A migrant cyborg is sent out into the world to record moving images of random human encounters in Tsangari’s rather prescient if sometimes incoherent debut feature that distils the sense of obliviousness to the new anxieties at the turn of the millennium.
Review #2,875
Dir. Athina Rachel Tsangari
2000 | Greece, USA | Drama | 101 min | 1.85:1 | English
Not rated – likely to be NC16 for some nudity and sexual references
Cast: Lizzie Curry Martinez, Maria Tsantsanoglou, Gary Price
Plot: A mysterious cyborg woman travels the world with a rocking chair, interacting with the people she meets.
Awards: Official Selection (Rotterdam)
Source: Haos Film
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Cyborg; Human Encounters; Into the Millennium
Narrative Style: Slightly Complex/Vignettes
Pace: Slightly Slow
Audience Type: General Arthouse
Viewed: Le Cinema Club
Spoilers: No
With her latest film, Harvest (2024), having competed for the Venice Golden Lion, Le Cinema Club brings us back to her first feature, The Slow Business of Going, which was her graduation thesis.
It was as if her supervisor had given her the following assignment task: travel around the world and produce a fictional film as creatively as you could, and in the guise of a Chris Marker documentary.
The result is undefinable, utterly fragmented, yet so close to depicting how it feels like careening headfirst into the new millennium.
I was a ‘90s kid and certain scenes in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s work hit close to home even though they may have been shot in numerous locales (Greece, Morocco, Japan, and more) far away from Singapore (where I still live), particularly how there were organic interactions with strangers and a general absence of the mobile phone.
“The problem with travel is that when arriving at a new place, I always end up taking myself along.”
Everyone during that era seemed to be living rather than just existing. However, the catch of The Slow Business of Going is that the protagonist, Petra, experiences life un-lived as a migrant cyborg.
She is a corporate agent sent out to the world to observe, and hence, record moving images of random encounters that will enter an archive of ‘memories’ for rent in the future.
Fast-forward to 2024 and we see Petra’s diaristic journeys and her performative gestures (for others) rather prescient of the social media age.
Not that it is a truly prophetic work but where Tsangari gets right in a film that some might ultimately find incoherent and sporadically engaging, is that sense of obliviousness to the new anxieties of the future, whether human or technological.
In a warped way, this would make an interesting double-bill with Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (2023).
Grade: B
Trailer:
Eternality Tan 
[…] have to thank Athina Rachel Tsangari, whose sophomore effort ten years after the similarly quaint The Slow Business of Going (2000) is considered a key work of the […]
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