TIFF 2023: Arthur & Diana, by David Bax
Because much of it was shot on MiniDV and because the title and credit font is bright and scribbly, Sara Summa‘s Arthur & Diana sometimes feels like a remnant from the late 90s, like a Dogme 95 screwball comedy. Really, that era and style are just some of the influences tossed into Summa’s blender, a few ingredients among the many that make up her singularly delightful film.
In the same way that a road trip movie–which is what Arthur & Diana is–jumps from vignette to vignette, Summa and director of photography Faraz Fesharaki (who also shot the recent Georgian magical realist gem What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?) continually experiment with the movie’s look and form. Despite the home movie visual quality of the footage, Summa’s eye for fun new camera set-ups never tires. From overhead shots to close-ups to zooms to a handheld long take following the movement of a pair of feet, the joy of watching Arthur & Diana is in just that, the watching. Hot and smeary imagery was never so unpredictably enjoyable.
One major clue that we’re not actually at the end of the millennium here is the presence of GPS, which the characters follow faithfully, no matter what. Summa stars as Diana. Her own brother, Robin, plays Diana’s brother, Arthur. And her own son plays Diana’s son. That makes this story of a family unit traveling from Berlin to Paris (by way of Italy) to update the registration on their late father’s junky car technically a work of auto-fiction. I would not put it past Summa that that’s a pun.
But my favorite mini-genre to which Arthur & Diana belongs is the car drama, which I mostly associate with the Iranian New Wave. Centralizing most of the action inside a moving automobile allows characters to be their private selves while traveling through public spaces. Singing songs, inventing situations, near constant snacking… They’re in their own enclosed little world no matter which country they’re in.
That’s not to imply that these folks suddenly become polite and civic-minded once they step out of their tiny, yellow Renault. On the contrary, a lot of the movie’s comedy comes from their seeming inability to be normal around other people, like Arthur’s disastrous flirtation with a laundromat employee or, in one of the film’s most enduring scenes, Diana blithely pacing back and forth in front of an automatic door, oblivious to the fact that she’s causing it to open and close endlessly.
