EIFF Film #2It’s very easy to criticise a film for playing into cliché, but if done well, if it’s earned, it could be quite powerful. That’s not the case with this film. While quite gorgeous from a filmmaking point of view - lush locations, really nice framing, warm environments - it narratively goes into well worn territory with no real depth, and it doesn’t particularly earn where it heads.There’s a good portion of this film that works well. It simply is this budding relationship between these two women, one of whom has asked the other to model for their painting. It’s not doing anything out of the ordinary, but it was shot well, the vibes between the women were somewhat interesting as they both figured each other out and it felt very quiet and simple.The film then takes the most clichéd turn possible, with essentially no build up to the nature of these women’s relationship changing. It was beyond frustrating as it felt like the film had to head somewhere so it chose to go to the place you expect this story to go.What’s more frustrating is that everything after this plays out how you expect. There’s no real exploration on a character level of how people feel about what happened, or how they feel about the consequences, stuff just happens. I found this beyond frustrating to watch, it was like witnessing a list of beats the film had to hit instead of it feeling natural. Really found very little in this, some shaky acting as well in places which took me out of the story. If you’re going to do a well-worn story it either needs to work, or do something reinventive, instead of just hitting plot points for the sake of hitting points.
