The 16mm grain, the light, the colours, the framing. Brussels has never looked so beautiful as in this Eva Giolo work, which, in a delicate homage to Chantal Akerman, takes us through quiet places that would otherwise be crowded: a metro platform, a cinema, a museum.
She unfolds a map on the table — and we’re on the streets of Brussels. She plays with a buoy — and we are taken inside a public swimming pool. She puts a conical object to her ear — and a shot of the noisy subway platform at vanishing point appears. She stretches a tape measure along her arm — and inside a gym someone exercises a plié. Stone, Hat, Ribbon and Rose is entirely built on a game of associating ideas between small vignettes in which women interact with objects against a blue background, and images of the streets and places of Brussels, with the vignettes functioning as communicating vessels, in a permanent visual and conceptual game. In this tour of Brussels, minimal movements animate its fixed shots of streets at dawn, of the interiors of museums, libraries and cafés that are still empty, and of so many other urban places par excellence. A beautiful and playful film that continually opens up to our senses. (Cláudia Marques)
