This jewel of the American cinematic avant garde shows us a tragic event in a mirror and then it shatters the mirror. In each shard is a strange new reflection of the scene.
I watched this three times in a row—it’s only fourteen minutes long—and liked it more each time. Can’t say that I understood it any more for all of that (at least not in a Sherlock Holmes explains it all sense), but it still gets under the skin with a fine homemade shiv. In any case, this film is not a code to be broken. What’s happening is less important than how it’s happening—and how it happens here is through dazzling montages and a sense of dread executed with simple tools.
So, what IS happening here? Well, there’s a key that keeps turning into a knife. Meanwhile, a woman (played by co-director Maya Deren) arrives home, falls asleep in a chair and then splits off into three different women, each of them strangely troubled and prone to dizzy walks up staircases and chases in the street after another woman who has a mirror for a face. All of this happens around a small two-story dwelling that, in one scene, turns into a beach.
I’m not a big “theory” guy so this is the closest that I get to a theory here:
The first thing that we see in the film is a fake mannequin hand that drops a very fake flower onto a very real stretch of pavement. Then we see a shadow hand (literally a shadow) reach for the flower. Then, a real hand, the “owner” of the shadow, picks it up. I think that’s a clue that what we’re seeing here involves at least three different realities: a totally fake fantasy reality, a “real” reality and an eternally tragic “shadow” reality that constantly follows us (the woman in this film often watches her other self from a window.)
The flower is the hook, the mystery, the story itself (watching a film is a little like picking a flower, when you think about it). The knife and the key are interchangeable because they are, for the purposes of fiction, the same thing. Simple objects that make something happen. Both feel important when a camera focuses close on them.
Meshes in the Afternoon is a story with a definite beginning and a definite end. What happens in between isn’t so definite. It’s internal and expressionist. It may be happening across fourteen minutes; it may be a translation of something that’s happening in a split second. It’s made up of the sort of secrets that no detective can ever pick up from physical clues.