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For all his exceeding competence and renown as the big-budget American auteur of his generation, Steven Soderbergh has demonstrated so far that he is indeed equally capable of storytelling mastery (Traffic) as he is of supercilious ineptitude (Erin Brockovich), the latter now being broached as a deliberate style in his revisitation of good, old-fashioned indie production values titled Full Frontal (previously dubbed The Art of Negotiating a Turn, which on its own, making as little sense as it does, tells you a lot about the spirit of offhanded “I-couldn’t-care-less” indolence in which this production was conceived). Structured cunningly as a film within a film within a film, the picture occupies its running time as well as it can cutting between a 35MM studio romance yarn and a quasi-documentary of the actors’ real lives, filmed in repulsively low-res digital video for the sake of that stale “fly-on-the-wall” dinginess we’ve seen all too often already. Admittedly, this premise, though not entirely original, seems like just the sort of corker to land us in some metaphysical rumination on the interplay between reality and filmic fantasy, apparently just what Soderbergh intended, as if his nearly household name could help resuscitate the casual moviegoer’s interest in the value of idiosyncratic art films like this one. But as it so happens, Full Frontal degenerates more rapidly than expected from a mildly engaging scrap of self-satisfied pseudo-art into just the sort of uncompromisingly banal trash that serves to prejudice mainstream viewers against art films in the first place. Naturally, then, this turns out to be the sort of film usually defended by its pompous benefactors as a misunderstood examination of … well, an unidentifiable something-or-other, in this case, since not even the film-within-a-film conceit yields an indication of any effort toward insight. However you want to interpret it, what you see is what you get: talented actors flailing desperately within a series of what appear to be improv setups they simply don’t know how to dig themselves out of – you can applaud them for not giving themselves away by stuttering too much, but all the while you may be too busy cringing at the harrowing sight of these performers drowning in Full Frontal’s all-enveloping unscripted oblivion, with the director hardly mustering the compassion to throw them a life preserver. It looks like Soderbergh is just trying to beat John Cassavetes at his own game, though there’s no use comparing this catastrophe to a film like Shadows to realize the guy’s shot himself in the foot. |
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Full Frontal |
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capsule review by André de Alencar Lyon |
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Steven Soderbergh |
