Like an advert for life assurance

Rating: Null/10 (29 July 2011)

The style of photography, the close shots, the angles and the contrast are an early sign that the sensibility here is very close to advertising. At first the hyper real proximity of the image is interesting; as if, in Umberto Eco's view the perception of reality may reveal something beneath; but as the movie moves on and the rupture in the narrative becomes more glaring it is obvious that this is very bad writing and has no real sense of narrative logic or how to combine it with characterization.
This film is all surface: the light, the glow and contrast of images and how lovely they look, like a fetishistic advertising campaign.
The simpleness of the construction and the poverty of its ideas are present within the first act and therefore what ensues is not much more than the lame resolution of the basic premise. It has the smug contented appearance of an adverting campaign, as if all the focus group research confirmed that that what was shown has been preapproved.
Play this movie at double speed on a DVD player and it is still perfectly comprehensible because there is absolutely no depth to the writing - it is all superficially obvious from the pictures.