***/****
directed by Cédric Laty & Vincent Gérard
by Alex Jackson I'm certain that William Eggleston is a real photographer; I'm a little less sure that Cédric Laty and Vincent Gérard are real Frenchmen: I can't find anything about them on the Internet not directly related to this movie. You would understand my skepticism were you to see By the Ways, A Journey with William Eggleston, which plays like a particularly bizarre practical joke. The film purports to be a study of Eggleston's life and work, but it's actually more of a Parisian love letter to American cars, the American south, Elvis Presley, Los Angeles, and cigarettes. It's like a French New Wave road documentary. To be honest, I'm not sure I can make heads or tails out of this thing–I need to see it a second time. (This first time I was too busy looking at all the doodles in the margins.) Highlights include an interview with an art critic and photographer who tells us that Eggleston only takes one shot of his subject, no more than two, and that every picture is "a keeper." David Byrne gives his account of Eggleston, saying that he was on the set of Annie, a film he seems to believe was directed by Robert Altman. (Could he be thinking of Popeye from two years earlier?) Where everybody else was photographing the production, Eggleston took stills of the empty set. There is a truly haunting montage of a development lab scored to Bob Dylan's "Desolation Road." One interview takes place entirely offscreen while the camera fixates on a birdcage. The coup de grâce is the use of Patsy Cline's "Is That All There Is?" at the end of the picture. Seriously, is somebody playing a trick on me? Producers Agnès Troublé and Nadja Romain's next project is Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely, allegedly about a colony of celebrity impersonators. Truly the world would be a darker place without movies like this populating it.
