This is rather remarkable.

It's a sort of poetic reflection on life and love and memory, told through the words of an unnamed traveler and the voice of a cryptic narrator. Without this narration, beautiful and eloquent and personal and ironic, this film may not be half as brilliant as it is. But it's there. And the film greatly benefits because of it.

But there's also the imagery - the stark, colourful, dazzling imagery - that, on a base level, are as stunning as anything put on film. The opening, brief shot of the three children in Iceland, the dogs lying on the beach, the cat statues - they're all very natural and yet somehow beautiful images. And when combined with the text, they are given meaning beyond their context. They are imbued with an iconic, almost mythic quality - standing for more than just the moment captured in time. They, like memory, have greater significance than that.

I also like that Marker (or whoever) referred back to Vertigo by visiting all the filming sites around San Francisco. It ties the film back to La jetée in an interesting manner, again touching on that film's (brilliant) preoccupation with memory while also reflexively referencing the director's oeuvre. And it's a tribute to this film that it's perhaps even better than La jetée, something I definitely was not expecting.

A premier work of essay-filmmaking from the premier essay-filmmaker.