A Lost Man is the kind of movie the only way of viewing which is at film festivals, where one often ends up watching movies which are stranger than what one might have bargained for. Ditto for this French movie; this was the first film that I saw at this year's Kolkata Film Festival. The movie, in the form of a loose travelogue, follows two protagonists – a trigger-happy French photographer with a lewd fetish for ‘live’ photography (if you know what I mean), and a mysterious, laconic and world-weary Middle-Eastern wanderlust who is running away from one thing that no one can ever escape – past. The movie is unabashedly artsy in nature, but hopelessly hollow in its intellectual content. The biggest failure of the movie is that it fails to add layers of these two otherwise enigmatic and deeply existential characters; in other words, the director, by stubbornly refusing to delve into their pasts and their thought processes, ends up presenting two characters who remain as two-dimensional and unknown to us during the end credits as they were when the movie began. And what happen in between seem inconsequential in hindsight.
Director: Danielle Arbid
Genre: Drama/Road Movie/Existential Drama/Psychological Drama
Language: French/Lebanese
Country: Lebanon/France
