I don't know what to make of this short film. One one hand, I find it very original, told in a traditional way but with an intriguing underlining story and marked symbolism.
The story revolves about a young couple, normal people with normal lives. They are having couple's issues: lack of communication, apathy, monotony, and small lies. The main thing happening is that she is suffering from a debilitating undiagnosed stomach malaise and that her husband seems more interested in spending his free time in an empty lawn. The only other extraordinary thing is the presence of a snake in certain moments of the story.
The film is shot in mostly black and white, with some pastel minimal hues, except for the intense splashes of red, used in drawings of the internal organs and the snake tongue. The drawing is very clear and detailed, but deprived of anything superfluous. The animation is very realistic and very cinematic, as if this was a normal movie transformed into drawings, and not proper animation, but it is.
The main intrigue of the short is in what the snake has to do with the story. We know it is symbolic because one of the scenes in the movie shows that clearly. The archetype and symbolism of the snake, with different meanings can be found in all cultures, from Antiquity to the Renaissance to the Jungian revival of the power of the myth. Two main meanings seem to fit the story of this short. One is the Gnogstic oroborus, a snake that represents, at the same time, the active and the passive, the constructive and the destructive. The dynamics of this couple seem exactly a constant play of those two elements. For the Romans it was a companion of Chronus (time), and therefore the snake that bites its tail is an attribute of time, of the infinite and eternal, like something that starts and ends at the same time, a perennial something, like an obsession, like a compulsion. Snakes have been symbolically associated with life, power, the underworld, death and the dead, rebirth, sin, evil, or just as carriers of venom. All of those values could be associated with the film, but not clearly so for the viewer. Probably death, the clicking clock, and the never ending nature of the obsessions shown in the film are there.
I thought there were many good things about the film, but it feels a slice of life that has no point. The symbolism is difficult to grasp by the normal viewer. And there is no digging into the psychology of the characters. Besides, the ending is not really an ending, to me.
The story revolves about a young couple, normal people with normal lives. They are having couple's issues: lack of communication, apathy, monotony, and small lies. The main thing happening is that she is suffering from a debilitating undiagnosed stomach malaise and that her husband seems more interested in spending his free time in an empty lawn. The only other extraordinary thing is the presence of a snake in certain moments of the story.
The film is shot in mostly black and white, with some pastel minimal hues, except for the intense splashes of red, used in drawings of the internal organs and the snake tongue. The drawing is very clear and detailed, but deprived of anything superfluous. The animation is very realistic and very cinematic, as if this was a normal movie transformed into drawings, and not proper animation, but it is.
The main intrigue of the short is in what the snake has to do with the story. We know it is symbolic because one of the scenes in the movie shows that clearly. The archetype and symbolism of the snake, with different meanings can be found in all cultures, from Antiquity to the Renaissance to the Jungian revival of the power of the myth. Two main meanings seem to fit the story of this short. One is the Gnogstic oroborus, a snake that represents, at the same time, the active and the passive, the constructive and the destructive. The dynamics of this couple seem exactly a constant play of those two elements. For the Romans it was a companion of Chronus (time), and therefore the snake that bites its tail is an attribute of time, of the infinite and eternal, like something that starts and ends at the same time, a perennial something, like an obsession, like a compulsion. Snakes have been symbolically associated with life, power, the underworld, death and the dead, rebirth, sin, evil, or just as carriers of venom. All of those values could be associated with the film, but not clearly so for the viewer. Probably death, the clicking clock, and the never ending nature of the obsessions shown in the film are there.
I thought there were many good things about the film, but it feels a slice of life that has no point. The symbolism is difficult to grasp by the normal viewer. And there is no digging into the psychology of the characters. Besides, the ending is not really an ending, to me.
