Seat 25

SEAT 25 (2017)

Seat 25 was recommended to me by someone whose artistic talent and sensibility I respect. I like when friends refer films to me because it gets me to look beyond the films I would choose for myself. Sometimes I love their movie referrals, and other times, as in the case of Seat 25, I don't.

I did enjoy the performance by the lead actress, Madeleine Cooke, who also is a co-writer and producer of the project. She played the main character Faye Banks with a clear presence that gave access to her feelings of alienation in ways I felt were easily accessible. And depressing. Faye is a woman in a beige, uninspiring marriage and a thankless job as a Employment Termination Assistant, an axeman who delivers the news to poor souls that they are fired. Her family is physically and emotionally unavailable; her sister is a negative sterotype of a proclaimed free spirit who is in actuality a freeloader. Faye's husband is portrayed as a one dimensional man going through his days on auto-pilot, escaping to console games, life cliques, ("we're going to try for a baby now, it's the next logical step"), and briefcase-in-hand, bland morning exits.

Faye feels like an alien on planet earth and has been captivated by Mars since she was a child, and so naturally when a lottery for a ticket on a shuttle to Mars comes up, Faye applies... and is chosen to go. I'm not a believer in the idea that life on Mars is realistic or desirable, so I was out of this narrative from it's inception. I settled in to watch the film as a metaphor, and managed to find a few interesting moments in her interactions with her neighbor Peter, a stay-at-home dad, and with Teodor, one of the employees she fired; I hoped these relationships would go somewhere substantial, but I ultimately felt they were pawns to manipulative the story in ways I found void of meaningful impact.

Artistically I appreciated the cinematography; Faye's colorful, quirky wardrobe; and the set designs, even in her very beige house.

For me, Seat 25 never took off.

I really wanted to like this film, but I was very disappointed. Apart from a couple of sidesteps and the last 20 seconds, it was like watching paint dry in a room full of really annoying people. It's no wonder she wanted to leave. No life to this film except the last few seconds. There was a lot of potential ready to burst forth in the character, but it never got there.

Seat 25 is a thoughtful piece of art. Highly entertaining, beautiful. It is a sensitive look at everyday life and how many of us including this central character, are not truly living. Faye realises that she is unhappy. She awakens to her real life and decides she needs to make a big change. The ticket to mars is a representation of this change and the leap of faith that many of us have to take in order to find true happiness and contentment.

This film wants to be Amelie SO BAD but it just isn't. It's a shame as it seems like it had so much potential if it had just done its own thing.

Faye is a Londoner who feels ignored by husband, family and colleagues and dreams of more in her life. She doesn't do anything towards that goal and her story would have probably been boring and unchanging if not for her becoming the winner of "seat 25" on an interplanetary expedition to Mars. So now that this extraordinary event has put everything into perspective... nothing changes. It's an hour and a half of Faye still getting ignored and being unable to express any thought or emotion in a way that the others can understand. Even her getting closer to one of the loner colleagues at her work and talking to him is a sham, since he is saying something and she understands something else entirely.

It is a movie about alienation, about people living around other people, not with them, about not being able to communicate in any meaningful way. This, it presents well. I wish, though, that the film would not have used a trip to Mars as the emotional trigger and that it would have actually triggered something other than depression! As such, I feel suckered in to see something about Mars and getting a story about the inner life of a woman in London (plus narration). Had I known that, I would probably have not watched it.