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‘Tendaberry’ Review: Striking Portrait of a Young Woman’s Life Maps Faces and Places with Expressive Filmmaking
Told over four seasons, Haley Elizabeth Anderson’s elliptical first feature follows the trials and tribulations of an ordinary New York City resident.
Fleeting moments rushing into the unforgivable vortex of time, all of which would be lost forever if not for the presence of a camera, comprise Haley Elizabeth Anderson ’s “ Tendaberry,” a ravishingly lyrical portrait of both a single young life and a centuries-old locale converging in the present. Its mostly free-flowing structure and sensual sensibilities make “Tendaberry” comparable to similarly conceived and thematically akin efforts: the first-person documentary “Beba,” last year’s “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” or Andrea Arnold’s “American Honey.” But Anderson’s film finds its own cadence in how cinematographer Matthew Ballard and editor Stephania Dulowski summon a feeling of raw immediacy and unforced progression. She achieves that because she believes that even the smallest of exchanges contribute to the formation of someone’s transient journey through life: friends and hair dye, apartments and roommates, co-workers and assholes, sad smiles and boisterous laughter, tears and blood, secret thoughts and unspoken words.The very impulse of recoding these moments, Anderson suggests, dons them with meaning.
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