Faces of Hillary is a very simple scene – a girl (Hillary) has had an abortion without her boyfriend knowing she was going to and now he confronts her about it. This is the plot and nothing more than this happens in a narratively very simple film. The delivery though is split four ways and all of them pretty much occur at the same time. While the boyfriend's reaction is the same in each thread, we see Hillary acting triumphant and uncaring, deeply wounded, dead to the core and emotionally weeping. All four of these scenarios are played out on the screen at the same time with the image split into quarters for the viewer.
As an idea it is a nice one but it is also a very good delivery too. Technically it is very well edited together – at first the overlapping sound jarred me a little but once I adjusted it worked really well. The plot doesn't matter so much as the delivery and I found it really engaging to see how different things were in each version of Hillary. Having them played out simultaneously could have been a gimmick but it stands up to the reality of the film and I found it quite fascinating. The editing is strong but it is the performance from Gray that really does the trick. Well, not so much the performance but the juxtaposition of the four performances because it brings it home how different a good performance can make the character. I didn't think she had much to work with in regard to the "laughing" version, but otherwise she was effective and the way she delivered on the differences so well is what made the concept work.
I came to this film off the back of a short I enjoyed called Dan Invited Hannah Over for Dinner. I spotted it was directed by Pat Lo, who I then noticed had made some Call of Duty fan films I had watched (which seemed like an odd fit) and this made me want to check out what else he had done. It is really encouraging to watch this film and see Lo working with an idea rather than trying to just make a film with a start, middle and end – it perhaps doesn't have much beyond the idea and delivery thereof, but to me this was enough and it was an engaging and interesting short film.
