2 reviews
I'm so taken by the movie. Highly recommend to watch it. The performance of the main character is breathtaking! Breathtaking!
- anetasiatka
- Sep 2, 2021
- Permalink
Frankly growing increasingly weary of this handheld, medium-to-close-up shallow focus style of shooting that appears to have permeated the indie space. I guess this approach is to impose the picture with some 'authenticity', whatever that may mean in this regard, and to reel us closer in to the characters, but these films adhere to it to a fault, and thus you get awkward scenes like the demo dance performance about halfway through, where the proximity of the camera to the subject isn't actually motivated by the need for readable facial emotion - at which point it's just obfuscating the choreography.
Like I have stressed before in discussing such methods of shooting, I don't mean to suggest every film should be an exercise in pictorialism (some pretty frames are captured here, anyway) but when a scene is actively making me beg for a wide shot, I'm not just being frustrated, the force of a scene is likely being diminished. Sometimes a powerful frame that captures the essence of a scene proves more in line with the intention of that moment than a completely subjective camera.
On the actual drama side of things, I don't think this fares a whole lot better, either. This slice-of-life stuff is easy to mess up, and if you wanna know why, this is a neat rundown. Most notably, the concatenation of events here fails to find a rhythm in its own ebb and flow, suffering from a constant disconnect between scenes in terms of how these characters relate to one another (one scene they're angry, few seconds later they're on good terms again, because I guess some undisclosed amount of time has passed). It's also simply utterly confusing, as new dramatic elements enter and depart with an unfathomable lack of grace, and as such the unanswered question of what the hell the crux of this story is supposed to be threatens to sap your investment in the whole ordeal - it's no coincidence that the moment this finds a footing (in the final stretches, I might add), it instantly turns into something you could call worthwhile.
Like I have stressed before in discussing such methods of shooting, I don't mean to suggest every film should be an exercise in pictorialism (some pretty frames are captured here, anyway) but when a scene is actively making me beg for a wide shot, I'm not just being frustrated, the force of a scene is likely being diminished. Sometimes a powerful frame that captures the essence of a scene proves more in line with the intention of that moment than a completely subjective camera.
On the actual drama side of things, I don't think this fares a whole lot better, either. This slice-of-life stuff is easy to mess up, and if you wanna know why, this is a neat rundown. Most notably, the concatenation of events here fails to find a rhythm in its own ebb and flow, suffering from a constant disconnect between scenes in terms of how these characters relate to one another (one scene they're angry, few seconds later they're on good terms again, because I guess some undisclosed amount of time has passed). It's also simply utterly confusing, as new dramatic elements enter and depart with an unfathomable lack of grace, and as such the unanswered question of what the hell the crux of this story is supposed to be threatens to sap your investment in the whole ordeal - it's no coincidence that the moment this finds a footing (in the final stretches, I might add), it instantly turns into something you could call worthwhile.
- DeanAmythe
- Sep 14, 2024
- Permalink