85 min | R | March 13, 2020 | Bleecker Street
Leo drifts through a single disordered day in New York while his mind splits into the lives he never lived. His daughter tries to hold him in the present. The film mistakes confusion for depth.
Leo is a man whose mind has fractured. He lives in a small Manhattan apartment in a state of advanced cognitive decline. Across one day his daughter Molly shuttles him to a dentist and an eye doctor while his consciousness drops into parallel lives. In one he is a writer in Mexico mourning a dead child with his wife Dolores. In another he is a recluse on a Greek island. The film wants to map the geography of a dissolving mind. It is really about a daughter watching her father disappear in real time.
Javier Bardem plays Leo as a body that has outlived its access to language. He communicates in fragments and half-words and a gaze that keeps sliding off the present. The work is physically committed and emotionally remote by design. Elle Fanning plays Molly with exhausted patience that curdles into panic when the world stops accommodating her father. She carries the only thread that registers as lived experience. Salma Hayek plays Dolores in the Mexican strand with grief that the structure keeps interrupting before it can land.
Sally Potter writes and directs from her own experience of caring for a brother with dementia. She cuts between the three timelines without warning or transition. The editing treats Leo’s apartment, the Mexican past, and the Greek shore as adjacent rooms he can wander between mid-sentence. The intention is clear. The effect is to flatten three potentially powerful situations into a single muddle where no scene accumulates weight. The fragmentation that should generate disorientation instead generates distance.
The film holds a real subject at arm’s length. Dementia robs a person of continuity, and Potter builds a structure that robs the audience of it too. The problem is that the daughter’s story is concrete and moving and the film keeps abandoning it for abstraction. Bardem and Fanning do honest work inside a frame that will not let their scenes breathe. Potter has the courage to attempt the inside of a broken mind and not the craft to make the fracture mean anything.