When Mr. Ferrari was picked as part of the top 100 filmmakers in Steven Spielberg’s recent show, “On the Lot”, he had to make a short film in only six days. In order to do this, he took ideas from a feature film he’s been writing called Red Princess Blues and pared them down to a five minute short (or rather, three and a half minute short, if you don’t include the elaborate credits) called, “Cyn”.
Cyn is the story of a girl named “Cyn” who is kidnapped by two men, Otto and Mr. Sugar, and taken to a kindergarten classroom. In order to stay alive, Cyn taunts them into arguing with her and then with one another. Amidst her insults to the unstable Mr. Sugar’s manhood, she tricks him into attacking his partner.
From there, we learn that Cyn is not quite what she appears to be. (Due to the basic layout of this film, nothing else can be revealed here without providing spoilers.)
Content
I would dearly love to see Mr. Ferrari take a stab at writing a film that does not involve the kidnapping of a beautiful, yet mysteriously powerful girl by crazy maniacal villains. I love action movies, so my issue is not with him doing action, rather it’s just that this theme is so similar to the overall theme he had in his film Broken that it feels somewhat like it was a remake of his earlier film to support a pared down cast and a kindergarten classroom. The problem with making a film in a short time period that is too similar to the feel of a film you made when you weren’t on as tight a time crunch is that the film will often be unfavorably compared to your earlier film.
With that said, to the best of my ability, I put Mr. Ferrari’s past work out of my mind each time I watched and rewatched Cyn to make sure I was judging it on its own merits and not comparing it to Broken.
Cyn is a movie that’s designed to be visually impacting, with a secondary emphasis on compelling sound design. Emphasizing these things isn’t a problem, except that the content ended up being the weakest area of the film, with a storyline that was underdeveloped (even for a short term project) and acting that was problematic.
Spoilers become necessary in order to look into the issues of the storyline. As such, if you don’t wish to read them, please skip on to the Visual Look section.
The point of Cyn is that she’s kidnapped by two psychotically crazy kidnappers who are working for a mysterious person that they don’t personally know. Cyn has her own secrets, largely that she’s working for someone else (most likely the person who hired the kidnappers in the first place) and is not at all distressed by her kidnapping. Her job is to pit her assailants against one another and kill them for her boss, which she does in time to meet up with him at the end.
The story is not terribly original, but it could have been pulled off if the acting had been tight and subtle. If I honestly believed that the two killers were psychotic and that Cyn was craftily moving them into attacking one another, then I could have bought into the experience and got along quite willingly with it.
Unfortunately, the word that best describes the acting in the film was: melodramatic. Mr. Sugar sports strangely excessive pauses in his speech combined with a British accent that fades and reappears, while Otto seems to be reading his lines from a teleprompter or a cue card. Meanwhile, Cyn goes from a weeping victim to a frenetically taunting nutjob with extremely over-the-top facial expressions to a butt kicking sexpot. All of these things added up to making me feel like I was watching a stage melodrama, not a film. While these things may have been selected to make the film feel more comic book-like, they didn’t work for me. I just felt like the actors hadn’t had enough time to really get into their characters for the six day production. For future films, even on tight schedules, I would encourage a greater dose of subtlety in acting and writing, as the lens of the camera magnifies all of these things.
