Bleak Street

The cinematography is a beautiful thing to witness...yes, the black and white helps...but, those tracking shots...!

As for the lightning...magnificent.

Highly stylised, bordering on the theatrical...none of which detracts from the distressed, desolate, devastated, despair that Bleak Street's inhabitants face day in, day out.

The colour comes via a lesbian pimp, a gay-transvestite-husband, aged scheming prostitutes and masked, wrestling twin dwarves. This is Wonderland without Alice. Ripstein makes a point...life is not just surreal, it's a stark battle for survival...in the backstreet slums where anything goes and no-one escapes.

Where "reflection is a serious business" - where mirrors refuse to reveal the soul and act like a demeaning sentry...

Bleak Street is nothing more than an affecting work of art.

Trailer...