“Send her the dream.”
This is how it starts. A teenage girl lies supine in a field of grass, a hand on her belly, her breathing filling the soundtrack as if the film itself were her lungs. Then she’s asleep, and a pair of disembodied voices — from within her own mind or perhaps another dimension, whatever that difference might be — begin to discuss what images to screen on the back of her eyelids. Wind chimes. A Colorado Avalanche hat has a wing sticking out on each side for some reason. A bullet casing. They debate that last symbol, but ultimately decide it’s OK. The girl won’t know what it means yet.
How can the voices divine such portents themselves? Perhaps the girl’s life is like a movie they’ve both seen before. Then again, the self-possessed originality that fills every frame of Jacqueline Lentzou’s unforgettable “A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra” makes that supposition feel almost impossible. That feeling doesn’t last. By the end of this profound but ethereal wisp of a film, a slender cut of pure cinema that defies convention with the blithe inventiveness of a Björk lyric (or some other brilliant poet writing in their second language), the possibilities seem as boundless as life itself. Maybe even more so.
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Needless to say, the “Moon, 66 Questions” writer-director’s remarkable second feature isn’t a typical coming-of-age movie, even if it might sound like one on paper. The usual markers abound, like plenty of angst and music (the songs ranging from Vashti Bunyan and Daniel Johnston to Bryan Ferry and… Vincent Gallo?). Drugs. Dancing. Idle gossip. Self-discovery. Hallway makeouts at school and fights with mom at home. It all smacks of lived experience, and the film’s sketch of a story was inspired by a terrible incident in Lentzou’s native Athens when she was a teenager.
But this is most definitely not a movie about growing up. Cleaving much closer in spirit to the existential unease of Gus van Sant’s “Death Trilogy” than it does to the mottled survivalism that runs through everything from “The Breakfast Club” to “Lady Bird” (though it somehow feels lighter than any of those films), “A Day in the Life of Jo” is less interested in adolescence as a crucible than it is as a transitory state of being — a vulnerable in-between where people are in the process of becoming themselves, winnowing their identities down to one at the same time as they’re pushed towards the sheer infinity of what this world might have in store for them. The indwelling light of Lantzou’s style stretches that time into a microcosm of life itself, reimagining the “ephemeral performance” of being a teenager as the work of a soul on Earth.
That’s probably more than Jo (Evita Andriopoulou, real as can be) has in mind when she wakes up for school at the start of the movie, but some days are like that, I guess. A long and drifting god’s-eye-view shot — one of the many striking images in a film where every frame is fascinating and faintly rapturous to one degree or another — watches Jo miss the bus that swings through the generic Athens suburb where she lives with her divorced mom (Eleni Vergeti as the frustrated dance teacher Eleni). But Lantzou brings the camera down to ground-level to watch Jo beat the shit out of the family car when her mom refuses to drive her into town. Jo doesn’t seem like a violent kid, but maybe her body already knows something that her mind won’t learn until later.
At school, a 10th grader French-kisses her boyfriend under the stairs and joins her friends in mocking the childlike simplicity of an art class project, where they cut small holes in construction paper. Later, or earlier, the square reflection of a fluorescent light against the window resembles a rectangular moon floating in a clear blue sky. It’s among the first indications that time is not to be trusted in a film where people and objects are prone to glitching out of existence altogether (the various overlaps between this film and Sandra Wollner’s forthcoming “Everytime” create a cosmic serendipity that benefits them both).
In music class, all the students are made to sing a song in front of their peers, because being 15 isn’t traumatizing enough already. A shy girl in a chunky floral knit sweater — the kind of girl who’s suspicious of anyone wanting to be her friend, and the kind of sweater designed to save such girls the trouble of having to deal with that — warbles an ancient ballad that brings Jo to the brink of tears for reasons she doesn’t understand. This is Phaedra (Anastasia Gouliamou). She’ll tell Jo about proper breathing technique (through the belly, not the chest), commiserate with her about being fatherless or close to it, and make plans to see a movie together later that night.
In the end, Jo will ghost her. Maybe for a reason you might predict, maybe for a reason you might already know. (Careful as I’m being to preserve her film’s mystery, Lentzou has been very outspoken about the event that inspired it, and most reviews have neglected to treat it like a spoiler). It doesn’t matter. As with everything in “A Day in the Life of Jo,” the blunt fact of what happens is eclipsed by the illimitable beauty and surprise of how.
Glimmers of that surprise — and the spectral essence of mutability that attends to it — can be found in every shot, some of them more than others. Nothing here is clever for its own sake, but the initial delight of an ingenious composition, such as one where a simple camera move transforms the hardwood floor of Eleni’s dance studio into her daughter’s high school basketball court, is often endowed with some new dimension of meaning when this 82-minute film eventually reveals its full scope. In that case, our attention is retroactively drawn back toward the squidginess of time and space, and the question of how to depict the invisible forces that hold the universe together.
It’s a question that informs every aspect of Lentzou’s storytelling, despite — and by virtue of being enhanced by — the emulsified crackle of Grimm Vandekerckhove’s 16mm cinematography, which always seems to be looking for all of the things that our eyes can’t see. Apparently determined to ensure that the name of her movie eats up the entire allotment of characters you could squeeze into a WordPress SEO field, Lentzou uses the opening credits of “A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra” to further subtitle it “A Film About Breath, Hands, and Loneliness (and the Lack of Them All),” but it’s shot with a searching tactility that makes even the most abstract of those subjects feel as real and traceable as a shadow. “Have you ever heard of anyone being found after they go missing?” a jaded character asks in response to a news report about a local disappearance. Lentzou could find them anywhere.
It’s somewhat ironic that Jo and Phaedra never fulfill their plan to go to the movies together, since the movie that brings these girls to life is prone to contemplating where film characters might go when they aren’t being watched onscreen. On the one hand it’s as if they were never here — on the other it’s as if they always will be. “The architecture of forgetting is the most precise,” someone tells Jo soon after her story becomes unmoored from the world as we know it. “You remember nothing, yet are remembered forever.”
“A Day in the Life of Jo” not only takes place in the fissures of that liminal disconnect, but also suggests everything else does. Fleetingly lightweight but heavy as the heavens on your soul, Lentzou’s elusive prayer of a motion picture celebrates the fact that cinema is as limitless as life itself, if only so it can more tenderly lament how tragic it is when neither of those things are given the chance to be as infinite as they should be.
Grade: A-
“A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra” screened at the 2026 New York Film Festival. 1-2 Special will release it in theaters in 2027.