When was the last time you felt like you were watching something wholly original? It’s a rare enough feeling for cinemagoers, but when considering the biopic, which tends to flatten any life into a familiar narrative shape, it’s an even more alien concept. Patrick Wang explodes that form in A. Rimbaud, his wildly unconventional portrait of the 19th century poet Arthur Rimbaud. The film details Rimbaud’s life from his prodigious youth to his untimely death, but from the moment Rimbaud asks us if we’d like to hear a story and reaches out to physically make the camera ‘nod’ in agreement, Wang springs surprises in almost every scene.
