I love it when I find a filmmaker with promise. Its a professional task of mine to find young geniuses in another field and I like stretching those skills to film. Some time back I saw "Cache" but Ms Coal and was rather stunned. She probably thinks she makes films that are raw, emotionally direct and that explore women's soft private territory. Yes, sure. But there's a competence in all the stuff between that and what my mind gets that impresses. Its the articulatenesses of the cinematic language that impressed.
This is a later project. Its more ambitious, more cerebral. For me its more successful in its vision and beginning, but overall it wears out. Some of this is reliance on actors that cannot carry the heavy weight assigned to them, but I think the structure cannot sustain itself. There's a vast difference between a successful short form story and a long form, what we expect and need from talent.
The ambition is that we have all sorts of introspective notions folded in and together. Our focus is a movie person. The device is a planted camera that is overtly in the story. Our witnesses, sit in a film auditorium. The wondrous skill in this is how we enter the story, how its unfolding is designed. I'm really impressed by how this was engineered, snippets that have string narrative motion that are introduced with no sense. Then over time, we work in sort of a team, us, writer, world and the world of film story as some sort of deliberate person. We work all four of us to "put this together" in a way that seems to make sense, just as the woman in the film (who is in film) tries to do so with her life.
Its worth watching for the beginning, and that's better than you'll do lots of places.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
