Redouaaane

6/10

The film starts with the director introducing the project of the documentary: get a bunch of millenials, give them cameras and ask them to record their life, talk to them about love life, ???, profit. It's an interesting concept, but the director decides to do away with it compeletely upon a happenstance that brought two participants (who weren't initially supposed to interact or know about the existence of one another) together, and they hit it off and that somehow was enough for the director to switch course. This is was a bad move from the director not because the movie turns out to be bad but because the switch puts a lot of pressure on that one relationship to make the movie work. It's like, if I told you I'm going to give you a whole pizza and then decide to give you just one slice, you aren't going to be mad because you're still getting something, but in the back of your mind you're always thinking of the other slices and how nice it would have been to have them as well. The better decision would have been to not say anything about the other slices, and just present the one slice. This is important because, as I said, it puts a lot of pressure on one relationship to be a representation of a typical milennial relationship and be entertaining at the same time or at least provide something of value to the viewer. The movie starts out well, there's a meet cute, everything is new, that awkwardness around each other, what to say what to do. The boy was really neurotic at first in a relatable way, the girl was really open, and the whole thing was too intimate that it felt almost like voyeurism. Then something happens and the communcation between the participants drop for months, at this point you start to question the decision of the director. Wouldn't it have been better to have multiple participants just in case something like this happens? However, after a bit of time-jumping, things pick up again and the protagonists' relationship changes and lots of things happen and through it all you get the sense that the viewer has more of a clue of what is going on than the participants themselves. Which is dissapointing because it left a lot of things unadressed and thus the overall experience was unsatisfying. For the most part, the documentary was banal and the director's attempts to magnify some of the 'drama' made it even more banal than it was. I felt it was possible to salvage whatever this is if the director was more probing in the Skype "interviews" and tried to provoke some sort of analysis beyond that "He said and I felt" stuff. The participants, for their part in this, were interesting and their personalities developed a lot during 12 months. They said and did things that made me think about my own life, even when their behavior was less than exemplary it helped provoke thoughts about human behavior. All in all, I felt like this was a good idea executed poorly, and I bet the rest of that pizza would have tasted delicious.