The Brooklyn Rail

Any attempts to figure out the strict operation of myth is a happy fool’s errand. It’s not a written medium. Is it allegory? Folklore? A fable by way of ethical aspiration in society or a morality play by way of fairytale’s memory of history? Words start to mean nothing. Better to put it into practice and play: myth is the ephemeral enacted by human bodies. As in a Big Thief song (“You have a mythological beauty / You have the eye of someone I have seen”), as in a turn of Euripides via Anne Carson (“Are [the gods] after us again?/ Forget the gods. You have a new suit of woe to put on.”) As in Ovid, New York, the feature film debut of Vito A. Rowlands. Transmuting Ovid and his various meandering Metamorphoses through locales and locals more familiar to his own life, the Belgian-born, Greenpoint-based filmmaker handily articulates the form in which myth finds a most welcome and restless bedmate: the disparate motion of light, body, and time we call “cinema.”

The film starts, fittingly, with an act of transformation: a still landscape (by the Connecuticut-based artist Amaya Gurpide) gradually morphs to moving image, as two far-off headlights drag a truck and its driver down the now-real, snowy road. In an interview with local rag Greenpointers, Rowlands has confessed an interest in “films in which time and space operate by their own logic, like in a surrealist painting or magical realist novel.” The surrealism Ovid seizes on hews closer to Jean Cocteau’s poetic pure cinema—as in, the “unreal” is realized through the edit, the cut, the position of the camera—than the occasionally molotov, (more) occasionally banal provocations of recenxft practitioners like Bruno Dumont and Quentin Dupieux. In fact, the viewer seeking irreverence in Rowlands’s vision is likely to come up empty-handed. The film adapts Ovid in a loose and ragged manner, presenting echoes and reverberations of half-remembered myth and poem. And even as the dramatic situations of its seven sections careen into playful send-ups of those stories—a hunter (Emil Daubon) encounters his doppelganger in a deer he stalks, a woman (April Matthis) is spurred to commit matricide by a nonplussed praying mantis, a man (Craig Mungavin) shakes an infinity of caterpillars out of a Hoover—the film never tips into irony, which would have proven fatal to it. Myth, simultaneously real and fiction, still depends upon a certain willingness to believe.

Ovid’s seven situations (Carson might call them playbooks, à la her 2021 H of H Playbook, a scrambling of Herakles) locate myth’s urges in a mostly Upstate New York community of players and locations. Magical transformation, catharsis by turns tragic and comic, and the will of the gods intersect with the quotidian. Fate hangs in the air. A woman (Tina Makharadze) rehearses a modern-day production of Medea while events strikingly similar to Medea happen just off-stage of her. Twin business-suited Charons (Max and Nicholas Weinbach) ruminate on an uptick in ferry business like two financial planners. It is frankly a joy to see so many modes and moods evoked by an ensemble that forgoes self-seriousness for community theater’s charge of connective storytelling. Crossfades commemorate glens and hamlets across a year’s worth of shifts in the Western Catskills and Hudson Valley. That the film literally winds up in the Finger Lakes region town of Ovid, New York, is a reminder that ancient-seeming notions reside in the present’s geography, a suggestion further explored through the film’s use of expired AGFA XT100 35mm negative stock. The ensuing texture of Thomas Heban’s cinematography and coloring is grained like a basement couch full of years; the body sticks twice over, in contours and crevices formed by use and in memories of what the use meant and means.

Celebrational of Ovid’s poetry as a form and forum for real transformation, Ovid is even more reverential to cinema itself. Cocteau and Orpheus (1950) are conjured in approach, then shouted out by a character. An iris shot is deployed with such glee so as to bypass cheek or cheap nostalgia. By the time the filmmaker himself cameos in the film’s final sequence, in an outfit lovingly cribbed from The Seventh Seal (1957), the magic trick of myth-telling—allegories that aren’t only allegories, symbols that both stand for themselves and are, actually, themselves—Ovid locates a similar urge in how it moves a story through the cinematic medium. Neither wholly a discrete formal language nor an indistinct storytelling tradition—which is also to say, both of those things—cinema’s mutant inclinations toward the ever-turbulently unstable allegory charts our dreams, desires, and morphing stories of creation and dissolution. Cinema always is and it always isn’t, like a boy flying towards the sun on waxen wings and a place in the body, both human and bull. Rowlands and his collaborators re-lay the formal poetics of classical Greek myth atop cinematic language. That this isn’t a novel experiment is exactly the point: stars shift eternal. It’s in tracing the imagined lines between them that we reveal shapes that, in turn, chart us. Constellations, Ovid and Ovid remind us, are our celestial reflections. Half-remembered, half-invented, they transmit us back to us through mediated images. And Rowlands’s film ends like it began, a magic trick that locates a lake where the sky should be and a shock of sun-struck sky as the ground beneath it. How did he do it? He moved the camera.