Soror

Soror Express

Soror
2014 UK
Directed by James Webber

Soror is a short film by James Webber, a talented young director who I follow on twitter. I reviewed an earlier short film by him, Driftwood, on this blog here and I reckon I must have done an okayish job on that one because, after having seen a trailer for Soror on the internet and being pumped up to see it, the director allowed me to get a sneak preview of this one before it’s released. Hopefully he won’t mind me reviewing it here if I promise not to give too much away.

The film opens with a young girl asleep in a tracking shot which is replaced by an angle closer to her via crosscutting through white on black opening credits.This is set to a haunting piece of piano music by Richard Keyworth which shifts gear, directly after the title of the film comes up, to a more richly textured version of this, as a guitar spills into the orchestration to lift you into the experience of two half-sisters sharing a bond. It shows a good understanding of the way music can be used to support and add tone to a piece when used in this manner.

Visually the film is absolutely brilliant… which is what I'd expected from this guy, actually. There's a sequence near the start where the younger of the two daughters is being pushed around in a shopping trolley by her half-sister. The film is played back in slow motion, demonstrating a perfect marriage of camera movement going almost counter to the motion already created within the shot and highlighted by the passing verticals of a fence which this sequence is being shot through, to emphasise that counter motion. It's then edited perfectly and marries up with a continuation of that shot at a different angle. This, again with the addition of music for this part, gives the look and feel of the film an almost fairytale-like quality, which is a tone the movie manages to retain throughout, even when there is a large amount of tension within a scene. It's also a visual style which echoes throughout the length of the short and may well be a future sign of one of this director's visual fingerprints, I suspect. Bit too early to tell possibly but... take another look in ten years time and I reckon this may be a typical approach for this artist.

These slower, graceful pieces of motion are then pitched against hand-held, almost-but-not-quite- static shots which are little mini montages of a very short duration, building up glimpses of, say, a character revealing an attitude through the performance… rather than jarring against what has come before or after it. The editing is such that the flow of the film is left undisturbed during the transitions to and from these sections. Amazingly.

And the performances here by the main actors are amazing. Kate Dickie plays the mother of one of them and I already knew her through her outstanding work in a film called Outcast (reviewed here) but the two other leads, played by Rosie Day as the younger and Sian Breckin as the older of the two half-sisters respectively, are also quite amazing and do an absolutely fantastic job in this. A great deal of the acting and emoting is heart rending and raw which, pitched against the visual style... oh, wait, I’ll get back to that again in a minute.

The director also utilises a spin on an old trick favoured by directors since talkies began. One which I personally mostly associate with people like Akira Kurosawa or William Friedkin. This is to have the soundscape change dramatically from scene to scene… such as the almost silent shots of Kate Dickie looking at herself in a mirror cutting to a babble of background conversation in a dressing room at the younger daughter’s dance school. Amazingly, though, the sharp contrast between sound doesn't actually jump you into the next section of the movie with any kind of aftershock. Webber, in association with his talented sound designer Helen Miles (this guy seems to have a knack for picking outstanding collaborators), use the contrasting elements in a different way to those film-makers I mentioned… and this demonstrates a degree of subtlety I wouldn't have expected from a lot of people these days, to be honest.

However, the director does use the contrast of sped up and slowed down film and slowed down sound to produce a sharper contrast within certain scenes. It's like the audience is thrust into a surreal hyper-vision of the reality surrounding the characters but from a dream-like point of view… so it's like you're given a new primer to translate the visual and audio language of the film as you're going along. Which takes you into an understanding of the way you decode the shot information on the director’s terms a lot quicker and easier than you might imagine from my description here.

I don't want to spoil the story for you but it's a tale of the way the mother and the two sisters relate to each other and it's quite an intensely sad character sketch, in some ways. But, because of the beauty of the way in which it's told, the film is also quite uplifting in some moments too. For example, the younger of the two performs a brief dance solo and, when she goes through her choreography, this is pitched for the camera in two alternating, cross cut realities of that set of rhythm and movement. It’s actually a very uplifting glimpse into the way the mind’s eye sees something and how that beauty can be equally captured in real life. And as you can probably guess by the tone of this review, I was quite impressed by it.

In conclusion, Soror is a story of the very real and everyday moments of the, often, horrible weight of living… but it's not kitchen sink drama or, say, something that someone like Mike Leigh would do with the same material. It's looked at in an almost voyeuristic fashion with a camera which focuses on the beauty of the passing of time, as opposed to the details of the misery you would see if you were living through these experiences yourself… and that's why film is an art and it's why this film is a very good example of why film is considered an art… at least for this enthusiastic member of this film's audience. It shows reality through an almost dream-like visual and aural language which renders even the most tragic scenarios into a reflective beauty of their own. And that takes a heck of a lot of skill and dedication from the director, the producers, the cast and crew. I’m hoping that this guy and his team graduate into shooting commercially released feature films soon because, frankly, I think this director could well be one of the future greats of British movie making. Somebody needs to throw money and distribution deals at this guy soonest. If you get a chance, then this short film Soror is definitely one you should get a look at. It’s sheer poetry from start to finish and it’s something that people should know about.

You can read more about the production details of this film and see the trailer here at www.sororfilm.com

Driftwood

Sink Or Swim?

Driftwood 2012 UK 
Written and Directed by James Webber
Produced by Meddy Ford and Freddy Green
Viewed at the request of the director.

