Music-video director Kahlil Joseph’s first feature explores Arcade Fire’s most recent album, Reflektor, and plays like an electronic press kit with jumped up ideas about itself. Comprised of concert footage, and more intimate scenes of the band writing and recording in Haiti, all shot on a range of stocks, it’s flabby and repetitive, but peppered with moments of exquisite sonic lusciousness – not unlike the album itself. Naturally, enjoyment will depend to high degree on how much viewers already like the American-Canadian-Haitian stadium fillers. But as a piece of cinema, it’s a doggedly indifferent work that tells us little about the music or the people who make it. We do, however, learn that they like Kierkegaard, and wearing big plastic heads because they turn them into “cartoon versions of themselves”. More problematic is the way interspersed shots of Haitians enjoying carnival time feel like touristic, gap-year mementos, despite the fact that band-member Régine Chassagne’s parents came from the island.
