(Amos Poe, writer; Amy Redford, director; 2008)

Unexceptionally abstract and crudely written, yet redemptive in its diaphanous celluloid language, this metaphorically sound but materially slight piece is perhaps worth a bit more than its weight in real film.

Mortally gossamer but completely unbelievable. Predictable, choppy, conceptually stationary, fraught with broken transitions and flawed character clichés. But a doable watch, despite its long thread of impotence and remote, stark behaviors, its flat, stupid development and utter lack of personality.

I make it sound really bad, which, if you know what…it really is. Yet because it makes mixed sense, regardless of a penchant for embellishing boredom, this particular movie is a masterful comment on whatever it explores. Fleeting, shallow indulgence, for instance, and its deep spectral complement, detachment, are both prevalent figures in the worried spatial scenes, frugal cast and insipid, terse dialogue. It is obvious about halfway through the movie that its main predilection is beauty; however, the beautiful herein is blancmange. And its point is redemption, change, its master theme music, but these elements are either audibly sticky or so slack it feels like several films edited to one.

Saffron Burrows fails to chemically connect until the wrap of the film, which I suppose is the premise, but her posited transition is too finitely drastic for plausible emotional sagacity. Her character’s ineffectual dalliances and self-teaching methods are short-lived, unremarkable and discreditable, much like her very few modes of actual expression. Her unimportantly significant vignette is a long, languid stretch in the morning of reluctant desire; a more credible story would’ve played fewer concepts in favor of making the song more concise.

Even less may be said of her diminishing company, the inauthentic other humans introduced like a back-story only to dangle implicitly and then exit predictably. It is highly unlikely that ‘Melody’ and ‘Brett’ would have ever even crossed paths; they energetically repel, both eschewing even vague interest, and reenact no emotional history whatsoever. Moreover, the heroine’s secondary partners contrast just as harshly and, however legitimately transient, segue fantastically in and out of her life. And in a last stroke of dispassionate luck, only one day on the street, our meager changeling is rescued by some strolling disciples. After all, she is skinny and pathetically hot and now knows a few chords on a cherry red Fender; fate will render the rest.

If a mountain of debt and the will not to live were all it took to find fortune and the providence of change, I think more than a few of us would gladly throw Chandrasekhar limits to the wind. As it is, this rather college-level flick smarts parabolic…nice and dirty, but albeit, a wishful post-modern fable.