Okay it's Leeds International Film Festival time (http://www.leedsfilm.com/ - it's going for another week until sunday, there's the latest Kim Ki-Duk on Tuesday, a Czech film called Empties that looks interesting on Wednesday as well as lots of documentaries, shorts and retrospective showings, check it out if you're in the area) and after seeing four cracking films last year (Breath by Kim Ki-Duk, the beautifully titled and uber-obscure Faro: Goddess of the Waves, No Country for Old Men and The Orphanage) I imposed myself on one of my friends again and decided to check out three films this year.
The first is this one, which is Slovakia's submission in the Foreign Language film category at the oscars next year. I also have an affection for most things Slovakian stemming from Daniela Hantuchova being one of my favourite people so I was really looking forward to this film. It's a documentary which shows four different stories of blind people and their lives. In the first segment we see a couple living together - the man is a music teacher and the woman spends her time knitting him a sweater. The second segment follows a blind guy and a partially sighted girl who are getting together behind her parents' back. The third shows a woman expecting a child and the fourth segment shows a young lonely teenage girl talking to someone on MSN.
This is a documentary the way The Osbournes is a documentary because quite frankly there are certain scenes which are quite obviously staged. This has led to some confusion with people who didn't know beforehand that it was a doc assuming it was a fictional film afterwards, I can see why. The film has some very interesting visual touches (the club scene is very well done, the MSN window is put on the screen in a white outline over a simple shot of her face, etc.) but also it's overdone at times including an animated sequence (designed to show what's going on in the music teacher's mind as he plays away his compositions on the keyboard), which is out of the blue stylistically and is jarring and at odds with the rest of the film.
We are shown the four segments in order and then at the end they all come back for their conclusions (of sorts). The film gets better as it goes as the later segments are frankly more interesting than the earlier ones. My overriding feeling is that the film is a bit of a missed opportunity, it's only 77 minutes long so most of the segments are undercooked and don't engage you enough. The final segment though hooked me emotionally and rather annoyingly that was the one which was left the most ambiguously - if this were a 40 minute short just on this girl I would be absolutely raving it but sadly the others don't get up to the level of her part of the film.
So a beautifully shot film, which has an interesting subject matter, but is rather unevenly made in many ways. This wouldn't be too much of a problem but it is highlighted by the uneven quality of the segments, storytelling across them and content therein. What remains overall is a decent film that flirts with brilliance, but is not without its problems. It was worth me going to see it but this could only appeal to a narrow audience. Ironically though the screening I went to was packed - proof that it's intriguing enough to get people through the door but I couldn't say how many would be ecstatic they made the effort afterwards.