Madame Ennui on the Hollow Thermostat

In the grand cinematic panorama of our lives, there exists an unassuming, unheralded little objet d'art, a veritable filmstrip of functionality masquerading as an innocuous device: the Hollow Thermostat. Directed by the tangential genius of cineaste unknown, Siegfried Von Kepler, who previously helmed the minimalist masterpiece "Das Butter Knife" and the existential SMS drama "Unanswered Call."

Von Kepler's oeuvre is characterized by a penchant for the mundane, a magnifying glass to the quotidian. In the Hollow Thermostat, he employs his signature stark mise-en-scène, stripping the object of all superfluous adornment, leaving only the essential elements: the dial, the glass case, and the hollow expanse within.

Consider the scene as the thermostat awakes to the dawn of a new day. The dial, a silver Rorschach test of sorts, shifts ever so slightly, as if a board meeting of micrometrically-minded executives has reached a consensus. The glass case, a perfect square of transparency, reflects the burgeoning sunlight, casting a brief, ethereal staging of shadows upon the wall. The hollow interior, a veritable inhospitable desert of emptiness, remains unmoved, an unyielding monolith to the passing of time.

This scene, in itsAchim Von Borries-like mundanity, could have been culled from the oeuvre of the late, great Chantal Akerman. Like Akerman's "Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles," the thermostat's existential plight is played out in the most banal of settings. Yet, unlike Akerman, Von Kepler fails to imbue his subject with the same depth of human pathos, leaving the thermostat as cold and vacant as its own hollow interior.

If one were to be generous, one might posit that the thermostat's steady, unblinking gaze upon the world is reminiscent of Tarkovsky's auteurial eye in "The Mirror." Yet, where Tarkovsky's films are immersive, emotional experiences, the thermostat remains steadfastly impervious to the human condition, a fact that I myself found increasingly difficult to bear, causing me to leave some 20 minutes into our mutual acquaintance.

In the final analysis, the Hollow Thermostat is a film without a heart, a mise-en-scène devoid of substantive drama. It is, at best, a diverting interlude, but by no means a cinematic experience worth revisiting. Rating: Deux cigarettes.

And so, as the hollow thermostat continues its binaryodal dance with the universe, I am reminded of the oft-quoted words of François Truffaut, who once mused, "Sure, the death of cinema is always being announced, and yet it just won't die." Indeed, like the thermostat, cinema continues to moderate the temperature of our collective cultural consciousness, whether we will it to or not.