Dimitri de Clercq's YOU GO TO MY HEAD: high-end and somewhat tony travails in the desert

Update: This film is being released today, 

February 9, 2021, via VOD

It certainly seems appropriate to open on Valentine's Day the new film being billed as a "psychological thriller," YOU GO TO MY HEAD. This is, after all, a love story. Of sorts. But a thriller? I don't know. If so, this has to be one of the slowest-moving in the entire history of the genre.

Co-written and directed by Dimitri de Clercq, shown below, the movie seems more interested in continuous visual displays of architecture, the desert and the very lithe and attractive nude body of its star, Delphine Bafort (on poster, left).

The plot, such as it is, begins with the aftermath of an automobile accident, shown below, and the difficult trek of our heroine, Ms Bafort, across sand, sand and more sand until she find a well -- but no way to draw the water from it. No wonder she gives up in anger and submission.

To go much into what happens next will give away just about everything and anything there is to spoil about this movie -- so minimal is the plotting and, most especially and unfortunately, the characterization.

Basically what the film industry calls a two-hander, the movie slow dances around Bafort and her

"savior," played by Yugoslavian/Serbian actor, Svetozar Cvetkovic, as the audience comes to terms with what is actually going on here and why. It is not that the plot is in any way difficult to follow. No, the real question is whether we give a hoot about any of it -- including the outcome.

You Go to My Head moves so slowly that it does give us time to consider various possibilities about who these characters really are and what they might actually want -- other than the very obvious stuff we see and hear going on in front of us. The alternate scenario that you come up with will probably be more interesting that what you're watching. (Mine was.)

Injury, memory loss, obsessive love and lots of swimming all play into the game, as we wait and wait for both something to happen (a couple of minor things occur that may jerk us awake) and for much of anything approaching actual character to be revealed.

Little comes of all this and to accept the film's finale, you'd best pay major attention to a line of dialog that one very subsidiary character tells the heroine late in the game: Everything happens for a reason. Oh, of course! Thanks so much for that little gem.

From First Run Features and running an unconscionably lengthy 116 minutes, the movie -- which features that classic 1930s title song during the opening and closing credits -- hits theaters this Friday, February 14, in New York City at the Quad Cinema before opening in L.A. on February 21 at Laemmle's Glendale.