A Day in the Life of Joe: The Phaedra Season Review: A cosmic, glorious coming-of-age movie that defies expectations at every turn

New York Film Festival: Jacqueline Lenzo's slim but remarkable second feature reminds us that movies can be anything.

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. We use vendors who may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and Google's Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

This is how it begins: a teenage girl is lying down in a field of grass, with a hand on her stomach, and her breathing fills the soundtrack of the film, as if the film itself is her lungs. Then he's asleep, and a pair of disembodied voices—from inside his own mind, or perhaps another dimension, whatever the difference may be—begin to discuss the images projected behind his eyelids. wind chimes For some reason, the Colorado Avalanche has wings protruding from each side. For a while they argue about the last symbol, but finally decide it's okay. The girl still does not know what it means.

How can voices themselves deify such signs? Maybe this girl's life is like a movie that both of them have seen before. Then again, the authenticity that fills every frame of Jacqueline Lenzo's unforgettable A Day in the Life of Joe: The Phaedra Season makes that assumption nearly impossible. This feeling does not last. At the end of this deep but ethereal film, a narrow piece of pure cinema that defies conventions with the unique invention of Björk's sonnets (or some other brilliant poets who write in their second language), the possibilities seem endless. Life itself, perhaps even more so. RELATED STORY REVIEW 'VisionQuest': Marvel's boring Bad-Dad drama series ends short-lived MCU TV run 'Being Heumann' trailer: Sian Hader's 'CODA' sequel is a thrilling biopic about a real-life American hero.

Needless to say, writer-director Moon, 66 Questions' second notable feature isn't your typical coming-of-age movie, even if it looks like it on paper. The usual markers abound, like lots of angst and music (songs from Vashti Bunyan and Daniel Johnston to Bryan Frey and...Vincent Gallo?). Drugs. dancing self-indulgent rumours. Making up the hallway at school and fighting with mom at home. It all smacks of lived experience, and the film's plot was inspired by a story inspired by a horrific incident in Lentzo's hometown of Athens, when he was a teenager.

But this is definitely not a coming-of-age movie. Closer in spirit to the existential angst of Gus Van Sant's Death Trilogy than to the tainted survival that spans The Breakfast Club to Lady Bird (though somehow it feels lighter than either of those films), A Day in the Life of Joe is less interested in an overarching mode. Vulnerability in the midst of a place where people are becoming who they are and who they are and are simultaneously pushed towards. The infinity of what this world might have in store for them. The still light of Lantzo's style draws that time into a microcosm of life, reimagining the "ephemeral performance" of being a teenager as the work of a soul on earth.

That's probably more than Jo (the real-life Evita Andreopoulou) thinks when she wakes up for school at the beginning of the movie, but I guess that's how it is some days. A long, moving shot from God's perspective—one of many stunning images in a film in which every frame is somehow charming and pale—watches Joe miss a bus swinging through the Athens suburbs, where he lives with his divorced mother (Eleni Vergetti as a desperate dance teacher). But Lanzo brings the camera down to ground level to see Joe getting beaten out of the family car when his mother refuses to take him into town. Baby Joe doesn't seem violent, but maybe his body already knows something his 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 childish simplicity of an art class project where they cut tiny holes in construction paper. Sooner or later, the square reflection of the fluorescent light against the window looks like a rectangular moon floating in the bright blue sky. It's one of the first signs that time isn't to be trusted in a film where people and things are prone to being disconnected from existence altogether (various overlaps between this film and Sandra Woolner's upcoming Everytime create a cosmic calm that benefits both).

In music class, all students are forced to sing a song in front of their peers because being 15 isn't traumatizing enough. A shy girl in a chunky floral knit sweater—the kind of girl who's suspicious of anyone who wants to be her friend, and the kind of sweater designed to save such girls from having to deal with it—strums an ancient ballad that brings Joe to the brink of tears for reasons he doesn't understand. This is Phaedra (Anastasia Goliamo). He tells Joe about proper breathing technique (through the belly, not the chest), commiserates with him about being fatherless or close to it, and makes plans to see a movie together later that night.

In the end, Joe will ghost him. Maybe for a reason you might anticipate, maybe for a reason you might already know. (Because I want to preserve the mystery of his film, Lenzo has been very upfront about the event that inspired it, and most reviews have neglected to treat it as a spoiler.) It doesn't matter. As with everything in A Day in the Life of Joe, the stark reality of what happens is overshadowed by the immense beauty and wonder of how.

Glimpses of that wonder—and the spectral essence of the change it calls attention to—can be found in every shot, some more than others. Nothing here is clever on its own, but the initial joy of an inventive composition, such as a song in which a simple camera movement transforms the hardwood floor of Eleni's dance studio into her daughter's high school basketball court, is often accompanied by new dimensions of meaning as the 82-minute film finally reaches its full scope. reveals In that case, our attention is retroactively directed to the complexity of time and space and the question of how to depict the invisible forces that hold the world together.

It's a question that informs every aspect of Lenzo's storytelling, despite - and because of - the emulsified crackle of Graeme VanDerkov's 16mm cinematography, which seems to always be looking for everything our eyes can't see. Lentzo, apparently determined to make sure his movie name eats all the characters you can squeeze into a WordPress SEO field, uses the opening credits of "A Day in the Life of Joe: The Phaedra Chapter" to subtitle it "A movie about ego, hands, and loneliness" (and the lack of search makes it all abstract). These subjects are as real and traceable as a shadow. "Have you ever heard of someone being found after being lost?" asks a bored character in response to a news report about a local disappearance. Lentzo could find them anywhere.

It's somewhat ironic that Joe and Phaedra never follow through on their plans to go to the movies, because the movie that brings these girls to life is prone to wondering where the characters go when they're not on screen. On the one hand it's as if they were never here - on the other hand it's as if they always will be. "Architecture is the most accurate forgetting," someone tells Joe. "You don't remember anything, but you remember forever."

"A Day in the Life of Joe" not only takes place in the cracks of that border break, but also shows everything else. Lentzo's elusive prayer of a moving film, light as ephemeral but heavy as the sky on your soul, celebrates the fact that cinema is as limitless as life itself, if only so that it can more tenderly lament how sad it is when none of these things are given the chance to be as infinite as they should be.

A Day in the Life of Joe: The Phaedra Season premiered at the 2026 New York Film Festival. 1-2 Special will release it in theaters in 2027.