My end of year waltzing through films recommended as some of the best of the year by the more arthouse oriented side of film criticism sometimes leads to astonishing discoveries for me, like the films of Ryusuke Hamaguchi or Céline Sciamma, cinema that’s as mind-blowing – often in very quiet ways – as its proponents say it is.
At other times, like with this supposed satire by Sebastián Silva using some of the rules of POV filmmaking genres without ever becoming something as gauche (or entertaining) as a genre movie, I leave genuinely puzzled by what I am supposed to take away as being so damn brilliant here. What’s so great about watching a self-centred asshole portrayed by the director as a variant version of himself whining, looking away from dicks, doing drugs, sighing, reading Cioran and so on? Why am I supposed to care when he is never interesting, lacks interesting – or even just not boring -problems, does not encounter interesting people and certainly never gets up to doing anything interesting (not even when a sort of mystery plot ever so slowly crawls about after many, many scenes of observing this asshat doing nothing of import)? Who exactly is this aimed at as a satire? People who think criticising modern culture as self-centred to be really rather clever and new? Who believe showing the influencer life as empty is any kind of insight?
Visually, this goes for harsh handheld shots, much wobbling of viewpoints and the kind of consciously ugly look that in most cases screams “poser!” to me, and certainly does so here.
To be fair, this isn’t three hours of tedium, but not even two, so I can’t add “sucking away valuable time I could have spent playing videogames” to my list of complaints.
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