inted with muted pastels, the effect as tender as a watercolour, coarsness emanating from subtly nuanced colorings of figures uncovered just enough, the blended brushwork revealing depths sketched to scrupolous incisiveness and truths only cautiously disclosed. A bit like a Dupré painting, Ultranova sails across lanscapes of profound introspectivness, visually mastering its sensible emotional vapidity through the very elements it sets out to dissect. And if there is one thing these meticulous but unconstrained visual compositions reveal, it is the strong artistic sensibility that holds them together, not unlike moving images of canvases being coated with fresh paint.

It is clear Bouli Lanners intended for his first movie to be seen as a painting, a visual journey through plain-walled rooms where characters are images, situations become frames, and dialogues discreet footnotes shy about revealing more than what we might feel. As a consequence, buttoned-down elements of more conventional narrative are often passed by in favor of the tenderly poetic but dry milieu created amidst more systematic filmic stipulations. As a Belgian landscape painter-cum-actor-cum-filmmaker, Lanners inhabits that very rarest of places—the midpoint between the static perceptibility of painting and the broad complexities of a medium that has to, ultimately, entertain—and juggles the two with exceptionally focused distinctness.

To further intensify the stylistical context, Lanners employed Jarby McCoy, whose atmospheric and minimalist score (built around tender electronic beats) perfectly matches the movie's drab, melancholic sense of helplessness. This concept works best when illustrating the lachrymose depths of the characters, where McCoy's music reaches its most darkly sublime. The occasionally undernourished narrative, built around the premise of a droll story about an underloved loner, is sometimes murky, more consistently engaging. The most striking aspect of the movie is the visual artistry of scenes eliminated from its narrative continuity, hanging by threads of feeble barrenness (the unprovoked inflation of an air-bag inside a car, the tactile exploration of a stocking wrapped around one's arm). No doubt these visual touches were included for the exclusive enjoyment of arthouse audiences intrigued by aberrant stories of unlikely washouts, but their poignant powerfulness works to full effect nonetheless.


The common thread that conjoins the abashed souls in Ultranova is their forlorn incapacity to create–or find–their own peace. Set around the flat landscape of Liege in Belgium, Dimitri's (an almost childlike Vincent Lécuyer) story is perhaps a common one: introspective, contemplative and lonely, he is a 25-year old estate agent selling pre-made houses to first time buyers in dreary locations. He hates his job and doesn't relate to his inane coworkers. Ever the realist, Lanners is less interested in giving his characters' lives rational environments to unfold in than he is in exposing their dejected follies, sometimes at the expense of structural coherence. That seems to be the reason why the chance encounter between the demure Dimitri and the more vivacious—but equally solitary—Cathy (an honest if sometimes stiff Hélène de Reymaeker) is clearly bound to go nowhere. And—you guessed it—it does go nowhere. Marred by dimly delineated solicitudes and desperate for human connection, each character in Ultranova is waiting for a motivational kick to arouse their threadbare realities. And though the answers Lanners presents are often borne out of inconsolable desperation—one character mines her own hand to change her life line—Lanners' focus on the dark occasionally precludes his sense of reality, bringing stiffness to what would otherwise be some of the more profound scenes.

Lanners' accomplishment, though, lies in the frequently amazing, occasionally vacillating feats of intertextuality. And if the truths beneath the impenetrable exteriors are of a monochrome reality, there is much to be made of the soft pauses, bone-dry humor and nimble camera movements. Ultimately, all this self-conscious irreverence masks a sensitive, dystopian sensibility. The more visual the composition, the more engaging it is to watch, and the more telling it becomes. Ultranova's aim is ultimately a deceptively simple one: to unassumingly state the understated, as hazy as this may sound. It is where the line between telling a story and creating a segment of visual art blurs that the movie amply shines, but it is also where Lanner's grip is the most vulnerable.

As wilting sketches of floundering fibers with a candor and brutal despondency that radiates from their very core, the characters in Ultranova are everyday specimens you normally overlook, characters that fill the background to your many encounters, dewdrops from a leaf brushing against the wings of a butterfly.

If only Lanners gave them more space to breathe.