Film Review #4: "You Instead"

Will Means

Cannes Study Abroad

05/23/11

Film Review #4:

You Instead

The plot of You Instead has all the makings of a hipster, indie, soon to be cult classic love story. Two rival punk musicians who hate each other, Adam and Morello, find themselves handcuffed together at a world renowned British music festival where they are both scheduled to perform, and gradually they find themselves falling in love with each other. While the film may be hipster, and it is indie, unfortunately it’s destined to never become a cult classic because it’s not very good. It has its positive attributes, but they are far from enough to save the film.

To start off, the whole reason behind the two rock stars ending up in handcuffs is a bit on the implausible side. As soon as the two characters meet each other, they break into a quick but harmlessly taunting argument, and just as soon as our two characters have met, a random old man runs up to them, tells them that the world should be “a place of peace,” slaps handcuffs on their wrists, and quickly takes off on a golf-cart with the key. In the hands of a talented screenwriter, this might not have been such a bad start, but the film’s ensuing story-line is too unfunny and too drab to warrant such an awkward introduction. From here, the majority of the film up until about the 40-minute mark seems like a compilation of footage that was thrown together just to extend the runtime of a film that’s already only 79 minutes long. We see the two handcuffed protagonists walking around trying to find a way out of their situation, and each shot of them walking around will last about 3 minutes at best before the film cuts to about 5 solid minutes of what looks like stockpiled band performance footage from the real music festival that the story takes place during. Not to mention that there’s a cameo thrown in the middle of all this with a lead singer from one of the real-life bands that serves no purpose whatsoever except, again, to extend the movie’s runtime.

It’s not until around the film’s 40-minute mark that the two leads abruptly decide that they are in love with each other. After they spend the entire first half of the film bickering back and forth with each other and seeming completely irritated with one another, it comes as quite the sudden but foreseeable shock when Adam tells Morello’s boyfriend that he is in love with her. Adam insists to the boyfriend that Morello loves him back, and when she doesn’t argue against it, the boyfriend walks away and leaves the handcuffed couple be. This begins an ongoing chain of all the other characters abruptly falling in and out of love with others, such as Morello’s (ex) boyfriend, who falls in love with another girl about 10 minutes later. These people change their minds and devote their hearts to others so quickly that you begin to think that they might have some form of bipolar disorder. These quickly forming relationships could have seemed like desperate attempts with a more thoughtful meaning behind them, but alas, they are simply poorly scripted attempts at chemistry. Speaking of chemistry, there is absolutely none between the two protagonists leading up to their confessions of love (except for one poor attempt in which they spontaneously create a rather sub-par remix of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” together).

Once the handcuffed musicians have expressed their feelings for each other, the film turns into nothing but another montage of clips of them running around in the night with useless sub-plots scattered in between. The characters of Adam’s musical partner and his agent have quite a lot of screentime devoted to them, but they serve no purpose whatsoever as they do not help propel the story at all. Yet we are forced to watch the other band member pursue and hook up with a girl, and we have to watch the agent get so drunk that he passes out on the middle of the carnival grounds. I believe these were attempts at humor or comic relief, but they are so boring and far from succeeding that it’s somewhat hard to identify.

As I mentioned before, the film does have its positive attributes. For one thing, it managed to meet up to the standard that seemed to be running throughout the majority of films at Cannes this year, which was one of excellent cinematography. There are some beautiful shots scattered here and there, particularly when the time in the story transfers from late night to early morning, and the sun begins to turn the skies cold blue. One particular sequence that stood out was when the handcuffed couple started playfully wrestling in mud next to the carnival’s abandoned Farris wheel underneath the dreary early-morning sky. Something like this could easily make an eye-catching one-sheet. The film also benefits from a solid indie soundtrack and the acting from the leads. In fact, it seems that most of the trouble with the performances came not from a case of inability on the actors’ parts, but rather just the poor scriptwriting. They deliver when they have to in terms of emotion, but this emotion is accompanied with some nearly cringe-inducing dialogue.

While things like the cinematography and the soundtrack make the film easier to sit through, they still do not make it easy to sit through. The great premise is taken in very boring and predictable directions, right up until the ending that’s already been done a million times over. It’s likely that very appealing trailers and promotional materials could be cut together for this film, but once audiences see it (if it even makes it to audiences through buyers) it will undoubtedly flop. In a day and age when some of the best indie hipster films tend to flop (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Wristcutters, etc.) it’s highly unlikely that one that’s just flat-out poor will even stand the chance of making it to mainstream theatres. However, if You Instead does make its way to theatres, it would probably be in your best interest to see something else instead.

“You Instead”

Director: David Mackenzie

Cast: Luke Treadaway, Natalia Tena, Sophie Wu

Distributor: Bankside Films

Romance Comedy

Runtime: 79 minutes