A cinematic essay in defense of remembering, The Royal Road offers up a primer on the Spanish colonization of California and the Mexican American War alongside intimate reflections on nostalgia, butch identity, the pursuit of unavailable women and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo - all against a contemplative backdrop of 16mm urban California landscapes, and featuring a voiceover cameo by Tony Kushner. Deceptively simple California urban landscapes serve as the framework for the fi... (Full plot summary below)
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A cinematic essay in defense of remembering, The Royal Road offers up a primer on the Spanish colonization of California and the Mexican American War alongside intimate reflections on nostalgia, butch identity, the pursuit of unavailable women and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo - all against a contemplative backdrop of 16mm urban California landscapes, and featuring a voiceover cameo by Tony Kushner. Deceptively simple California urban landscapes serve as the framework for the film's lyrically written voiceover which combines rigorous historical research with a stream-of-consciousness personal monologue and relates these seemingly disparate stories from an intimate, colloquial perspective to tell a one-of-a-kind California tale. Shot on 16mm film and contemplatively crafted of long takes, The Royal Road is a film about landscapes and desire, memory and history - and the stories we tell.
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| Combustible CelluloidJeffrey M. AndersonA deeply personal, remarkably intelligent, and profoundly moving experience, Jenni Olson's The Royal Road is not easily labeled. |
| Village VoiceMelissa AndersonAs personal as it is political, Olson's meditative project offers a profound lesson on intimacy and history — and the ways in which both are distorted and remade by memory. |
| 4:3Conor BatemanThe Royal Road eschews temporality; both the film's content and presentation reflect a rejection of digital cultures and a focus on grappling with the real and fictive past. |
| CineVueBen NicholsonEven as she challenges accepted mythologies, she crafts her own both warning against nostalgia and passionately arguing for it; both being seduced and seducing at once. |
| DoddleKimberly GadetteIt is at once a static, yet highly moving film. |
| The PlaylistDrew TaylorWhat keeps The Royal Road from feeling like its trapped in amber is the genuine heartbreak that Olson clearly feels, the rawness of her emotions and her dedicated willingness to share. |
| VarietyDennis HarveyWhile this free-ranging agenda might easily have seemed overly random or pretentious, Olson’s confessional tenor lends it all a stream-of-consciousness intimacy. |
| The Hollywood ReporterBoyd van HoeijIf this ambitious film never quite coheres into a single whole, something that an artificial division into several chapters only helps to underline, it does provide a lot to chew on along the way. |
| Film ThreatMark BellIt is a risky film if your attention span is not forgiving, and some people will love it while others will be terribly put off by it. |
| Film ExperienceGlenn DunksQueer audiences, and those with a deep passion for Hollywood - and especially those where the two elements overlap - may get the most out of Olson's movie... |
