A young woman in a ratty sweater wanders up to a riverbank and seems ready to fall in, but then a standing kayaker in full black wetsuit floats by like an alien messenger, causing her to change course. She returns home where her exasperated boyfriend asks why she hasn’t been answering her phone. Then they’re in the backseat of a car on the way out to the country to take a boat trip but just before they get on the boat she tells the boyfriend she’s not feeling well and wants to go home. He borrows the car to take her to the bus station but rolls the car on the way and is killed. She survives.

A middle-aged woman—who they nearly run into just before the rollover—hears the noise of the crash, runs down the road, then walks the young woman back to her house. The young woman starts a new life as a kind of surrogate daughter. She meets the older woman’s estranged husband and son. They don’t know what to make of her or how to act with their wife/mother now.

The way these four people fit into one another’s lives is uncanny and requires many stars to align just so but somehow the filmmaker makes it sort of inevitable. It’s a dream logic that only works in art.

I see the movie on Saturday and text K to see if she wants to see it. We’d seen the trailer a couple weeks back. We go on Tuesday and even though I know the plot points and reveals it takes nothing away from the simmering tension Petzold is able to maintain. His four characters are all lost and grief-stricken, they seemingly find a way out, all know it’s wrong, but keep the fantasy going because it feels better to pretend.

The big difference between the two screenings is an overheard conversation in the theater before the second viewing. An insufferable local filmmaker whines on and on to a retired critic about the state of local arts journalism somewhere behind our heads. They sound like Statler and Waldorf. It only takes me a minute to place both voices. I’ve had forgettable interactions with both these burnouts. They mention three or four others I know as well. Sometimes a big city feels very small. Fortunately, the lights dim and the trailers run, silencing the complainers.

Petzold names his movie after a piece of piano music by Ravel. The piano is a recurring part of the story. I’m listening to the soundtrack as I write this.

Go see Miroirs No. 3.

I read a few pages from William Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck into a microphone.

Flattered to’ve become a plot-point in a Bud Wiggins story.

My shows at Wormhole and Firecat are down but that art is available in case you have walls that need covering.