An interesting documentary piece this one – although not one that really convinced me for what it delivered itself. The concept is interesting – which is that of being 'alone'. Not an overly dramatic version of the word where one feels cut off and isolated, but in this case just having a moment when nobody is around. In the film we see plenty of people who do things in front of the camera that they normally do when nobody is watching. It is a mix of self-abuse, playing like children, drowning sorrows, acting out fantasy, or just crying into the void.
As a piece to make you think it does work, and what it does for you will depend on your own place. For me the idea of just having dead time is appealing since at the moment everything is something – some of it self-inflicted like my media-obsessed hobbies, but mostly it is family, work, and chore heavy time which never really leaves me 'alone' in the way of this film. For many, being alone means a pretense drops, which can mean wildly different outcomes, and to see the variety here does make you think what it means and also the importance of it. However, to consider the film, I am not sure how much of that work I did for it.
As a piece it is less interesting in its content. The shooting process breaks the concept I think; the people agreeing to be vulnerable on camera are by definition those people more open to being seen doing their private things. This means they can still trigger thought by what they represent, but at the same time they do not really represent what the film is getting at. I found the feeling of them being exhibitionists in their supposed privacy to be disrupting in terms of what the film was trying to do.
It was still interesting as a piece, even if some of that interest came from the way that the nature of it was working against its own core idea.
