Pretend (2003) User Reviews

Starts INCREDIBLE ends horrible.

[djlethalrush · 18 April 2004]

This movie has a simple yet interesting plot.

Throughout the entire movie, there are at least two different sections, or screens, of the movie screen showing two different angles from two different video cameras of the same scene. Some scenes had four or five, with a few screens shwoing memories that the characters were recounting.

This video style was done, on the most part, really rather well, and the editing was done well too. However, I left the theatre with a serious case of motion sickness; there is simply way TOO MUCH slow-motion shots, and i mean TOO MUCH. It was almost insulting, sometimes all there was on the screen was stop-frame slow-motion.

Asides from that, there was about a fifteen minute bridge three quarters into the movie, where literally NOTHING happened - it was just fifteen minutes of showcasing multi-angle screen-by-screen techniques.

I think that if you're going to use such a bold technique as this, the plot should be just as bold and interesting.

During the first half of this movie, I was so engrossed and captivated by it that I doubt I blinked a single time, I was barely even breathing. The second half of the movie totally killed it though.

Incredible film-making, editing, acting and storytelling challenges audiences to actually witness the subliminal forces driving a modern-day tragedy. Non-Hollywood ending unforgettable and haunting.

[aaeschylus · 10/10 · 30 May 2004]

Filmmaker and auteur Julie Talen weaves from the opening frames of Pretend together a mosaic. The mosaic is, on the surface, a simple modern day retelling of the age-old folk-tale of siblings straying into the forest against the interdiction of their parents. She begins right off the bat using split screen images of the young girls playing in their safe upstate New York yard., luring the audience in to their world which, by the fabric of the split screen itself, is perceived as both inner world and outer. The mosaic slowly intensifies and draws the audience deeper into the psychological and emotion complexities of the world she is creating as the film moves on. The screen continues to split into ever changing ratios and tempos and color palettes, demanding more and more profound commitment on the part of the watcher to follow the girls' story. The film itself takes on the properties of the forest they venture into and that metaphor continues throughout the film. At one point, as we follow the youngest sister's journey into lost-ness, the screen itself morphs into something un-nameable and beautiful and terrifying, and this lasts until something intangible happens in the watcher's experience which I can only describe as what Alice must have experienced in her descent into the rabbit hole.

The film challenges the audience and itself to question wherein does the fabric of our reality actually lie See this film.