HEADING SOUTH FOR THE NARRATIVE

Southland Tales

Even if Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales weren't so fiercely politicized, it would still be a tremendously polarizing work of art. Set in an alternate 2006 reality where World War III began the previous year with the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Abilene, Tx., and society has become riddled with paranoid surveillance, the film succeeds as a series of contextualized paraphrases rather than a unified story. Kelly creates vague situations just crazy enough to function according to their own logic, allowing momentary lapses in its steadfast incoherence; much of Southland Tales relies on paradigmatic symbolism, easy to read in individual clauses despite not quite gelling together.

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