Review: The Roads Not Taken Leads Only to a Void of Imagination

The film is an unending source for the worst possible clichés and most overdone series of graphic matches in the history of film editing.

The Roads Not Taken
Photo: Bleecker Street Media

Attending a film festival like the Berlinale, where Sally Potter’s The Roads Not Taken enjoyed its world premiere, can help one reconnect with the sheer gravity of our love for cinema. At an international festival such as this, films aren’t reduced to user-friendly content. An encounter with them requires effort and risk, as well as negotiating physical space with others, from traveling to another country, to reading countless synopses before choosing which films to watch, to cross-checking schedules and maps to make sure there’s enough time to go from one screening to the next. There’s also the very non-digital experience of being told a film is sold out, and in the event that it’s not, one might, for instance, still have to climb dozens of steps at the Palast before finally spotting an empty seat.

The risk here isn’t only in constantly congregating masses of people in small spaces in the run-up to a viral pandemic, but in the fact that all that analog labor might be in the name of a film as astonishingly dreadful as The Roads Not Taken, where the audience follows a day in the life of a young woman, Molly (Elle Fanning), as she tries to get her dementia-addled father, Leo (Javier Bardem), to the dentist and then the eye doctor before her lunch break is over. Molly’s ordeal involves a trip to the emergency room after her father hits his head on the pavement of a busy Brooklyn intersection, the delicate business of swapping pants with him after a case of urinary incontinence on his part, and multiple instances where the man takes turns forgetting things and remembering people the girl has never heard of so that she can ask him, and while holding back tears, “Is that someone you used to know?”

All that Molly wanted was to get from point A to point B to point C with ease. She doesn’t have time for this. Neither does the dentist (Debora Weston), the optometrist (Cory Peterson), or Leo’s ex-wife, Rita (Laura Linney), all of whom implausibly treat a disabled man as if his disability were an avoidable annoyance or a ruse. While all of this takes place, Molly has to call her job to promise that she will be back soon, only to finally admit that “something came up” and that she won’t be back after all, until she loses her job and suddenly she, too, is treating her dad’s disability as if it were some sort of performance on his part.

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Most painful of all, for the audience at least, is that Leo keeps having flashbacks that prove to be an unending source for the worst possible clichés and the most overdone series of graphic matches in the history of film editing. These involve scenes of Leo closing his eyes in present-day New York and opening them in the Mexican countryside, where he’s in the throes of his long-ago love affair with a woman named Dolores (Salma Hayek). All of these scenes taking place in this Mexican past are drowned in ranchera music so that we understand that we are no longer in Brooklyn but in Mexico, and that while Molly’s supposed selflessness is so quick to turn into passive aggressiveness, Latinx people are just really dramatic all the time.

These flashbacks are also meant to explain what set off Leo’s mental breakdown and, yes, it most likely has to do with the loss of a baby. As if these memories weren’t trite enough, and made even more cringe-inducing by unexplainable and overtly aestheticized shots like that of Leo lying on a bed of corn, Potter also takes us back in time to a moment of paternal abandonment steeped in trite melodrama. This was a brief but traumatic period for Molly, when she was a child and Leo, a writer, took a trip to a coastal town on his own so he could get over his writer’s block and finish his book. The book is about a man who wonders what life would be like if he had taken roads that he did not take, which allows Bardem’s character to explain the self-explanatory title of The Roads Not Taken in detail.

Upon arrival, Leo meets a beautiful young woman, Anni (Milena Tscharntke), with a German accent who keeps reminding him “of someone I once knew.” Here, Potter tries to mask the film’s obviousness with some supposedly metaphorical imagery that doesn’t move the story forward, such as the surreal shots of Leo rowing for his life on a boat in the middle of the ocean, pining for the young lady as she dances the night away with her friends on top of a yacht. But Potter’s insistence in dressing up every platitude imaginable with pretty transitions only makes the film’s lack of pathos all the more glaring.

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Score: 
 Cast: Javier Bardem, Elle Fanning, Salma Hayek, Laura Linney, Branka Katic, Milena Tscharntke, Waleed Akhtar, Debora Weston, Corey Petersen  Director: Sally Potter  Screenwriter: Sally Potter  Distributor: Bleecker Street Media  Running Time: 85 min  Rating: R  Year: 2020  Buy: Soundtrack

Diego Semerene

Diego Semerene is an assistant professor of queer and transgender media at the University of Amsterdam.

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