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‘Slow’ Review: A Swoon-Worthy Romantic Drama Grapples With Asexuality With Loving Care
With 'Slow,' Marija Kavtaradze and her leads, Kęstutis Cicėnas and Greta Grinevičiūtė, craft a beautifully choreographed study in coupled intimacy.
Once Elena is confronted with the reality of what Dovydas has told her — namely that he doesn’t feel sexually attracted to anyone, that he can do without sex, that if she’ll miss such carnal needs she should probably steer clear of him — she’s racked with not so quiet doubts, especially since it’s so obvious that he cares a lot about her and wants very much to make their relationship work. Playing with the genre trappings of a modern-day romance, “Slow” demands we assess what those familiar beats reveal about how it is we understand such seemingly self-evident concepts like “love,” “desire” and “commitment.” It helps that with a dancer on one end and a sign language interpreter on the other, Kavtaradze’s film benefits from being rooted in a sensual rather than a sexual world. Indeed, those dance numbers Elena is choreographing with her colleagues and those love songs Dovydas ends up interpreting on camera work as fitting interludes that further stress how in tune this couple is with their own bodies, and yet how their joint intimate language proves hard nevertheless to harness and make sense of.
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