Review of The Graffiti Artist

"The Graffiti Artist" is a brilliant experiment and an amazing film. With a moving narration the director manages to tell the story not through action or dialogues, but rather through the discrete observation of the emotional intimacy of the protagonist, Nick, a young graffiti artist living in a silent, soft solitude, skating around the empty streets and nocturnal landscapes of Portland and Seattle, where his artistic immaginario comes to life. Through extremely brief dialogues and long silences the film investigates the loneliness of an adolescent in search of warmth and significance, describing his first sentimental education. That's why "The Graffiti Artist" can be seen as a romantic film, telling the intimate confusion inside Nick's heart which, unexpressed by words, finds its ultimate expression in the boy's artistic action. The cold camera photography, the wild character of digital shooting and the minimal soundtrack analyse an intimate world made of silent mornings with corn cobs-breakfasts and silent nights of grass joint smoking. Nick is impersonated by the talented Ruben Bansie-Snellman, through whose "wide shut eyes" the yearning melancholy of a lonely young boy comes out. Nicks meets Jesse (Pepper Fajans) for the first time in a skate park in Portland; as Nick and Jesse accidentally meet again in Seattle, Nick's face shows for the very first time a brief, pure smile. The joy of the direct self-expression above virgin walls and the will of leaving signs, evidences of their own existence is the bound between the two boys. This bound will be the motor of new creations, and the two of them will create a huge graffiti around the railway rest areas of Seattle. Though, Nick's lonely artistic actions through the streets of Portland and Seattle represent the most lyrical moments in the film. In the intense final Nick will survive a non-returned affection for Jesse and the experience of jail; as a survivor though, he will keep on skating through the abandoned industrial areas of Portland, sleeping in the streets, leaving through graffiti his message of free art, a sign of his own existence and of the freedom of his lonely spirit.