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First Snow

A moody debut

By PETER KEOUGH | April 4, 2007

3.0 Stars

VIDEO: Watch the trailer for First Snow.

When slick salesman Jimmy (Guy Pearce) struts into a fortune teller’s trailer after being delayed at a desolate New Mexico truck stop, his fate is sealed. That predictability hangs over Mark Fergus’s skillful debut feature, but not enough to detract from the intensity of the mood, the rhythm, and the performances. A grizzled cowboy, the seer recoils at Jimmy’s touch, and after repeated visits by the increasingly frantic client, he reveals that Jimmy won’t live past the first snow. Well, we all live under a death sentence, just not as neatly circumscribed as Jimmy’s, so First Snow becomes in effect an existential primer. At first Jimmy reacts to the news badly, trying to beat the rap, and in the process souring his relationship with his girlfriend and stirring up demons from the past. Gradually, though, he and the film achieve a kind of serenity, the former from Pearce’s sardonic resignation, the latter from Fergus’s subtle intercutting of past and future into an elusive present tense.

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