The Unity of All Things (2013, Alexander Carver & Daniel Schmidt)

A massive particle accelerator is being shut down, and the team is scouting locations to build a new one in the Sonoran Desert along the U.S./Mexico border. We are focused on two female scientists who may be lovers, one of whom has two children visiting. None of the plot or character is extremely well defined, the movie content to float in a Super-8 haze, producing some lovely images but it’s all so diffuse and quiet and soothing and still that it was hard enough to stay awake, let alone figure what is going on.

Personal and professional setbacks… mild flashbacks to Tropical Malady… teenage insults… stories of a Weird Uncle… mystical talk about particles and sociopolitical talk about borders, while lost men search for the last North American jaguar. A kid nails his brother in the eye with a rock while their mom gets a snakebite… things happen all at once, in low trance tones.

Not sure who played what, but the main cast features Celia Au (star of Bad Tara), Andrea Chen (Lorelei’s roomie in Boyhood) and Jennifer Kim (Mozart in the Jungle, Wild Canaries). Carver also made an Anohni video and Schmidt made waves at Cannes this year with his weirdo soccer film Diamantino.

The word online is that the boys (played by girls btw) have an incestuous relationship, how did I miss this? Also, Schmidt’s dad was a particle physicist.

In conversation with Filmmaker magazine:
Schmidt:

Psychology doesn’t really exist at all [in the film], and [it’s] replaced with desire. Everything is rendered as erotic, basically, in one way or another, but this eroticism and sensuality is not a reflection of the characters’ psychologies or the cultural psychologies that they belong to, but is simply a force.

Carver:

The film is deliberately reckless and playful with representation, and this is sort of uniformly distributed. It’s not just people that are treated with this irreverence, but whole landscapes … We really wanted the film to be sensual and humorous and perverse. To maintain a level of chemistry, we’d sort of write forward and erase back. I think it ultimately helped to create a very pliable structure. One of the technical challenges was how to maintain the narrative threads. They’re very minor, but they exist.