TASK 1 - SHORT FILM APPRECIATION

The short I chose is based on the theme of love, called Marisa by Nacho Vigalondo. The short is about a couple's everyday life and follows them throughout their relationship with the boyfriend/husband doing a VoiceOver for us. His girlfriend is diagnosed with a mental disorder whereby her personality changes depending on where she stands. As their relationship continues this gradually gets worse and worse & so she changes after every individual step she takes, compared to before when it changed depending on the room she was in. Eventually the boyfriend finds his girlfriends real personality in one specific place; a park on the swings, however when he tried to move closer to the area in order to keep her, there was no work available for him and so he couldn't leave his home. He searched for years to find Marisa again and only found her once after that, but by the time this happened, she didn't know who he was. This film reflects change and possibly disliking change from the boyfriends point of view. I chose this film because it is very quirky and I haven't seen a film like it before, I like the peculiar way the shots are put together as they're the same shots but of different actors doing the same thing and then all edited together to reflect how she changes after each step and each actress resembles a different personality. I feel as though the film has a deeper meaning, as underneath it says, 'the distances we go to prevent the ones we love from changing'. I think the films shows us the boyfriends emotion in a visual way rather than the girlfriends forever changing personality, by this I mean that the different actresses representing his girlfriend are actually his way of not dealing with the fact that she may be changing in a different way, for example, growing away from him. Maybe this film is a visual representation showing us the boyfriends emotions towards the inevitable changes him and his partner are going through. The voiceover however makes us think differently as it sounds as though her boyfriend is genuinely concerned for his girlfriend and almost deceives us, this is very powerful as it allows to get inside her boyfriends head even though he is not present in most of the film, we get to see and understand his view point, allowing us to make our own interpretations of the film. The editing would have been very difficult as there is a lot of continuity throughout the whole clip, each individual actress had to do the same routine and the shots would have all had to have been put together at the right place and time. The use of many actresses gives a different and unique element to the film as it shows visual changes and so keeps the audience interested on what the next one is going to be. The actual shots are not very interesting as there is not much variety, instead they're kept simple and plain, this is done to show the boyfriend watching her, and also that it is a routine carried out everyday. It makes the film seem very realistic as it adds to us seeing from the boyfriends eyes.