The Young Man as a Movie Star: Opulence (2022)

The Young Man as a Movie Star, (Paranoia, Opulence, Perversion, Competition) is a film installation, consisting of four short narrative fiction films, simultaneously screened in the exhibition space. Thus forming a total composition of corresponding action and dialogue, the work challenges the single-screen principle of popular narrative fiction film. Playfully using style references to four major male directors from the twentieth century, - namely Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and Lars von Trier - each film depicts a different relationship between a young man of 20 and a mature woman of 50, who in one way or another deal with the absence of a third, male, figure. In Paranoia, after Godard, the characters are two secret lovers, gradually overtaken by the idea of a spying husband. In Opulence, after Hitchcock, a runaway terrorist ends up on the porch of a housewife who just killed her man. In Perversion, after Spielberg, a mother and her son deal with the father's death by arguing and taking drugs. In Competition, after Von Trier, two dancers grapple with the acute health issues of the woman, with a dramatic outcome.