Roman’s Circuit
This Chilean trip through memory and heartache proves slick and heady, if a bit empty.
SCREENINGS:
Monday, September 12, 5:15 p.m.
AMC 2 (10 Dundas Street East)
Tuesday, September 13, 3:30 p.m.
AMC 5 (10 Dundas Street East)
Saturday, September 17, 6:30 a.m.
Jackman Hall, AGO (317 Dundas Street West)
Centring on lapsed academic wunderkind Roberto Roman (Cristián Carvajal), who returns to his alma mater in Santiago to rekindle his study of how memories migrate through the brain and enter the waking consciousness, Roman’s Circuit revels in its portrait of Roman as an obsessive, loner intellectual. After all, his success in the university is stymied by his partner and rival José (Alexis Moreno), who is now dating Roman’s ex-girlfriend and former mentor Osvaldo (Pablo Krögh), who’s dating Roman’s mom.
They say you’re not really paranoid if everyone’s out to get you, and this degree of justifiable schizoid delusion inflects much of Circuit. But as the dread mounts and Roman battles against academia’s publish-or-perish mandate, and against experimental puzzle exercises designed to help his focus, there’s no real sense of what it’s all building towards. The stakes are derailed by the dreamy lapses into Roman’s own memories (which seem to be intruding on the present), and while the increased clip of Brahm’s cuts seems to suggest some ticking-clock factor, the film is too cerebral and unfocused to make this felt. An accomplished debut, certainly, but the head-trip feels a bit hollow.