On the most basic level, Graham Swon’s second feature, An Evening Song (for three voices), could be called a pre-war domestic melodrama, a gothic mystery, and a queer romance. But these are merely generic avenues by which Swon traverses an inquiry into disappearances, of people into thin air, into one’s work, into one’s self, into history. In Swon’s hands, and those of his close collaborators like cinematographer Barton Cortright, the kaleidoscopic Evening Song stands out among the very best American films in recent years.
Barabara (Hannah Gross) and Richard (Peter Vack) have recently relocated to the American midwest and live a rather hermetically sealed life. She’s a poet, though hasn’t written for years, and takes to long, intimate walks in the woods. He’s a writer of disreputable pulp fiction, dissatisfied with, though ultimately accepting of, his lack of literary prestige. They hire the demure and pious Martha (Deragh Campbell) as their maid, and each quickly falls into a deep fascination — in love, even — with her, pouring details of themselves into her so that she becomes a kind of liaison between them.
Barbara, loosely inspired by the child-prodigy writer Barbara Newhall Follett, who mysteriously disappeared in 1939 and was never seen again, is a woman in constant conflict with the fact of her existence. To reflect this, the film is full of details about disembodiment and transcendence of various kinds. Richard explains to Martha that one of his stories is about a death that isn’t a death, but a new way of existing. Later, Martha recalls to Barbara, in vivid, visceral detail, a dream she had in which she was a passenger pigeon trapped in a cage but rapturously in love with her owner. Barbara, too, explains in voiceover that she wanted to write a novel that was infinite, whose narrative became lost in the proliferation of details. She tells the story of The Girl Who Was Not, in which an entity that lives among the clouds and stars is sent to earth as a little girl and trapped in the misery of corporeality.
Swon has created a melting pot of subjectivities, in part through the three-pronged narration by Barbara, Richard, and Martha, but also through his camera, a custom rig he designed with longtime collaborator and cinematographer, Cortright. Hazy and dreamlike, An Evening Song’s impressionistic imagery feels wholly original outside of the world of experimental film, isolating the characters in vignettes that problematize the viewer’s ability to identify with any one of them, and render their observations slippery and unreliable. It’s like watching the whole film through a keyhole from another dimension. This creates an immense challenge for the actors, whose faces are often partially lit, out of focus, or obscured in some way by objects or layers of other filmed images. But Campbell, an actor of remarkable expression through the subtlest of physical means, excels despite these apparent restrictions. Her Martha, who is in a constant state of wilting recoil, breaks through the obscurity of the film’s visual language to become legible and alive against Barbara and Richard, who seem to be experiencing different, though not necessarily literal, forms of death.
DIRECTOR: Graham Swon; CAST: Hannah Gross, Peter Vack, Deragh Campbell; DISTRIBUTOR: Factory 25; IN THEATERS: May 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 26 min.
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