Six decades ago, David Lean ventured to the sprawling sandstone mountains of Wadi Rum to film the world’s most interesting canvas: the human face. This credo is not dissimilar from that of Winnipeg-shot “A. Rimbaud,” the latest micro-budget feature from American indie virtuoso Patrick Wang (“A Bread Factory”), whose contained, stripped-bare, three-hour biopic of French poet Arthur Rimbaud plays like a black box “Lawrence of Arabia.” It’s wonderful and fascinating.
Wang’s Peter O’Toole is a young man by the name of Blake Draper, who you probably haven’t heard of, but who delivers a towering performance spanning several decades. The director’s Alec Guiness and Omar Sharif, however, are musical instruments, for “A. Rimbaud” is also a remarkably esoteric one-man show rendered in impossibly cinematic hues, yielding an appropriately sui generis rollout (a months-long engagement of only one weekly showing at New York’s Roxy Cinema).
Mere minutes into its gargantuan runtime, Draper’s Rimbaud adjusts the camera to make himself look diminutive, in order to recall a story from when he was a child. It’s about the only time the fourth wall is broken so brazenly, but it speaks to Wang’s postmodern approach to the big screen — which is notably anti-Lean, who believed tools should be invisible — and to the manner in which “A. Rimbaud” embodies the spontaneous mischief of the French surrealist’s work.
