Here is a dreamily sensual realist debut from Haley Elizabeth Anderson, the title a nod to New York singer-songwriter Laura Nyro and her 1969 album New York Tendaberry. It’s a movie of textures and moods and murmuring voiceovers; the pin-sharp 4K digital cinematography switching to grainy Super 8 and then to milky analogue video from the 1980s; and there are some beautifully curated images and sequences, some in slow-mo – particularly towards the end – where the camera follows a drifting butterfly which moves as slowly as a gull riding an updraft. Yet it can be a bit indulgent and occasionally borders on a kind of gratitude-journalling aesthetic in which the cause-and-effect nature of the drama is paused.
Acting newcomer Kota Johan plays Dakota, a twentysomething Dominican-American woman who lives in south Brooklyn with her Ukrainian boyfriend Yuri (Yuri Pleskun), working in a convenience store and musing on her preoccupation with the history of Coney Island – particularly the videotape archive of it in the 1980s created by video-chronicler Nelson Sullivan. Dakota is left alone in the city when Yuri returns to Ukraine to look after his ailing father, and when Russia invades, she loses contact with him. Exactly how distraught this makes Dakota isn’t quite clear in the flow of (brilliant) imagist epiphanies. Dakota has to deal with many personal crises; she gets ripped off by a phoney letting agent when she tries moving to a smaller apartment but succeeds in getting her own back. Her precarious employment at the convenience store collapses: maybe she will get work lapdancing.
As we follow Dakota over the four seasons of a year (the movie was in fact shot over longer than that) we see her coming to terms with herself, but the memory of Yuri fades. There are some terrific scenes shot guerrilla-style in the city with real people providing sensational cameo roles.
• Tendaberry is on Mubi from 25 April
