The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger — ponderous

The French town Quincy sounds, pronounced, a little like “can’t see”. What an irony: at least for the late author-critic-philosopher John Berger, who lived there and wrote Ways of Seeing. He would surely have been amused. Which is more than we are by the ponderous, pasted-together tribute documentary The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger.

The team of self-asserting, self-inserting producer-directors includes Tilda Swinton and Colin McCabe. Swinton hogs a long, rambling, going-nowhere duologue with Berger about memory and parentage. McCabe presides over an unfocused, perfunctory think-tank in which Berger burbles bravely about much and nothing. The scarcely referenced woman in specs glimpsed in the background of several scenes is Berger’s late wife. Everything in this film seems to have gone missing or partly missing, including its point and including — dramatically and sadly, after its completion — Berger himself.