For his first feature, “You Go To My Head,” the Belgian director Dimitri de Clercq decided to see what he could do with just four crew members, two main characters and a single, stunning location. It turned out to be quite a lot.
Stranded in the Sahara after a car accident, a lovely young woman (Delfine Bafort) is found, unconscious, by Jake (Svetozar Cvetkovic), a withdrawn architect. When a doctor explains that the woman has post-traumatic amnesia, Jake names her Kitty and claims she’s his wife. Later, installed in Jake’s striking home — a place without neighbors or, more disturbingly, furniture — Kitty struggles to connect to a life, and a partner, as alien to her as the desert itself.
Shot in Morocco between searing sunlight and pillowy dunes, “You Go to My Head” is a mysteriously elusive romance whose location is almost overpoweringly tangible. (The sensual cinematography is by Stijn Grupping.) Hacène Larbi’s eerily dissonant score is as perfectly spare as the film’s emotions, yet it imbues Kitty’s situation with a mesmerizing, inchoate danger. The movie is clamoring to erupt into melodrama, but de Clercq, content to wallow in teasingly luscious and enigmatically staged images, happily isn’t listening.
Until its surprisingly effective ending, “You Go To My Head” keeps its drama under the skin. Like an animal in captivity, Bafort, who is also a model, slinks and lounges with long-limbed grace; but it’s Cvetkovic who holds the movie steady, giving Jake a secretive, worn gentleness that’s tinged with tragedy.
“I feel good, like I’m coming back to life,” Kitty tells him, gazing fondly at her kidnapper. We just don’t know whose life she’s coming back to.
You Go to My Head
Not rated. Running time: In French, Flemish and English, with English subtitles. 1 hour 56 minutes.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
