2016 Directed by Amber Sealey
Grieving her mother’s death and her own failing marriage, Lexi boards a plane from London to Los Angeles in search of the estranged father who abandoned her when she was three years old. Based out of a seedy Hollywood motel, she follows a tenuous trail of breadcrumbs, collecting numbers and addresses in the hopes that one will lead to her father, while establishing unexpected connections along the way.
No Light and No Land Anywhere is like a raw, grittier, and indier precursor to Promising Young Woman. The story follows Lexi (Gemma Brockis) whose trauma is her absent father. She's propelled to go searching for the man that disappeared from her life and takes astounding measures to get there.
The music sometimes sounds like it's straight out of a horror film and the other times it sounds very heavily inspired by Angelo Badalamenti (Twin Peaks era).
The film has no easy answers and no cute bow wrapped around it, but it is definitely an interesting character study.
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A woman washes her hands, then slowly, deliberately drops her wedding ring down the drain of the sink. Her iPhone screen shows several “Fuck you” texts from her ex, David. In the next scene, she’s inhaling several bags of chips and chocolate bars and, between gasping breaths, slamming a can of Coca-Cola. It can’t be any less subtle than this: No Light and No Land Anywhere, directed by Amber Sealey and executive-produced by Miranda July, is woman-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown cinema.
After the death of her mother, Lexi (Gemma Brockis) escapes her deteriorating marriage in London and flies to Los Angeles to track down her long-lost father. She displays troubling behavior, like bringing back two strange men to her motel room and engaging…
There are moments of sustained tension and painfully uncomfortable social situations. This is enjoyable, but not as focused and memorable as Seeley's later No Man of God.
A character study of a woman who is seeking for meaning in her life after a breakup and she goes to Los Angeles from the UK seeking her father and some connection with a family she never knew. Enigmatic and unsettling at times, it's a raw look at someone who has become disconnected from her world.
"Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease." ~ Naguib Mahfouz
This is an emotionally heavy film that burns slow. The main character Lexi loses her mom and her world falls apart. She's desperate to reconnect with any family she has and sets off on a journey to America to find her estranged father.
This isn't a film for everyone, and it will probably be too slow, too weird for some. Yet, as someone who has lost her mom, I can tell you that this film does a good job at portraying the emptiness you feel and the desperate need you have to make sense of everything.
No Light and No Land…
It's fine. Ending really elevates the material, but it's really an uninteresting film with one wonderful performance.
Really, what was she expecting? This movie is centered on the cliché of blaming one's parents for everything wrong in their lives, transferring responsibility and the misguided belief in that everything will sort itself out magically just by having them acknowledge it. Girl, don't look for your father, look for a therapist instead! Besides it has the least joyful sex scene in movie history. Seeing her joyless expression should turn anybody off.
En serio, ¿qué esperaba que pasara? Esta película está centrada en el cliché de culpar a los padres por todo lo que sale mal en la vida, transferir responsabilidades y la mal habida creencia de que todo se solucionará como por arte de magia si ellos simplemente lo reconocen. Mujer, no busques a tu padre, busca a un terapeuta, mejor. Además, incluye la escena sexual más deprimente en la historia del cine. Ver la expresión inerte en ella debería quitarle las ganas a cualquiera.
This film is carried assuredly by its lead Gemma Brokis who is compelling through out. She has a unique look, with a punk rock flare, refreshing to behold in her grounded my-life-is-gone-to-hell-yet-I-maintain-my-dignity aesthetic. She comports herself exceptionally well. Flying from London to LA, with nothing but her suitcase, to hunt down her estranged father and hall-sister, Brokis as well exorcises a considerable amount of sexual frustration in the process with a couple of lads in her hotel room. These scenes constitute some of the braver and intrinsically compelling scenes in the film on the strength that they do not chicken out but in fact bravely portrayal sexuality in all its awkwardness, as people struggle to connect but often find misadventure…
The Director shows a ton of grace and empathy for the film's main character and subject, especially as she struggles with feeling lost and uncertain. This grace and this empathy goes a long way in what is a fairly subtle and gradual emotional journey. It has a way of lingering, pausing, and stepping back when you might want things to move forward. There's a sense in which moments like the ones she finds herself in, where life kind of sets you off balance and out of sorts, won't allow you to rush ahead even when you desperately want you. And that helps give shape to her personal journey.
At the heart of her personal crisis is a break up, the…
