All the Vermeers in New York (1990)

I am not really sure what to say about this one. It starts off like a collage, things come and go in impressionistic snippets, but slowly something begins to emerge. These people float in and out of spaces, they cannot be pinned down. Jost comes the closest to capturing what I felt like when I visited New York; a strange, alienating place full of people. It is a transit station, people do not really live there, they are just there while en route to somewhere else, to home, the longing for home; it is temporary. At one point in the film, the stockbroker, Mark, is showing his French girlfriend Anna around his apartment and he comments on how when he looks out his window, he does not see New York at the tenth floor, but a street-level view of some cozy gothic hamlet in Europe. We all want to be somewhere we are not. Home is found in the unlikeliest of places. People have called this dreamy, but it is dreamy in a different way, less the surreal night dreams and more the daydreams, like the daydreams I have at school.