Kinshasa Palace

Kinshasa Palace starts out (slowly) as a kind of mystery-fiction: the narrator's brother, Max, has abandoned his family and disappeared. The family, the children of a white Colonialist father and a Congolese mother, is more baffled than alarmed by this, and the narrator, with whom the brother had lived for a time after leaving his family, is at first reluctant to involve himself. After some urging, however, he begins and extremely low-key search for Max, following the dubious trail of Max's videos. None of it seems to amount to much. The narrator follows various trails, to Lisbon and Cambodia, but none of them pan out. There are documentary-style interviews of the family, but none of them say anything interesting. At this point you realize that the film has been a documentary for the last thirty minutes or so. What? Wait a minute... Is it doc or fiction? What is the point of all this? Why do we keep seeing the narrator only from behind, or from the waist-down - well, I could make up a convincing reason for this, but it doesn't work very well. Nothing is resolved, and there's no sense that it matters much. The direction is mannered in that Euro-tic way - repeated shots of blank windows through the narrator's window, many shots of overhead wires rushing by, trains departing, traffic-noise. Pretentious and aimless.