Entroncamento
A much more raw and gritty version of Brick, without the trapings of high school, just economically depressed outer suburbs. There’s a legit sub-plot about marriage across minority lines, and ironic far-right rants by the very same Others, with fairer skin.
The protagonist, an outsider, comes from the big infamous projects in the North to the small town where all the train lines converge. Through sheer force of will, she takes the money and runs.
The director lived there, and it captures the small time crook ethos perfectly. The stupid tracksuits. The bling. The hideous tattoos. The far right talking points in cafés, at the dinner table, everywhere.
It’s visually beautiful, even when filming absolute crap by any other metric. That nice black Volvo. A “fancy” Opel Corsa doing donuts in a parking lot. The fucking cornrows in white people, Spring Breakers-style.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.