Marisa

This short film is for sure a clever and interesting one in the basic foundation. A man relates his relationship with a woman who he noticed would have a different personality depending on where she physically was. Over time she seemed to change with smaller and smaller movements in space and gradually it seemed she changed even though she physically stayed in one place. The film depicts this with the use of different actresses and editing between them as they move across a scene, but really the idea here seems to be about the idea of people changing with time (particularly in a relationship) and how the other people connected to the version they fell for, will try to prevent that change or not be able to cope with it as an idea.

So I liked this aspect of it and I applaud it for doing this but the film is very short and within 3 minutes I had two larger reservations with it, which given the brevity of the film, is a lot to carry. The first is that frankly it is too short and the idea doesn't have time to bed in and make an emotional impact which is a real shame since it is an engaging one and with an unusual physical manifestation. This was the biggie for me and I really felt that the film was rushed and that the idea and potential suffered as a result. The second issue I had with it was more one of aesthetics because I also did not think it was technically particular impressive.

Too many of the scenes appeared gritty and hurried; I think maybe there is the potential that I do not know the context to this short, so perhaps it was made in only 24 hours or with some other self-imposed rule put in place on the making, but it felt rough. The editing was actually part of this. In theory the editing should be impressive as it seamlessly moves between women in the same scene but actually I found too many of the cuts to be blunt and with no flow to them, some of them having the camera position move slightly so that even though it was the same static shot, it would appear slightly zoomed in or at a very slight different perspective, again breaking the flow. Maybe this was the point but if so it did not work for me.

I suspect I am alone in this because it seems many on other sites really loved this film for everything it did, but to me it had a good foundation but the rushed delivery failed to make the most of it while at the same time the rough look and feel from the construction and editing tended to distract me from the actual content. Maybe there is something better in here, but if so it did not get out to me.

I'd heard the name Nacho Vigalondo somewhere before so double checked his name on this website . Writer/director of 7:35 IN THE MORNING which alongside THE END by Ted Marcus is one of the most outstanding short films I've seen recently I went in with very high expectations . After all Vigalondo is someone who went on to have a fairly successful career in Spanish cinema , a country that tends to celebrate imaginative morbid cinema and perhaps my high expectations led to disappointment . To be fair you can see the main point of this short film is to showcase some very impressive editing but beyond that there's not a lot else . One wonders if the story might be constrained by length since it's only three minutes long and involves a quest by a man trying to find a long lost love by methods that fall in to the mind bending realm of meta-physics . Again like so many other shorts it almost feels like a pitch of sorts and when the end titles come up it feels more like the opening credits to a feature length film where we've just had the premise and story set up explained to us

Marisa is about a woman. Or, at least according to the man who loves her, a woman who is also several women, depending on the place and time. He goes about looking for the Marisa he loves, only to discover that she's changed into someone else again. As time goes by, it's getting harder and harder to find Marisa. Will he ever be able to find her again?

This film is a curious tale is about a man in search for his one and only Marisa, only to find her constantly changing. With a simple monologue, psychologists' perspectives, and hundreds of women shown in just three minutes, we rediscover the journey of one man and one woman who are trying to make sense of the changes that happen to every person.