Institute History
Description
Alone and aimless, seventeen-year-old Terry wanders the streets of New York, hanging out with a minor scam artist and occasionally running errands for guys further up the petty-crime food chain. His father, an alcoholic obsessed with finding his missing wife, lives in his own desperate world. A chronic shortage of cash stymies Terry’s own modest fantasy to move to Toronto and find a job. Then he meets Lyrica, the beautiful, abused girlfriend of a menacing thug. Life assumes new purpose as he schemes to save her. One night they steal away to a beach resort, shuttered for the season. Against this wintry backdrop, their
romance stills city sounds . . . momentarily.
Filmmaker Chris Hart’s terrain is a familiar one of wily and not-so-wily lowlifes, sexual imparity, and violence. But whereas most young-men-and-gun movies surge to the in-your-face blast of rock ’n‘ roll, Hart dares—and achieves—something closer to a melancholic jazz solo. Laconic dialogue blends with long stretches of ambient sound and mournful music. As their contrapuntal stories unfold, the characters move through an urban landscape constantly fragmenting into a collage of light through riffs of stop-action and slow-motion photography and other experimental techniques. Timeless’s symbiosis of story and style is reminiscent of Antonioni’s alienated environmental romances, although its impact is not as bleak.