One of the nicer compliments payable to first-time filmmaker Jesse Peretz is that his background in TV commercials and music videos is nowhere evident on screen. Even the interesting selections of pop songs on the soundtrack (with heavy representation by a group calling itself Shudder to Think) are for the most part tightly tethered to the phonograph or radio from which they emanate -- a precisely located and limited sound source inside the scene -- rather than flooding the screen like a sonic tidal wave. The summer romance of a bayou beauty (Natasha Gregson Wagner) and a vacationing Brooklynite (Giovanni Ribisi) is not puffed up into anything more than an ephemeral sketch of particular people in a particular place. The people, when separated from their adventuresome carnality, are not terribly scintillating company ("What do you do there?" the boyfriend dutifully inquires about the girlfriend's new job at the sugar factory, and the answer: "I make sure the sugar gets into the bag"); and the place, though fully and efficiently taken in, is not such as to stir up a tourist stampede. The scenes have an uncommon power of concentration, with no sense of hurry and nowhere special to go, but with an alertness to life-breathing details: a lighted match as an antidote to foot itch, the ominous scratching inside the walls of the beach house, the growing disenchantment expressed in the girlfriend's methodical submersion of the boyfriend's 45s into boiling water. The whole thing, ultimately, goes nowhere special, unless there is some immensity to be unlocked in the bookish symbolism of the captured eels and the pregnant rat. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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