If you’ve been reading my blog reviews for a while now, you’ll know that I started off with a general sense of creeping dread towards ‘short films’, but that the more exposure I’ve had to them over the last couple of years since I’ve been doing this, has allowed me to embrace the format a little more gladly. Don’t get me wrong. My three favourite shorts are still Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou, Svankmeyer’s Virile Games and Scorcese’s The Big Shave... but some of the films I’ve seen over the last couple of years by people like Leilani Holmes, Damien Cullen, Rouzbeh Rashidi and James Devereaux, to name a few, have really challenged my tired old “I can’t be bothered” attitude to this particular species of the art form.

I saw four shorts at BAFTA just over a week ago (review here) and, based on the qualities, such as they are, of that review, a director called James Webber DM’d me on Twitter to see if I wanted to take a look at his new short called Driftwood. I said “yes”, of course, being that I’m always genuinely flattered when someone can make it through reading one of my blog entries without gnawing their own legs off, and put in the proviso that, if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t review it... I don’t like to publish negative reviews of a film if a specific person involved with it has actually asked me to take a look at it.

Driftwood tells of a little episode in the life of a young man training to be a competetive swimmer.

It starts off with a slow, but steady, pan/reveal of the central character, Sam (played by Sam Gittins) in a swimming pool changing room. This is cut (almost violently, in terms of sheer agressive editing) to a shot dollying in from the front of the character and the juxtaposition of this relatively speedy shot combined with the look of determination on Sam’s face when he looks up as the camera closes in on him, gives one a real sense of the dogged, self-motivation of the character. This guy wants to win and it’s interesting because that sense of fluid, forward momentum created with the movement of the camera continues during the opening credits, which are intercut with similar set ups showing a relatively static person (static in his own space) combined with this constant state of motion, or ‘moving forward’ from the camera.

It’s actually very powerful because you can almost feel the central character, and the film for that matter, storing up its potential energy by expressing it with a kinetic camera eye, so to speak. Waiting to pounce on you once the credits have finished. Sure enough, as the story starts proper, the stillness of the central character stops (mostly) and we have three parts of the story intercut with each other, each working through in a linear fashion but each part filling in little bits of information about Sam as the camera eye moves back and forth between one part of his story and another, before returning to a fourth, bookending, slice of the story (for want of a better word).

It’s long been my belief that you don’t need everything (or sometimes even anything) spelled out for you in movies and the short film format proves this again and again. Driftwood, throughout, uses the central character and observations about him as you see little details of a bigger story, to give you all the information you need to give incidents an overall shape in your mind. As it cuts between a session with Sam’s trainer played by Brandy Doubleday, a run in with a bully and his gang of thugs, and Sam’s problematic, abusive father, played by the excellent Neil Maskell (who I knew from his outstanding performance in last year’s Kill List, reviewed here)... before reuniting with the opening of the picture to bring us the actual event that Sam has been training for... you are given the chance to ponder the little connections between the events that happen on screen.

Questions like why his father has become abusive and why Sam has become like he is, for example, are referred to in both the sequence with his father and in the run in with the gang of hoodlums. The implications of death and loss are visibly portrayed without ever implicitly stating or overstating what the audience will pick up on. Other details, like the nasty scarring on Sam’s back which his trainer is so obviously concerned with, are left for the viewers to make a decision on for themselves, as to the source of this wound.

This is, I’m happy to say, like a lot of independently produced films outside of a big studio system... not a passive experience for anyone watching. This is how more films should be, giving the audience a little more of an interactive role with the flickers of light and sound beaming into their souls at 24 frames per second and, I’m glad to say, that the end of this film will not wrap everything up in a neat little parcel of ‘closure’ for you. This is a short that doesn’t want to pander to you or spoonfeed your mind but grab you by the collar and ask you to really respond to what you’re seeing. And this short, in particular, does contain a certain amount of, what I like to call, ‘power between the frames’. It’s beautifully shot, well performed, has a nice score which is reflective of the sense of a character drifting from one situation to the next (as suggested by the film’s title and also by the style of the shooting and editing... if I was paying attention to what I was seeing properly) and which also gives you a sense of building to transition within composer Richard Keyworth’s notes, like a caterpillar emerging from it’s cocoon as almost a new species. This, naturally, highlights the ultimate promise of Sam’s original look of wilful determination, foreshadowed straight away in what is only the second shot of the film.

The ‘to-ing’ and ‘fro-ing’ of the camera movement and the rhythmic editing style pull the viewer in to the film almost hypnotically and won’t let you go until the short running time has ended up exactly at the point where the director wants you to finish filling in the blanks, so to speak. This is a really great use of cinematic syntax that will keep your mind occupied and, dare I say it, entertained to the point where you may find yourself haunted by it once the film has stopped running. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t an epic and, obviously, the nature of the short film format kind of precludes that kind of accomplishment anyway (you watch, someone will go and prove me wrong now), but it is a very satisfying and, ultimately, extremely watchable piece of moviemaking. It just shows the incredible talent we have here in the UK working on such great, unsung gems who need to be given the money to make their own feature length movies. So if you find yourself in a position to give Driftwood a watch, then it certainly comes with my recommendation. Anybody who can work the visuals like this, whether it be the story of a swimmer in training or whatever else is in the writer’s head, deserves a larger audience and a bigger budget to bring their vision to the world.

So it’s a big thank you from me to this particular director for doing me the honour of letting me watch his new work. And I’m also really glad I didn’t hate it. ;-)

Follow the director on twitter here and check out the film-maker’s website here.http://www.fingercuffproductions.co.uk/