A hug has a lot of contradictions. It is the most obvious and invasive way of presenting oneself and, therefore, being present to the other, but — if it is not accompanied by clapping, greetings or other noisy obscenities — its modest silence turns it into an almost mystical exercise in the solitude of shared . Words are unnecessary. Nothing comforts like a hug. In its silent helplessness, one body gives itself to another to remind it that its pain, its hope, its loss or its fear are ours. The director Raven Jackson he knows it and that’s why his filmAll Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’(All dirt roads taste like salt) It’s basically a hug. And so that there is no doubt, there are three almost infinite hugs around which the film is ordered and disordered at the same time. with a delicacy, precision and taste for stopped time that subjugates. Hugs, indeed, subjugate.
The film is hard to tell because it is its vocation of freedom and does not allow itself to be trapped by issues such as narration. As it is. Counting does not tell anything, which is the most studied and pedigreed way of telling everything. But dramas, dangers and broken affections are sensed. A couple shares their love on the banks of the Mississippi River. They are united by the earth, the water and a long, very long, tradition of pain. They will love each other and they will do it in silence. And in silence they will embrace each other, aware that when they separate to say goodbye, everything will be lost.
Told through several generations and without time limitations of any kind, the story turns on itself, it delves into the past, ventures into the future and leaves each viewer to decide what exactly the present is. Below, or next to it, a mother dies, a daughter is orphaned and pregnant, and the baby that is born from that love that we already said before was broken will be given to the sister. And while suffering from centuries and endless rains on a river that never ends, the entire family will hug each other again and again until they let the arms of some of them confuse with the backs of the others. It sounds tremendous, perhaps disproportionately lyrical, and so it is.
Jackson, formerly a poet and photographer, thus composes a film with the manner of a myth. Demanding, but of unusual depth; exasperating at times, but even distressingly beautiful. ‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’ He seeks at all times to compose his own grammar and his own light for black skin. And in his efforts he leaves no one injured, he demands absolute surrender. It is true that the film likes itself so much that there are phases of unnecessary self-condescension. Either way, who can resist a hug?
That masculinity is in crisis is something we suspected long before the politicians of the Transition began to write memoirs. And to present them, which is worse. ‘Ex-husbands’, the director’s second film Noah Pritzker He talks about that: about the man who can’t cope when time passes him by (not about Alfonso Guerra, for example). The story is told of a man (who is not sir) to whom the passage of decades one after another has left him without parents, who are dying; Without children, they leave, and without a wife, they divorce. And there, in the middle, is a recovered Griffin Dunne (yes, our hero ‘Wow, what a night!’) without references and without knowing what to do with a life always lived through others. By the way, the woman is Rosanna Arquette (just for her, one more star).