The surreal, virtually non-narrative first feature from filmmaker Michelange Quay, Eat, For This is My Body is the rare Sundance title that unquestionably bears the mark of an obstinately independent vision. It’s by turns exhilarating and totally confounding, and it’s certainly not always successful, but it is always a challenge, and for that alone it pops out of the pack. It’s also incredible to look at. The opening series of arial sweeps across Haiti, from postcard-perfect coastline to inland slums to desolate mountain terrain, is absolutely breathtaking.
The film begins and ends with slow, deliberate montages depicting contemporary Haitian life, from a sea of black faces in a marketplace to a pregnant woman sweating in a slum, to a late night dance party. It looks like ethnography, the nameless subjects eyeing the camera with suspicion, and it’s clearly delineated from the main section of the film, which takes place in a massive mansion, home to a middle-aged white woman, her aging, ailing mother, and their black servant.
It’s in this section that the film settles into a series of dreamlike tableau, designed to illustrate the relationship between colonizer and colonized, a loosely-woven series of discreet moving paintings about the dynamics of difference. Some of these scenes and setups are more conceptually effective than others, but even those that miss their mark on a theoretic level are impressive as pure images. Imagine if David Lynch suddenly became interested in the interplay of race and power, and you’re almost there; much like Inland Empire, Eat’s blend of surreal, almost dialogue-free humor and painterly obfuscation remains compelling, even when what’s on the screen seems to drift further and further away from a discernible relationship to a concrete idea.
