Eco Village (premiering at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, and available online)

It’s inevitable that today’s counterculture has to learn the same hard lessons that my generation learned half a century ago, but in a style all its own. For me, two of the key lessons of Eco Village are (1) utopian communes are apt to turn into nightmares once the return of the repressed (i.e., whatever one is escaping from) rears its ugly head, and (2) in any competition between leftist politics and sadomasochism, the latter is always likelier to win, if only because, alas, loud and ugly heads (such as Trump’s or Fassbinder’s or von Trier’s) are more apt to sell tickets than quiet acts of compassion, Fortunately, the style brought by writer-director Phoebe Nir and her cast (lead actress Sidney Flanigan and many others) to these lessons gives this scattershot picture a punch of its own, and lots of songs to slide us past all the narrative clutter.

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