A LOVE SONG (2022) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Max Walker Silverman
Dale Dickey, Wes Studi, Benja K. Thomas,
Michelle Wilson, John Way, Marty Grace Dennis
There's a startling m0ment a couple minutes into this, when you first see Dale Dickey's face. At first, you just see her in long shots, a woman walking down to the lake shore to check on a crab pot. She goes into a small camper, and suddenly there's this closeup, and a thousand miles of rough road etched in this old woman's face. Dickey plays a nomad named Faye, who's set herself up in campsite 7 in this desolate part of Colorado, where she subsists on crayfish and coffee, keeps an eye on the birds and the stars, and waits. The movie's as spare as its landscape, and the dialogue is terse. It's about the silent spaces in conversations between people who aren't used to talking, or don't know what to say or how to say it, or just don't see the point. Wes Studi's in it, plying the old high-school friend Faye's waiting to meet up with, but the picture belongs to Dickey and that heroically weathered face. If minimalism has a cinematic definition, it's this movie.
