Erosion

If you don't like to be spoon fed a story and instead, enjoy piecing the story together yourself, you will take great pleasure in a film like EROSION.

I saw the film at the Brooklyn International Film Festival. It opens in the middle of the story without the traditional set up. It threw me off a little at first because I didn't know anything about the characters or their conflicts or relationships. Nevertheless, after about 10 minutes, I realized why the story was told this way. Without an upfront setup, I as an audience really got to use my instinct to follow the characters, to feel their pleasure and pain, and to experience what they're going through, without passing on judgments, making assumptions, or knowing where I'm going as a participant. My favorite scene is the costume shop scene where Gabe, the lead character, delivers his monologue on his philosophy of life and the rules of Erosion. That's when I really felt the emotional connection with the character and started to really appreciate the director's choice of storytelling.

This film demands the audience's full attention, as well as participation. If you invest enough of your time and attention following the story, the reward is definitely memorable.

Once upon a time a film would tell you a story. If something in the story was extremely sordid, bloody or harrowing the director would miss this part out whilst at the same time allowing you to work out what was happening or had happened through sound or consequence or symbolism. This allowed a far wider audience to see films with really quite important messages.

Here we have the opposite method. Put together the saddest, most painful or just dull aspects of a film that would once have been tastefully left out, and challenge the audience to start trying to imagine the story. We find we can do it that way, being the imaginative creatures we are and having done the work we're pretty much told anyway gradually, but I for one found I didn't really want to. This film made me think... It made me think I'd rather be sat in front of Lethal Weapon. Now that is not good.

I saw this film and was blown away at how truthful the love scenes felt. The acting (especially Charis Michelsen) is totally convincing from beginning to end. Give it 5 minutes at the beginning and the payoff is one that you'll never forget.

It's very erotic without being graphic or lewd. It sets up simple situations between the main characters that completely draw you into their world of trysts in other peoples' homes and makes you feel nervous like someone might walk in and catch you in the midst of doing something taboo.

I loved it and hope that Ann Lu continues to make more films like this one.

This is one of the best indie movies that I have seen. I saw it at the Brooklyn Film Festival. The beginning of the movie was a bit slow but a patient audience got rewarded at the end. The storyline is novel and smart. The theme touches the deepest desire of everyone's mind- not satisfy with one's life and want to live another person's life. The acting are both good and so so. The leading actor, Xuereb (???, a difficult name to remember) was brilliant but the leading actress Michelsen was just OK (maybe Xuereb was just too good for her to compare with). This is not a movie for the fast action Hollywood movie seekers but for those indie lovers who have patience and intelligence. It took me some time to fully digest all messages in the movie. I spent $10 for the movie and it definitely worths the money. There is one more thing that I like about the movie. Although it has a very erotic storyline, the director did not put up any unnecessary explicit sex scenes. Well done!!!

I'm not really into artsy films with disjointed stories and long symbolic passages I'm supposed to mull over. The description on the DVD package made it sound like it was going to be much more exciting and sexy than it was. I thought the character progression for the woman was too abrupt. It was just too much of a string of individual scenes for me.

For some reason, as they were breaking into the costume shop the screen turned black and I thought my DVD player had stopped but the time counter was still moving. I fast-forwarded through more black, all of a sudden color bars flashed on and the scene began again but a few seconds back from where it was when it went black. Looked like a bad editing job. Yet another disappointing rental for me.