that displaced affect. Focusing on the city’s interstitial sites—streets, subway platforms, the waterfront—Akerman instead cruises nocturnal Manhattan for spaces that permit free, anonymous occupation. The reading of the letters, whose subject is longing, nostalgia, and separation, suffuses the shots of recognizably dilapidated places—visibly the domain of the impoverished, the overworked, the lonely and marginalized—with a romantic quality and a sense of latent intimacy, depersonalized but deeply erotic.
