Critics reviews

The structure is simple and hypnotic: Wittman pans across an apartment, catching a changing roster of inhabitants in conversation, in repose, at work, and in absentia, forever in a even, idyllic afternoon light. Prefaced with polyglot narration about an unsteady world, Wittman captures young bohemia in suffocating amber.

The apartment appealed to my rarely-seen Wouldn’t It Be Nice To Have Nice Things side; it just looks like a very pleasant place to be, occupied with plenty of well-maintained kitchenware and spacious rooms for low-key hanging out. Eventually the wind rises, the windows opened, the outside no longer unignorable; it’s a loud but hardly threatening climax.

Peeling plaster, a sleeper’s foot, a blowing curtain: each is subject to the film’s subtle and elegantly mutating contrasts, made still more enigmatic by oblique, polyglot onscreen text which switches between Mandarin, Brazilian, and English.

This is an incredibly subtle piece of cinema, and if you look closely, you can observe seismic change happening at an almost imperceptible rate.