Wednesday, 2 May 2012

DVD review: 4321


The interlocking tales of four young women and some stolen diamonds.

The plan for this movie is splendidly complicated. We see the same few days again and again from the point of view of four different characters but instead of alternating them like it normally happens we see them in straight order. So first we see everything from the point of view of one girl, then to the second, the third and the fourth only to resume normal filmmaking for the collective ending.
The main problem is that plot wise writer-director Noel Clarke doesn’t pull it off. There is an enormous amount of contrivances that we need to digest, it’s all so improbable that it really distracts from the story.
Moreover Clarke doesn’t solve the main problem of these kind of exercises, the first story is by definition the less interesting because we got such a thin slice of the whole picture and Clarke not only fails to make it exciting, he actually makes it a story about a depressed to the point of suicide girl.
Now nothing bad with this kind of stories, if you are into them, but whoever buys – rents this movie expecting a nice thriller is not the right costumer for a depressed plot.
The other stories are also not that interesting honestly, the only one that manages to get somewhere is the last, with Emma, niece of Julia, Roberts, which is luckily more grounded in real life and real problems while the others posits themselves as some random empowering fantasies for teenage girls.
The overall impression is that Clarke fell in love with the structure and tried to fill it up, puzzle like, maybe using leftover ideas from aborted project, without considering that a structure without substance is like a frame without a picture.

No comments:

Post a Comment