What a weird little lovely film this is. So familiar and boring in the way that life is sometimes. Obsessed with details and the inevitable movement of life. The familiarity you feel while watching adds a lot of inherent emotional response while watching that feels really impactful. From the music, to the look, you feel safe while watching this film, knowing that things are just going to happen and you can’t change it, but its fine.
This is another in a series that I have heard about for a long time and was nervous to be let down by with high expectations. It was not at all what I was expecting, and its charm and heart blew me away.
Fran (Daisy Ridley) works an office job, being really good at spreadsheets and the go-to gal for office supplies. She has a routine, sticks to it and mostly keeps to herself. The office around her seems relatively social, even if its in that stingy artificial way that only a phoney office atmosphere can do.
Isobel (Magan Stalter) is the office manager, cracking painfully awkward jokes to “liven” up the atmosphere. Her character is painful to watch in the most entertaining way possible. I would watch Megan do this character all my life and never get tired of it.
We get a few characters around the office like this, surrounding Fran’s quietness with an out there cast of characters gives the film a fantastical element to it that feels just not quite in our world.
When Carol (Marcia DeBonis) retires to head off on a cruise, she is replaced by Robert (Dave Merheje) who has recently relocated from a big city to their small town. Fran takes an interest in Robert, having him introduce her to new things and ways of being, she is taken out of her daily routine.
Fran also has vivid daydreams of dying, looking out her window and imagining herself hanging from the crane. Obviously this, along with some other scenarios that crop up are pretty dark, but they're also just a weird part of most of our brains that happen every now and again, feeling like a sign for sadness or a wish for death when it could just be a thought, with no meaning or ill intent behind it.
The film has some elements like this, subtle nods to things unsaid, that add a lot of weight to the complexities of the characters, without necessarily spelling it out for us.
I spoke a little bit about the familaity of the film, setting you in a world that you don’t quite know, but you do understand.
The visual style of the film helps to set that all too familiar weirdness, with a square aspect ratio and a soft look. We feel boxed into Fran’s world, in a way that has a strange cosiness to it. The camera is soft and slow, delicate about what it shows on screen and the colours it chooses to display around it. They are often quite muted in a way.
The sound follows suit with a,melodic soundtrack and realistic environments. The sound transitions you between scenes and scenarios, particularly from reality to daydream, in a way that feels natural but clear that we’re somewhere else.
I think the best way to describe this film is gentle, it takes it time with everything in a confident manor, knowing what it wants to say, and when to say it. If you are not on the ride for a slow burn, I think this could be a tough watch, but elevated by the jokes in the film, told by actors like Meg Stalter and Daisy Ridley that completely understand the tone of the film and how to represent he story along with their respective characters.
I am so down for more of these types of films, just vibe cinema where we watch a life for a bit, there’s some life lessons or nice music in between and we all leave feeling contemplative, maybe I am too deep in the cinema cult but that sounds like a great time.
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