There is nothing more special about the
power of cinema than when you find a film that creeps up on you over and over
again after viewing it. Sometimes you
may feel disconnected from a film when you watch it, but then afterwards the
impact that has been made can stick with you for days. This is especially enjoyable when the film
was sprung upon you without any information about it beforehand – the latest
film to work this magic on me was Jay Alvarez’s I Play With The Phrase Each Other, a film that is definitely not
for everyone.
The film cuts between a number of
characters constantly on the phone talking to each other about the minutiae of
their lives and feelings. Every single
scene begins and ends with somebody answering or hanging up a phone call and
only slowly as the audience eavesdrops on these conversations does a plot begin
to take shape.
Jake is a socially awkward obsessive
compulsive who is moving to the big city for the first time, having lost his
job at a bookshop in a small town. He is
convinced by Sean (an existential poet-type who scams people off of craigslist)
to move to the city with no job and no apartment. There is also Erin, Jake’s ex-girlfriend, who
hates her job and despairs of the rudeness of customers; Zane, a sexually
curious hipster who has a disturbingly detached obsession with Jessica; Marcus,
a criminal who has “heroin aspirations and Jake’s mum who mainly communicates
with Jake via his voicemail that he listens to through headphones as he dangles
his phone from his finger…
The dialogue in the film is masterfully
pretentious, like a Bret Easton Ellis
novel directed by Jim Jarmusch. Blank conversation flows between characters
with lines such as:
“The other day I woke up and found three
eyelashes in my mouth. I don’t know how
they got there” “That seems kind of suspicious; do you think they could have
been planted there”
or the beautiful:
“Oh – I got a vibrator” “…What colour is
it?
The film is produced entirely on iPhone
cameras and filmed in grainy black & white, which allows the production to
achieve a perverse level of voyeurism.
Like in the moment where Jake’s ex-boss is listening to an off-screen
answering machine that is playing survey responses from customers, one of whom
spends around 5 minutes dissecting the disdain of managerial staff. This is filmed in one take fixed solely on
the manager’s face as he listens with no hint of cinematic flair. If you removed the sound then this scene
becomes absurd, until it reaches the point when as a viewer I became hypnotized
by the growing tragedy as he realized that the customer was perfectly
describing him – a character that you never meet except for behind this
desk. To convey this tragic disciplinarian
character without him ever setting foot on the shop floor seemed masterful to
me.
The focus on technology will inevitably
date the film as the characters use iPhone 4’s and Bluetooth hands-free kits,
but this feels like a beautiful snapshot of an era of surface
technologies. It feels like an Apple iPhone advert
stripped of all of the apps and gloss and rendered as an ugly reminder that
luxury smartphones only matter if you have luxurious experiences to capture
with them.
Due to the structure of the film
surrounding phone calls, no two speaking characters are ever in the same
location. This symbolic distancing of
the characters who have all moved to the city to free themselves from monotony
and embrace their own lives is a devastating metaphor for modern Americas alienation
from itself. In a post-recession / food stamp
/ welfare America, these young middle-class 20-somethings have no possession
and no hope for anything but minimum wage and empty existences. If America ever manages to recover from this
seemingly lost decade, then this film will stand as a reminder that things got
pretty bleak for a whole generation.
I Play With The Phrase Each Other premiers next week at the Raindance Film Festival
Tickets are online here
Tickets are online here
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