Sundance Film #7: Offscreen

Offscreen
Christoffer Boe's delirious psychological drama is an adept deconstruction of modern self-absorption and a trenchant commentary on the supposed utopia of readily available digital technologies in the modern media atmosphere.

The plot is straightforward: actor Nicholas Bro asks friend and director Boe for help with a documentary about his strained relationship with his girlfriend, Lene. Boe lends Nicholas a digital camera, along with the offhand advice to film everything he can. Nicholas takes this advice absolutely literally, exacerbating his domestic troubles with the intrusive camera until Lene walks out on him for good. Friends and acquaintances also evacuate the sweep of his omnipresent lens. The fragile, egomaniacal actor, fixated on fictionalizing his quest to win Lene back, slides into career ruin and psychological disintegration with shocking consequences.

Bro adroitly portrays Nicholas's decline in a terrific feat of self-parody as Boe explicitly (and cagily) interrogates the vapidity of a DIY media culture that raises egocentrism to a supposed art.
(Shannon Kelly 2007 Sundance Film Festival catalog)

preceded by the short Induction
The unexpected meeting of a shaman, a lonely woman and a young boy, whose paths cross and slip away in a labyrinthine world of unresolved mystery.
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The irony of this whole thing is that prior to hitting the theater, the Pirate and I stopped off at the Starbucks and got some hot beverages. We had an hour or so to kill, and while the Pirate waited in line I was listening in to the conversations of both the two women at the table on my right and the four women at the table on my left. On my right, the conversation was about what each had done the day before (skiing, eating out) and on my left there was a long and involved conversation about a woman not at the table who had just "gotten the ring," but whose relationship was being dissected in a pointedly unkind way.

The shallowness and vapidity of the conversation were making me edgy, and as the Pirate was sitting across from me wondering why I was looking unhappy, I finally whipped out my phone to send him a text message expressing my feelings. We moved over one table and started discussing something else entirely. Although I felt much better, we were both awestruck at the self-absorption of the ladies at the table.

Enter the short feature, Induction. Ten minutes of shots of a naked black man, a white woman in her underwear, a kid in sweatshirt and jeans, and various incomprehensible shots of blurry trees, blurry leaves, upside-down rooms and a shot of sheep running across a field shown upside down and backward. If Nicolas Provost, the director, was trying to portray "a labyrinthine world of unresolved mystery," he failed utterly. What he showed was some bad cinematography and some all-too-common sexual hangups.

About Induction, the Pirate says: So what?

Offscreen is in the "New Frontier" category which "celebrates experimentation and the convergence of film and art as an emerging hotbed for new cinematic ideas." While I am not even going to pretend that the preceeding sentence is anything but a lot of solipsistic nonsense, the category fits this film beautifully - solipsistic in the extreme!

For the first quarter of the film I identified with the main character, Nicolas, as he films everything. At one point, he's standing over his wife as she sleeps and whispering into the camera about how beautiful he thinks she is and how she's the best thing that ever happened to him and how he's really doing this for her. But when she leaves him because he's unable to turn the camera off, when he not only films her leaving but, as she sees the camera and asks incredulously "You're filming?" and he LIES TO HER, vehemently denying something she can see with her own eyes, he lost my sympathy. From there it was an uncomfortable forced march as Nicolas decayed before us.

The pain and discomfort I felt as a viewer weren't just in his more "public" moments - when his filming gets him into trouble with his friends and co-workers. There was a scene right after his wife's parents come to get her passport because she's moving out of the country and she doesn't want to go herself. Nicolas is broken-hearted at her leaving and after the in-laws leave, he films himself at the kitchen table and sobbing as he literally chokes down slice after slice of pizza, cramming them into his mouth as he cries.

By the end, when he loses touch with reality entirely, I was scared and wanted to leave, but it was obvious that we were near the end. After the movie, the Pirate and I ended up doing a lot of talking just to outprocess the horror of the movie. No, you're not like that. No, you'll never be like that. Yes, that guy was a sick fuck and although he was sweet for the first fifteen minutes of the movie, it didn't make him any less of a sick fuck.

The Pirate says: It was creepy and it was horrifying, but it was very well done. And if you really liked The Vanishing, you'll love Offscreen.

Luckily, the voting is over because awards are being presented tonight. The movie was amazingly well-acted and well-shot. The story arc was brilliant and it was thought-provoking, but I was deeply disturbed by it and would have no idea how to properly score a movie like this one.