Martin Coomer
Time Out

'I don't care what you do …what happens…I just want to die'. Ellen Cantor's three-screen video installation has a promising start. After these words from a spurned lover, each screen jumps into footage of the Ronettes singing 'Be My Baby' – a choice soundtrack of suffering (for we all know what a bastard Phil Spectre was). From here it's a beautiful but bewildering brief roller-coaster ride through human emotions. Hollywood film clips and stills are repeated and spliced so that from first caress to post-coital cigarette takes but a second. Marilyn Monroe and Clarke Gable embrace, wrestle to the ground, then drive off smiling into the sunset. ' Things are going to get better and better…' we hear. Neat. Sam Cooke's 'Stand By Me' strikes up as an astronaut floats through space; the next minute, a monkey appears, waist deep in water. Huh?
 
With their shift between Disney style innocence and scenes of violence and hardcore sex, I've often found Cantor's video's laboured and obvious. This, on the other hand has a light touch; it is optimistic and, perhaps inadvertently, rather funny. The film draws to a close with repeats of a couple struggling to climb a sand dune only to run back to the bottom, shrieking. In the dying moments, the clip is projected small onto a backdrop of deep-blue, outer space. From inconsolable grief to rapture in a little over twelve minutes – via the union between a man and a woman (with cosmic overtones) and a comedy monkey. Who said romance was dead?