Her own dynamic presence makes it all the more confusing as to what exactly she sees in Pete, who seems like he would be quite a bore to a woman of this caliber. We know something has happened to her in Calcutta, but it doesn’t matter what – Calcutta is about as important to the story as Chinatown was to “Chinatown”. It just represents a metaphorical wasteland, and whatever happened there is only meant to have turned Ashley into Ashley.
I particularly liked a scene where Ashley muses aloud before hacking into a corpse. On the page this is over the top, a kind of Tarantino-esque touch that could go wrong in about a million ways. Jackson finds the right note, and the framing is just right. The camera lets her do her thing, and doesn’t look away for the actual bone-sawing. The sound design is right on, and it is a nice punctuation to a successful, nuanced monologue delivery.
We meet a series of other characters along the way, all noir types who speak just a tad more eloquently than they should and have two modes – sinister and violent. Peter is perpetually beaten to a pulp as he answers the interrogator’s questions (which is odd, because he seems to be very forthcoming in answering their questions … the beatings just momentarily interrupt the information they want.)
In the end, it’s double crosses, triple crosses, people die, and the femme fatale and the noir hero fulfill their genre requirements by never walking happily into the sunset. There’s real pathos to Ashley’s character and journey, but it’s almost lost in an avalanche of MacGuffins. In the end I had too may nagging questions – why did she like this guy to begin with? Why didn’t she kill him? Why did he get out of the car when he did, and why did she keep driving?
With all this going on, it’s impossible to begin to care what was in the briefcase.
The look of “Kiss from Calcutta” is exceptional. Shot on the HVX-200 with the Letus Extreme 35mm Lens Adapter, Drews pulls out all the stops, and the result is a rich, dark, beautifully rendered visual experience. There are a few small moments where the film seems just slightly over treated, as when Pete is grabbed in the subway and it seems like the shutter speed has been adjusted to almost Hal Hartley-ian extremes. There are a couple of dead pixels that could be repaired and some dirt on the lens in places, but all in all this is a gorgeous, cinematic presentation.
The shot compositions are sharp, artistic, and appear effortless (which means, of course, they’re anything but). A tight depth of field allows Drews to constantly pull the focus, racking from foreground to background with ease and giving the film a captured-on-the-fly, docu-drama feel. The use of handheld technique and steadicam show that Drews knows his way around a camera, and the technical prowess on display here gives the film a production value that will serve it well on the festival circuit.
The sound is clean, the dialogue easily understood, and the SFX used rather invisibly. My one complaint was the lack of music, and the clearly synthesized quality of the score when it did appear. It’s particularly distracting in the film’s opening, where you get the sense that the visual quality out paces the musical quality. That is unfortunate, but by no means detracts from the overall experience.
Exceptional. Just exceptional. I know a little bit about shooting on a tight budget, and to get a calling card of this quality out of a mere $2,000 is worthy of applause. Drews says the budget went almost entirely into food (he owns his camera, which makes a HUGE difference), but it feels as though every penny found its way onto the screen. The variety of locations, the set design – people have spent a hundred times this much on films that didn’t come close.
