YOU GO TO MY HEAD
First Run Features
Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten
Director: Dimitri de Clercq
Screenwriter: Dimitri de Clercq, Pierre Bourdy, Rosemary Ricchio
Cast: Delfine Bafort, Svetozar Cvetkovic, Arend Pinoy, Omar Sarnane, Laurence Trémolet
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 1/25/20
Opens: February 14, 2020
“You Go to My Head,” the title taken from the 1938 song by J. Fred Coots, is about the nature of identity, with the specific exploration of what happens to a woman who has lost her memory and whose life is taken over by a lonely architect who convinces her that he is her husband. As we watch the two performers,Kitty (Delfine Bafort) and Jake (Svetozar Cvetkovic) engaging in a slow burn, appearing together in most of the film’s nearly two hours, we are likely to wonder what will happen when Kitty, whose real name is Dafne, recovers her memory. Will her new insight lead her to embrace her life, which despite its inauthenticity involves a sizzling romance, or will she abandon the man who saved her life, disgusted by the perverted game he is playing and sending him back to the loneliness he has endured for years?
Jake is an architect living in the Sahara—actually filmed in a house that must have once been featured in Architectural Digest magazine. When he discovers that a slim, beautiful, blond woman has been the victim of a car accident killing the man who had driven the car, he carries her back to his home, nurses her back to health, and pretends to be her husband. Though Kitty, the fictitious name he had given her, is eager to recall events in her life, she is slowly falling in love with her “husband,” exhilarated by the life she shares with him under the clear desert skies. Convincing Kitty has been easy as he has given her the clothing of the woman who had once shared his domain, even putting a wedding band on her finger while she is asleep under a doctor’s sedation.
The cracks developing in his swimming pool—into which she indulges displaying full-frontal nudity—serve as metaphor for the crumbling of the woman’s amnesia. All takes place within the dreamy landscape of Southern Morocco exquisitely filmed by Stijn Grupping with elements of fantasy embellished by Hacène Larbi’s music with startling, climactic notes ninety-three minutes into the drama.
This is a winning job all around, co-written and directed by Dimitri de Clercq in his freshman feature—following up his 1995 film “The Blue Villa,” about a ghostly return of a man into bordello of a Mediterranean island. At the time of this review we learn that the movie has already won Best Picture in film festivals in Bogota, Houston and Orlando with nominations for cinematography, score and acting.
In English and a little French spoken by the Yugoslav-born actor and his Belgian-born partner.
116 minutes. © 2020 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Onlin
Story – A-
Acting – A
Technical – A-
Overall – A-