreciation for The Congress requires a certain leap of faith, a certain acceptance of failure. It is a questionable movie, and if it was less questionable, it might just be much less worthwhile than it is in its current, unfinished state. It is a fearless attempt to develop a new cinematic lexicon for understanding stardom and the very idea of sense filtered through the human eye, and because it is so lost in its own head, it can probably never function as a normal, fully adjusted, wake-up-and-go-to-work movie. Rather than a finished film proper, it an altogether rarer, and more useful sight: a filmmaker lost in their own eternally young interpretation of the world, tempting their own mind to figure out what that world actually consists of and developing a heretofore unseen cinematic visual prism within which to decipher that world. Continue reading →