Marathon

After Manhattan by Numbers and A.B.C. Manhattan, in the third part of his New York trilogy, Naderi follows twentysomething Gretchen in her attempt to break her personal crosswordpuzzle record. Gretchen turns out to have a pretty obsessive personality. Within twentyfour hours, she has set herself the task of solving seventyseven puzzles, to prove that she is ‘everything she can be’. The puzzles are done underground and above, because Gretchen is best able to concentrate when surrounded by traffic noise. While she seeks out bustle and people, she remains an outsider who has no contact with her surroundings. She crosses New York by subway and bus, meanwhile focusing on her puzzles. When it gets dark, she goes home to her apartment festooned with crossword puzzles. In the meantime she ignores the worried messages from her mother on her answering machine. Halfway through the marathon, she seems to lose the race against the clock.Naderi, who shot part of the film wielding a DV camera himself, balances on the boundary between feature and documentary. The shots are sometimes jumpy, and then beautifully fluent. This provides a fresh, but searing portrait of an obsessive and lonely young woman and the city where she lives.