This is a rich mix of things, some successes and some interesting possible failures.
It is surely interesting enough to recommend. Independently, it is emotionally affecting, and works on that score as well.
Be aware that there is a spoiler coming.
The thing that works is the writing. It is amazing. Often a writer faces the challenge of being invisible. There are advantages to this, because the more you add the eye of someone not actually in the story, the less power the dynamics of the story have. This impossible invisibility carries over to the problem of explanatory speaking. When you have a character saying something purely because you as a viewer need to know it, you blow a hole in your boat.
The writing here takes that problem and turns it against itself. Usually I would remark that it is a narrative fold placed deep in the narrative. But my regular crew knows that -- it is why this was recommended.
There are only two actors. They are unnamed, and credited as "man" and "woman." In a profound display of ignorance, the included DVD interviews with these two actors includes a question about why their characters were unnamed. Both said it was because the story was universal, and so on. But the viewer will see that these two people are actually many souls and many fabricated or desired versions of some of those souls. Each of these souls exists because they are part of a story being told to themselves or the other actor.
The writing has us completely out of the noir loop, at least the ordinary one. We are given no background and have to figure things out over time. As the movie develops, we are teased into a single narrative. By the end, we believe we know what we are supposed to: a man meets his ex-wife at the wedding of his sister. They are still attracted to each other and cannot purge that even though they have moved to others. They work at living with this, she as confirming her separation by testing it; he by reinforcing his knots of self-doubt. But they do so by reference to other selves, both past selves from the courtship and marriage and parallel selves they maintain. Check out the rather brilliant title.
(There was a child involved.)
Against this spine: discovering what the story "is," the writer has created playful dialog that skips around, maintaining multiple perspectives, truths. selves. It is wonderful, and the look of the two actors (especially knowing Helena's background in such films) is wonderful.
Another attraction is that the film is mostly a splitscreen experiment. The filmmaker obviously selected the technique -- one would think by watching it -- to register that at any given moment, the speaker is at least two individuals. Sometimes in fact, this is how the screen is used. At other times, it simply follows the two actors in "real" time. Other effects are added to the vocabulary.
So the idea of the experiment, and that it was shot quickly and edited on a MacBook, has appeal. But the split-screen needed some more care than it got here, and watching this more than once it becomes clear that the reach of the filmmaker was less than his intuition. I applaud the attempt, but the cinema is something of a mess.
The actors are earnest and Carter has that confused look as if there are many souls within confusing her. But they don't master the words at all. They simply deliver them in the by now standard established by Mamet. The rhythm is good, but the actual meaning is lost because they don't know what they are saying. The actors are as confused as the characters.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
It is surely interesting enough to recommend. Independently, it is emotionally affecting, and works on that score as well.
Be aware that there is a spoiler coming.
The thing that works is the writing. It is amazing. Often a writer faces the challenge of being invisible. There are advantages to this, because the more you add the eye of someone not actually in the story, the less power the dynamics of the story have. This impossible invisibility carries over to the problem of explanatory speaking. When you have a character saying something purely because you as a viewer need to know it, you blow a hole in your boat.
The writing here takes that problem and turns it against itself. Usually I would remark that it is a narrative fold placed deep in the narrative. But my regular crew knows that -- it is why this was recommended.
There are only two actors. They are unnamed, and credited as "man" and "woman." In a profound display of ignorance, the included DVD interviews with these two actors includes a question about why their characters were unnamed. Both said it was because the story was universal, and so on. But the viewer will see that these two people are actually many souls and many fabricated or desired versions of some of those souls. Each of these souls exists because they are part of a story being told to themselves or the other actor.
The writing has us completely out of the noir loop, at least the ordinary one. We are given no background and have to figure things out over time. As the movie develops, we are teased into a single narrative. By the end, we believe we know what we are supposed to: a man meets his ex-wife at the wedding of his sister. They are still attracted to each other and cannot purge that even though they have moved to others. They work at living with this, she as confirming her separation by testing it; he by reinforcing his knots of self-doubt. But they do so by reference to other selves, both past selves from the courtship and marriage and parallel selves they maintain. Check out the rather brilliant title.
(There was a child involved.)
Against this spine: discovering what the story "is," the writer has created playful dialog that skips around, maintaining multiple perspectives, truths. selves. It is wonderful, and the look of the two actors (especially knowing Helena's background in such films) is wonderful.
Another attraction is that the film is mostly a splitscreen experiment. The filmmaker obviously selected the technique -- one would think by watching it -- to register that at any given moment, the speaker is at least two individuals. Sometimes in fact, this is how the screen is used. At other times, it simply follows the two actors in "real" time. Other effects are added to the vocabulary.
So the idea of the experiment, and that it was shot quickly and edited on a MacBook, has appeal. But the split-screen needed some more care than it got here, and watching this more than once it becomes clear that the reach of the filmmaker was less than his intuition. I applaud the attempt, but the cinema is something of a mess.
The actors are earnest and Carter has that confused look as if there are many souls within confusing her. But they don't master the words at all. They simply deliver them in the by now standard established by Mamet. The rhythm is good, but the actual meaning is lost because they don't know what they are saying. The actors are as confused as the characters.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.