The Waste Land is like a voyage into a suspended world and its frail but breathtaking poetry uncovers a rare and undiscovered horizon in French cinema.
Frédéric Strauss, CAHIERS DU CINEMA
1 / 1988
An actress with lunar violence : Anne Leroy. There is true poetry and the film composes a very beautiful, visual melody…
Frédéric Strauss, CAHIERS DU CINEMA
6 / 1988
The Waste Land doesn't amount to its screenplay only. Before the story, there are the characters, its material texture, the space… The texture is a black and white of the origins. The space is divided into grey seashores, ghostly nights in Paris, greek landscapes pictured like a desert. Timon Koulmasis has this precious gift to render the sensation of a place in just a few shots
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Timon Koulmasis films a succession of moments rather than a continuous story. We find ourselves in the domain of the fragmentary which means that the space between the sequences are as important as the sequences themselves, that the void and gaps play an important part in the film. Empty frames, black images, silence, irrational breaks –ways indicating cinematographic modernity- are used to introduce discontinuity. So, in The Waste Land editing has a central role since it puts in order the apparent disorder of the images. An extremely ambitous challenge…
This abstraction obliged Timon Koulmasis to create an invisible but palpable link between the images and, at the same time, to give every image, every shot, every sequence radiance and brightness enoug to let it exist by itself. Eventually the formal pattern that underlies The Waste Land is to be found in music.
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Moments of grace punctuate the film. Timon Koulmasis was looking for the flash of fascination. He sometimes found it in a close-up of Anna Achdian or Anne Leroy, a deserted frame in Greece or on the Northern seashore. In these fragments, that's where the poetry of The Waste Land lies
Thierry Jousse, CAHIERS DU CINEMA
1 / 1989
The Waste Land takes off to unusal shores. Timon Koulmasis signs his first feature film like a photographer who has never touched a camera but discovers immediately the optimal settings.
LE FILM FRANÇAIS, 15/5/1988
Timon Koulmasis' first feature film can't be described. It works with impressions and obsessions. Its characters feel they do not belong to the world they live in. Absolute minded men and women, on the road whenever possible, fighting solitude by artistic creation.
Jacques Siclier, LE MONDE
25/1/1989
Beautiful black and white photography … a refined, pure, ambitious cinema. If there is an emblematic film of the new generation, it is
The Waste Land.
LA CROIX, 1/12/1987
Anna Achdian is wonderful.