Review Summary: Ten Things I Am Indifferent Towards About You
Sundance unveils its first premiere of the year...
Director: Kip Berman
Screenwriter: Kip Berman
Principal Cast: Kip Berman
Genre: Romance/Fantasy
U.S.A / 40 Min.
Our protagonist is stuck in Limbo, also known as The Waiting Room, staring at the medical receptionist long enough for her to become a different character in a different world. In this place, a place where he will only ever be a visitor, nothing can be known for certain.
I know for certain that fantasies are dangerous and diminutive. Sometimes spiritual/mental retreats are tantamount to ignorance, irresponsibility; how to let the pot-plant on the windowsill wither, blacken and die. The mind manifests these vague utopias but they are fleeting and fragile. They leave us vulnerable to the bookends of reality, indulging in the anti-social, all for just The Echo of Pleasure.
Which is to say that disappearing into your own wishlist makes for a dialogue that’s both one-sided and humdrum. As four hopeless romantics from New York may or may not have discovered, translating dreams and aspirations into dense clouds of reverb is an idea that exhausts itself before you even have a chance to finish spelling out their band name.
We are left further adrift as we realise the vocals are subservient to the music, responding meekly and confusedly to the plodding numbers of which they occupy. The voice is emblematic of bottled-up desperation: to have your heart mended by the girl who once love heart reacted your profile picture on Facebook; to find company so perfect it could have risen from the pages of your diary.
If I had a diary (I’m not sure why I don’t already, I say plenty of things that no one wants to hear) it would be like these compositions: meandering, formless; full of half-baked ideas that revolve around insipid central conceits.
Our protagonist finds himself back in the waiting room. There is naught but the tick of the clock and the occasional cough. The world he created reveals itself as ephemeral – presenting existential notions, like loneliness, like purpose, only to ignore them at the first opportunity. He’s of little faculty to decide whether to return, or to dig his own corner into a world like this one: where the knots are eternally ours to untangle, and the patterns don’t change unless we make them.
The doctor ascribes our protagonist’s illness to what is, in the medical profession, commonly referred to as “The Pains of Being Absent of Mind”.
