Boy Meets Girl
(2010)
makers: Astyn Reid, Sarah Furnes and Maya Kavanagh.
The opening is a short clip of an embrace, with the suggestive textual line of "Boy Meets Girl. What happens next is up to you." This seems to suggest something of the order of a choose-your-own-adventure style narrative, with three thumbnails offered from which to begin. Relaunch, and it is a couple again, this time we can see the boy but the girl only from behind. Interesting, so it does not have a set start film. Let's try to begin it again to see what might happen. Close up, girls face, silent. But still that text which with its constancy is now no longer descriptive but declarative. I like that.
I start to explore and find that each part is very brief, they are all very short, indeterminate shots. We know what they are of, but each ends before offering narrative resolution. For example clothes on the floor with a slow pan and track towards a bed, with the clip ending before we see who might be in the bed. Or a caress across her coated back, in mid shot, or the opening of a termination letter. He offers an apology, direct to camera. Then what might be something important, a close up of the dishes and sink with an argument. I get caught in the same series for a while, inside, the letter, some "I love you's" and doors and not quite anythings the work slips towards ennui. But then a change as an outside shot appears in the thumbnails. Romance, with a candlelit dinner, and a ring.
I don't know, in a work like this, if the dinner and proposal comes after the interiors, or if I had managed to find the dinner first if the interiors and angst would have happened after the dinner. In my version it appears that there is a romantic ending. To test this I restart the work several more times, but it seems all possible start films are within the apartment. What might it have been like if the work had two 'clouds', the apartment and the dinner, and it could have started from either and ended up at the other? What then? (And why is the compression so poor, this really detracts here.)