the film's buried subject: escape from your own head — "self-forgetting as the Grail…"

Under the cold cleverness Joelle finds the real, almost moral thesis the father kept hiding: the four-minute shot of the ecstatic saint is the one moment the film's trapped protagonist gets out of his own relentless head, and the whole covert argument is that release from the sealed self — self-forgetting — is the thing worth wanting. It is the antidote to the theme stated as an aesthetic yearning, and it points straight at what the Entertainment will later offer in lethal form: total escape from the cage of one's own point of view. [sweep · shared-ground film-optics]