First of all, I must hand it to your cast and crew. The visual storytelling was terrific shot-to-shot. The photography was uniformly excellent (I'd love to look at this on a big screen) and I felt relatively unusual flourishes like blackouts, jump cuts and the sound drop-outs (is the latter a Kiarostami influence showing up perchance?) were interesting and not distracting for me. The first time through I mostly just took them as textures of the film. It was while watching certain scenes over again that I noticed how some of these textures also worked as techniques to convey specific information.

One very tellingly real through-line was how Noah's behavior only seemed to get worse and worse. Though the scene in which he's left alone and is having trouble climbing out of the pool was pretty gut-wrenching -- I truly had no idea where you were going to go at this point, and felt real dread at the idea of this extremely cute kid getting killed off in the eighth minute of the film -- for the most part he's pretty well-behaved until shortly after Daisy shows up. It's impossible not to look at the way she handles the responsibility of caring for Noah (obviously it's not just the "three meals a day" she'd bargained for) as a mirror for my own thoughts and anxieties about children (not something I'm currently, directly facing, but I've worked with kids in the past). The second-guessing of other people's child-rearing styles is not the kind of thing I feel comfortable doing, but of course I catch myself doing it in my head all the time. These thoughts feel just about as "icky" in the context of watching such a naturalistic relationship as that between Daisy and Noah, even though it's a fictional context. When these issues are at the front and center of your film, it makes for very challenging, almost confrontational, viewing. I can't help but get all self-reflexive about this stuff.

It seems you have a lack of interest in symbolism, which is probably good because it's so overused that it's become a pitfall more often than not I think. Instead there's a delightful interplay between narrative clarity and ambiguity. One technique that represented this, for me anyway, was the floating between dialogue spoken in sync with the image, and out, creating uncertainty about whether the sound is truly diegetic or not -- it made me wonder if parts of these conversations were actually taking place in the characters' minds, not in "real life."

The next stop on this train of thought was that perhaps none of the incidents we see happening on screen are happening outside of a character's mind. Is the penultimate shot of Daisy and her coworker smoking a return to the status quo after her experiences in California? Or is it a signal that somehow those experiences didn't exist at all; that she never took her father up on his offer? I have to say that the first time through, I kept wondering about her motivations to reunite so intensely with her father after spending half her life apart from him; in the absence of a real hashing-out conversation between the two over their estrangement, the idea that the majority of the film is merely Daisy's imagining of what it might be like to accept the offer is almost the most 'logical' explanation. On the other hand, over the course of the film we do get to know Daisy better and start to learn why she might have been so willing to come to California.

I'm glad there was no real "hashing-out" scene on this subject though. The increasingly glaring absence of answers about her father's abandonment of her surely serves a strong narrative purpose, as it made Daisy more vulnerable to setbacks (like being 'replaced' by Noreen's return) that trigger her decision to leave California. And stylistically, the few scenes that rubbed me wrong were indeed scenes in which conflict was hashed out directly in expository dialogue, such as when Wyatt and Noreen trade barbs about
'diversions' and 'debris'. For some reason certain line readings felt a bit forced, but I mostly rolled with it, considering that perhaps I'm meant to be set on edge at these points.

Something else that set me on edge was your glamorous, almost lovingly-photographed depictions of the mundane details of your characters' cush lifestyles. This felt especially expressed in scenes revolving around food. You very successfully avoided that movie cliche of the mealtime conversation in which we see characters talk but never actually eat the meal they're supposedly gathered around. However, in doing so I think you helped me understand why this cliche/convention exists in the first place. I'm not into food porn, and it turns out I'm particularly averse to extended close-ups on people eating. For me it's like nails on chalkboard is for some people. Maybe I'm alone in this idiosyncrasy, but at any rate the effect of these shots on me was to make the characters' lavish accoutrements seem all the more hideous. (I really can't relate to an $80 haircut!) It provided a fine contrast against the Russian teacher, browsing the glossy bookstore with Daisy but clearly fonder of the public library.

After a gripping, highly visual beginning, I found certain of these details to be increasingly distancing. Though, in a way, the distancing may reflect the arc of Daisy's character, and help to make the emotional weight of the finale, when Noah rejects her goodbyes, all the more unexpected and powerful.