The past arrives without a dissolve

The past arrives in this film without warning.

No dissolve. No shift in the grade. No music cue telling me to get ready. Lee is on a boat, and then Lee is on a boat years earlier, and the film does not stop to explain which is which. I work it out from a haircut. From who is standing next to him.

The first time, I assumed I had missed something. The second time I understood that the missing something is the point.

Grief doesn't announce itself with a transition. It doesn't fade in politely, or wait for a scene to end. It arrives mid-sentence, in the middle of an ordinary task, and it looks exactly like the present — because to the person carrying it, it is the present. The edit isn't being clever here. It's being accurate.

Most films use a flashback to explain a character. This one uses it to put me inside the mechanism.

I don't learn what happened to Lee so much as I get interrupted the way Lee gets interrupted. The information arrives the way it arrives for him: unannounced, out of order, and in the middle of something else.

What I keep returning to is the restraint that took. One dissolve would have made the film easier to follow. Every note anyone gives on a rough cut points toward that dissolve — the audience will be confused here. And the audience is confused. That confusion is the closest the film can get to handing me the thing it is actually about.

Legibility is a choice, not a virtue. Lonergan chose against it on purpose, in the one place where being lost is the subject.