ALL THE VERMEERS IN NEW YORK
A film review by George V. Reilly
Copyright 1992 George V. Reilly
ALL THE VERMEERS IN NEW YORK is a film written, directed, edited, and photographed by Jon Jost. It stars Stephen Lack and Emmanuelle Chaulet.
I hated VERMEERS. I found it to be self-indulgent, vacuous, irritating, boring, and pretentious. About a quarter of the audience disliked it enough to walk out before the end.
The plot, if the mishmash of disjointed scenes can be thus dignified, concerns a Wall Street stockbroker, Mark (played by Lack), who is smitten by a young French actress, Anna (played by Chaulet), whom he encounters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is staring intently at some paintings by Vermeer, and he is taken by her likeness to one of the portraits.
The film is full of pointless scenes. A long scene at the beginning of the film takes place in a gallery: an artist is arguing with the owner, desperately, angrily trying to get her to advance him a loan, while elsewhere in the gallery, a woman is looking intently at the large canvasses on display. None of the characters ever appear again in the film, save the receptionist who only has a minor part in the scene, nor do the events there have any bearing on what happens subsequently. Then there's the whirlwind tour of the columns and the opera singer roommate whose only role on the couple of occasions that she appears is to irritate her other roommates (and the audience) by practicing her voice exercises.
I disliked the photography: the subjects were often out of focus; Jost likes tight, tight closeups of his subjects' heads; he pans across various scenes in a jittery, almost stroboscopic fashion; and in one irrelevant scene in a hallway full of tall columns, he moves the camera through the columns in a random fashion, stopping here, panning there, turning suddenly to the left or the right, so that by the end of the scene I felt slightly motion-sick.
The characters are remote and unappealing. Anna is distant and aloof; the closest she comes to showing some warmth or interest in the other characters is her occasional quirky smile. Mark snaps his way through work, snarling down the phone, hectoring his colleagues. Outside of work, he becomes somewhat more likable, if hardly appealing.
This film won the L. A. Film Critics Award for Best Independent Film. I hate to think what the competition must have been like.
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