A suggestion to IMDb: users should be allowed to give 0 stars to a film. In the case of Second Life, I feel like I'm over-rating it by giving it 1 out of 10 and I'm positive I won't be the only one.
But let's get to the film itself. I was one of the people to be mis-fortunate enough to attend the avant-premiere in Lisbon and as it went on and on an on I just couldn't believe my eyes and my ears. Portugal's industry is in crisis, it's true, but this is a little too much. Let me state my points one by one:
1 - It feels like the film has nothing at all to say, that the producers just wanted to make a film, whatever that would be, and they came up with this in a few days.
2 - The narrative structure is absurdly amateurish. Not even in film schools do people come up with such excuses to justify absence of plot, nor do they create such poor schemes to manage to wrap up the "story", if there was one.
3 - There are no characters. Actors are like talking heads and the few chances of developing a little depth in some of them are dumbly thrown in the garbage by the writers who obviously did not know when they were dealing with "turning points" or "climaxes".
4 - There is no story. The situations succeed around one event that keeps being talked about again and again so that information won't get lost. It gets incredibly boring after a while, because everybody can sense there is nothing at all to say.
5 - There is no relation between cause and effect in the plot. Really strange things happen because the characters and the situations don't happen in a realistic way. At one point, all the characters gather around a dead body without reacting to it, while the dead guy talks (exposes) his connections to the others for the second time, so that the scene may have some tension. Moreover, a police investigation begins about a death that had NEVER looked like a murder - so we wonder "what for?".
6 - Light in this film is nice, but not the frames that are unimaginative and cliché. Some scenes happen like they are separate from the narrative and visually made me think of early nineties music videos. We sense the production value but also that it was applied to the least interesting ideas (helicopter shots over a river - very Travel Channel, very Discovery).
7 - Most of the dialogue is mellow in a corny way and often there are really funny lines that obviously were not meant to be funny.
8 - We never really get to know the leading character and there is a strong confusion about his nature that seems, like in the other characters, very little defined and, therefore, we never really relate to him. Other important characters in the "crime" subplot, like the servants, are never given any importance at all so, when a connection is made between them and the plot, it all seems very clumsy and laughable.
9 - The film's tag-line "The movie you were waiting for", is quite a misfortunate thing to say about this huge piece of dirt, but reflects I think both the pretentiousness of its makers as well as the total incapacity they have to tell steel from gold. Calling it "a good Portuguese film" as I heard some people say is also a huge fallacy since this is neither good neither Portuguese. If fact, it's so detached from any specificity that it could never be anything anywhere.
10 - All nudity in the film is deprived of any beauty (maybe for being out of context and being common place), but there is a lot - to a laughable extent. This has been a pattern in a few of the latest Portuguese "blockbusters" like "Padre Amaro" and "Corrupção", both from Utopia Filmes, but it was never so absurdly tasteless. How about a good, genuine, fearless porno next time?
Now, why did I go see it? Good question. I guess I was hoping it would actually be special in some kind of way... Maybe I was as naive as the people that will make this a success by buying the ticket and then coming out outraged and felling stupid. That makes me sad. As it does to talk everyday to so many talented young filmmakers who would give their right arm to have a tenth of this films budget and make a nice movie out of it.
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