Castanets

With an uneasy, asymmetric weave of sung songs, chants, electronic noise solos and spaghetti-western guitar interludes, City suggests a film soundtrack, with overture, mood-setting and plot-development songs, intermission (please remain seated, and ignore the guards at the exits), character studies, and themes of resolution and reconciliation. Ok, we’ve slogged into the muck of yet another tired metaphor, and there’s no way out but forward, so what the hell kind of movie is this anyway? Possibly a nocturnal, black and white contemporary desert western with characters real and imaginary, a failing motel on a little-used old highway, gas-well flares flickering far off in the night, the spirit-body of Lee Van Cleef watching from the shadows, a sliding eidetic road seen with closed eyes, the disturbing memory of an encounter that may or may not have been a dream, fallen bare wires crackling somewhere in the desert, the mingled odors of sagebrush smoke, candle wax, warm beer, and an overheated amplifier, and the howls of coyotes (or, perhaps, your brain). A narrative propelled by yearning, passion, dislocation, ambiguity, regret, false redemption, possible true redemption, cryptic symbolism and other art film obligatories, this time you’re liable to sit numb and silent through the credits as the theater empties (though you don't have to- the guards have disappeared). The difference between Raposa's landscape and more familiar backlot scenes might be this; you believe what you've heard and seen because your third ear intuits that he didn’t contrive any of it. City, then, is no longer only music, but emotional catharsis, and we, too, long for a City of Refuge.