Queen of Diamonds, dir. Nina Menkes

I struggle to think of another film so caged and endless as this.

There may be far more in common between you and I and a Las Vegas croupier than we ever could have imagined. The tepid mile-markers of a life dragging its feet from the glamour of youth toward the decay of old age - caring for the dying, working the job one struggles to justify, a fraying marriage - all of this makes it easy to project onto this film. Reading the critics’ reviews, one gets the strong sense that it has drawn out of the author their feelings about life at large. There is little other explanation for how a film featuring fifteen agonizing, uninterrupted minutes of silent blackjack could be hailed by Glenn Kenny of the New York Times as "an urgent portrayal of the tedium of endless transaction” or Erika Balsom of Canadian film mag Cinema Scope as "not quite abid[ing] by the reality principle. It hints at how things could be more, could be otherwise - and maybe already are." The critics are not talking about this film; they are talking about life, rendered inadvertently naked. It is a film that gets one talking about life, and that is its greatest genius and beauty.

Fridaus is an ideal delegate for the God-shaped hole. Tinka Menke’s dark hair and eyes swallow the Vegas sun. Not screaming daylight, nor cordial stranger, nor suicidal friend can unspool her mystery. The story here is the story untold: all we are left to wonder about, what she is thinking, what makes her who she is, what drives her to make her decisions. Our lives are as foreign to our own selves as Fridaus is to us. We struggle to understand what motivates us to behave in the ways we do, the larger purposes of our lives, how our stories could plateau or terminate in such underwhelm. There is a motif of lack of agency: she is subordinate to a large and rigorous order of monotony. Long, tedious, and often silent scenes elucidate the web of silent pain spun in the patterned, ritual repetition of days. Her life carries a space in the shape of a God, missing, forcing you to swallow images of cosmic indifference without

making a face.

The main character in this film, though, is unquestionably Las Vegas. Fridaus is relegated to a background character in establishing shots as interminable as the desert surrounding them. The spaces this film occupies are deliberately trying and failing to be structures, the way she is trying and failing to be human. But there is an unexpressed beauty about these places, places in which emptiness feels like room for the ineffable to occupy. Often these shells can be filled with the realest things. There is a church seated in a strip mall in my hometown that shares something difficult to qualify in common with the locations in the film. The buildings share a hollow disconnect from their purpose, but taken separately from their dismal immanent reality, the inner worlds are rich and thriving. In the same way I think this film grips onto something real, and squeezes it til the blood comes flowing.

This film is available for free on YouTube.