Now in his sixth decade and living on the outskirts of London in near-poverty on benefits and the products of his imagination, the supernaturally-inclined English writer Quentin S. Crisp (not to be confused with the other Quentin Crisp, author of The Naked Civil Servant) contemplates the value of living a creative life such as his. Duckweed (根無し草) adopts the form of the literary zuihitsu, a style of Japanese literature dating back to the Heian period, where one ‘‘follows the brush’’. This feature-length film-essay is structured around readings of Crisp’s own zuihitsu of the same name, which, in essence, is the story of his life. As we follow Crisp on a walk deeper into the ‘‘little wood’’ of his private landscape, the binaries of success and failure begin to fade away.
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