I've probably watched this film four or five times but this time still felt fresh. The narrative feeling more immediately graspable here than in prior watches, but Bartas' eye towards the dominating landscape remains second to none. Feels as much an ethnographic study as a now stereotypical "slow-cinema" narrative. Isolation, depression, near silence, long takes, static camera - it checks all the boxes but let it never be forgotten how ahead of the curb Bartas was. Taking the poetic style of Tarkovsky and hammering it into the earth ala the social realism of Tarr's early work. It's a work of great beauty that is covered by the dust of time.

When you live a world perpetually on the move forward, industrially speaking, humanity will be left behind. Our purposes relegated to momentary blips before the next technological advancement can take our place. So we wander the land, barely able to communicate, our tongues silenced by the sounds of metallic groans. All that remains is the physical desire, though even that is fleeting. All this and more contained and shown in the eyes (and performance) of Yekaterina Golubeva. To watch her here is to view a life passed on and on, reaching it's finality here. A walking shell with no purpose except to remain walking the streets.

But Bartas' eye is never less than stunning here, more often than not recalling the work of Vermeer. The simplicity in his images is haunting. One could call it almost documentary in it's aesthetic, plain and unadorned, but so captivating and engaging. Figures placed against brutal landscapes of plain walls. The beauty is the light that reflects off of their faces and bodies. The way their bodies move through light and shadow. Few filmmakers capture faces, really people in general, the way that Bartas does.