Film Review: Prince Avalanche

‘Prince Avalanche’ takes a humorous stroll down melancholy road.

Where we're going, we don't need lines on the roads.
Where we’re going, we don’t need lines on the roads.

Adapted loosely from the Iceland film, Either Way, Prince Avalanche is a sad, yet, somehow, delightful tale of unlikely friends connecting in an equally unlikely setting.  Alvin and Lance are spending the summer of 1988 re-painting traffic lines on a Texas highway that winds through a burnt out forest.  Their job is repetitive and tiresome, and takes an extraordinary amount of patience to adapt to the disconnect from city life and nearly all social/romantic interactions.  There is a lot of isolation in Prince Avalanche, from within the characters, to the landscape in which they work and pine, yet the film is light and inviting thanks to the humor elicited from a charming script and powerful performances by the two leads.

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SFIFF Spotlights #4: Fill the Void / Prince Avalanche / The Way, Way Back

More spotlights from the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF), which ends this Thursday, May 9th. Tickets for screenings still available at: http://festival.sffs.org/

Fill the Void
(Israel 2012, 90 min; Hebrew with English subtitles)

Yiftach Klein and Hadas Yaron in Fill the Void
Yiftach Klein and Hadas Yaron in Fill the Void

In this Israeli Film Academy Best Picture winner, director Rama Burshstein takes us inside the Tel Aviv Hassidic community. Shira (Hadas Yaron) is a conflicted young woman under pressure to marry her recently deceased sister’s husband. Hadas Yaron, resembling Greta Gerwig both physically and stylistically, deftly conveys Shira’s uncertainty and vulnerability. At the Q&A I attended, Burshstein called the film a “journey of feeling,” an apt description of this beautiful meditation on commitment and love.

Next showing:
No U.S. release date yet; has been playing film festivals. Continue reading “SFIFF Spotlights #4: Fill the Void / Prince Avalanche / The Way, Way Back”