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Clip description
The man (Syd Brisbane) laughs at the way his life is turning out, as the woman (Ulli Birvé) keeps changing locales, at her whim, from desert to forest to mountaintop. She suggests they need to have ‘a relationship’, for which she has a set of ‘simple rules’. He agrees, but is bemused by her attempts to advance the relationship with his belt.
Curator’s notes
The transition of the beginning of the scene from anthills to ancient forest has a lovely sleight of hand feeling. De Heer distracts us from watching the man in the foreground by having the woman speak, so we don’t notice the dissolve out on him. The landscape in the film is often quite breathtaking, which gives the film an elemental quality – this is, in one sense, a Garden of Eden story, with an earthly Adam and a celestial Eve, come to warn him about damaging the earth, before it’s too late.
