Latent(cy) is the feature film debut for director Blake Johnson and tells the story of Ana (Lily Lyons), as she strives to come to grips with her life, her job, and her art.
Ana is an artist who is having difficulty surviving the grown up world of employment after college. Like many artists, she has got a bit of a chip on her shoulder about the real world. It doesn’t seem fair to her that she has to work as a graphic designer for a big advertising company, when she wants to go off and create art all day for herself. (The fact that she’s fortunate to have actually gotten a job in her chosen field after graduation, as opposed to having to work at a gas station or drug store, seems to have eluded her in the winter of her discontent.)
Also, like many artists, Ana struggles with depression and has been prescribed anti-depressants by her therapist. However, unlike most people who require these drugs, the anti-depressants don’t mute her creativity. Instead, their only side effect is to cause her not to have disturbing dreams. Despite this beneficial relationship between her and her meds, her boyfriend, Evan (Ben Cohen), has convinced her she shouldn’t take her meds, because he’s sure that they will cause her to get cancer or go blind. Although Evan is clearly a paranoid slacker, Ana decides to go off her meds to please him.
Off her medications, she wrestles with narcolepsy and vivid nightmares about conformity, which haunt her everywhere, from her work to the mall. As she continues to wrestle with her dreams, she becomes more and more discontent with her life.
Content
As noted before, this is Mr. Johnson’s first feature-length film, which he directed. He collaborated on it, with a group of five high school classmates. Some things came out successfully and some things need work for future films.
As with most first features, Latent(cy) seems to have a strongly autobiographical, therapeutic nature to it. While the teenage screenwriters, Blake Johnson and Kris Cain, are clearly much younger than the 24-year-old protagonist they wrote about, the themes of non-conformity and angst toward a repressive society are likely to be autobiographical in nature. (My first feature film, which I wrote and directed, had many of these same themes, even though I penned it at the older age of 25.)
Therefore, this film represented a lot of honest struggle with life and attempted to delve into the realities of what makes us individuals and whether that must be lost in order to survive in corporate America. This adds a compelling nature to the story that makes you want to know what happens to Ana at the end.
Unfortunately, as with my own first film, Latent(cy) struggles with getting to the root of the main character’s own driving forces to tell a compelling tale. (Her latent motivations, as it were.) As the root of Ana’s own discontent is never really dealt with (although it is hinted at in a few of areas), we conclude this film feeling as confused as the main character. For example, as Ana struggles against the feeling of control that she finds in her work, she comes close to realizing that her non-conformist boyfriend is just as controlling as the work she dislikes. It is at this point she comes close to realizing that she’s associating the controls of her job and her friends with her father’s house where he was so controlling that she somehow managed to get emancipated from it. As emancipation is an extremely difficult thing to gain, except in the case of extreme abuse, we really needed to know more about this and how it ties into her current life. In the process, the main character also needs to delve into this element of her past to have a cohesive story that leads up to a logical ending.
Spoiler Alert!
Unfortunately, as it ends now, Ana barely touches upon part of these latent memories before rushing right past them into an apparent suicide, where she takes all of her anti-depressants at once and then wakes up in the black-and-white nightmare she’s been running from, giving the film a very ‘Eraserhead’-twist that doesn’t really make a lot of sense.
Compounding the problems of story development were the problems of casting and/or rehearsal time. This is one of the most common problems with first-time filmmakers (as I also epitomized in my first film)—the tendency to, first, cast non-actors or stage actors in one’s films and then, secondly, for whatever reason, not give them adequate time to memorize and rehearse their lines.
The casting issues are most often due to necessity that revolves around the desire to cast friends in certain roles, the failure to actually do a casting call, and/or the real (or perceived) inability to draw more experienced film actors to a first film. (The issue with finding film actors can be alleviated by posting notices on your state’s film board. Most states have an online site where filmmakers can post casting calls and searches for specialized positions.)
