All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

ALL DIRT ROADS TASTE OF SALT   ***1/2

Raven Jackson

2023

IDEA:  A girl grows into womanhood in rural Mississippi.

BLURB:  Haptic cinema in the most intentional sense, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is designed to generate a flow of affect between bodies onscreen and off. Through protracted closeups — typically of hands that are reaching, grasping, holding, caressing, and always, always feeling — the film centers skin and the act of touch as our primary interfaces with the world, entangling the body of the spectator with the diegetic space. Jomo Fray’s rich, tactile cinematography, Lee Chatametikool’s elliptical but spare editing, and an ambient soundscape of insect drone and birdsong entrain us to a slower, thicker temporality, which is to say a deeply embodied one in which sensation supersedes narrative and cognition. In this sensory regime, existence is experienced as a shifting field of intensities where borders dissolve into a chiastic intercorporeality. Unsurprisingly, if perhaps too-pointedly, water in All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is not just an aesthetic motif but a guiding metaphor (and synecdoche) for porous bodies that cry tears and absorb and transmit affect, memory, knowledge, and emotion. It’s possible Jackson could have been less withholding in regard to her characters and story, more willing to temper her abstractions with psychological interiority, but there’s something welcome about a portrait of black womanhood that denies such conventional apprehension. Here, we’re asked to feel from the inside rather than interpellate from without, and the results are often transcendent in their palpability.