Those new American indie films are a bit like the thing that the local critics throw their noses at, and it turns out that the film is some pretentious and laborious nonsense. Very close to that is “The Cathedral,” a semi-autobiographical postmodernist, impressionistic family drama that is the feature debut of one Ricky D’Ambrose and premiered at Sundance. In the beginning, “The Cathedral” reminded me of Wes Anderson’s films more in terms of narration than style and aesthetics, because we have that omniscient narrator, make-up and decorated scenes filmed with a static camera and sharp editing cuts.
It seems fragmentary, which is not surprising because here we are following a family drama stretched over a period of 20 years and told from the perspective of a boy, later a young man. Since the author of the film was born in the same year, it is very likely that he inserted some details from his own life and from the story of his family, but unfortunately it is the film that has serious problems with the rhythm and at times it is tiring and tiring and becomes after a while, it doesn’t matter how that family story will end.
And the story is told from the perspective of a boy who vaguely remembers numerous events from his childhood and early youth with a gap of 20 or more years. And it’s almost a classic American family, because his parents will soon divorce and find new partners, and in order to contextualize the situation in time, we also follow documentary segments of some events that marked certain years when the action takes place. And the camera follows all these events somehow from afar, as if trying to get the impression that someone’s lives are being captured, but this was simply too boring and uninteresting, not my kind of movie.