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VARIETY REVIEW BY ROBERT KOEHLER

Pic evolves from comedy into a fable of a person reconstructing his life -- first, by scrounging up clothes and food, and eventually finding an occupation as the owner of a junkyard. Fenster films the yard as a depository of Western civilization, with shards of cars, literature and tools allowing him to live with loads of time to kill -- including ogling a European tourist couple having sex in the yard. And the filmmaker toys with audience expectations to the end.

Although Fenster made "Trona" as his CalArts thesis pic, he shows a disciplined and experienced knack for cutting. Less attentive and impatient auds will read the general minimalist approach as mere nothingness, but that would be overlooking a keen artistic sensitivity to the story's extremely spacious place and a fun desire to link early silent comedy with modernist cinema.

Production package, done almost entirely by Fenster himself, is exceptionally pro on a tiny budget. Town of Trona itself, once a company town and always one of the strangest California communities, has never been better documented.

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