Pendular

In Julia Murat's atmospheric, unsentimental film "Pendular," a dancer (Raquel Karro) and a sculptor (Rodrigo Bolzan) marry and set up a communal working space in the sculptor's expansive loft, which also serves as their living space. The loft is situated in a decrepit factory, but it's comfortable enough, and companionship is never more than a stroll away through the factory's narrow corridors, for the old building has been converted into a warren of ateliers and studios inhabited by other artists. The difference is that the others don't actually live there; for our protagonists, art and life are one, and their careers have a residential character. They live for their work, but can they carve out enough - literally as well as figuratively - for each other?

The country is Brazil; the city is uncertain; the year is beside the point. This is a creative pocket universe, almost a womb of sorts, in which husband and wife - no names given - pursue acts of creation, some of them as trivial as labeling everything in sight and others as ambitious - and mysterious - as a seemingly limitless length of cable that the husband installed years earlier, a thread leading from the snug environs of the building to, evidently, the jungle. Does this thread anchor and locate their lives? Or is it the cord by which their private pendulum might swing?

There's plenty going on. Fittingly for artists - and newlyweds - their sexual relations are frequent and lusty. But does all their action result in movement, or are they merely spinning in place? The question is summarized in an easily understood dilemma: He wants a child, and she doesn't. Is this one more example the stalled creativity they both suffer, with critics lambasting their latest work and hours of industry-leading down unfruitful paths? Or is it a matter of how the power they swap between them shifts from one to the next, with him edging into her half of the studio when his huge projects expand, only for her to exact a price of her own in return?

Other people enter the movie but never quite penetrate its center. Fellow artists work in the factory - a painter, an illustrator - but no one else actually lives there. Socializing takes place in the loft, and even soccer games are played indoors, in a vast space that might once have been a lobby. The setting begs the question of whether artists can be contained in space or in life, and director Julia Murat, together with cinematographer Soledad Rodriquez, explores the contours of the space, the shapes - human an otherwise - that it contains, and the way artistic vision flits and teases, forever promising and too rarely delivering on those promises... not unlike the promise of fulfillment in anyone else's life.