Blair (Jet Frichot) is a musician and boyfriend of Asta (Lauren Penrose), who happens to be the sister of his boss, Riley (Roberrto Gonzalez), a drug kingpin. Blair gets nabbed by the police with a trunkful of coke, and faces the decision to betray both his girlfriend and her dangerous brother, or go to prison for the foreseeable future.
The big difficulty in watching this film – though it may be partially due to cultural misunderstandings as it was filmed in Australia – was that I had a very hard time understanding it. The film begins in a bar in which there is a shootout, then a scene with Blair being pulled over by the police and interrogated at the station. The interrogation scene cuts back and forth between interactions with several characters, including Blair, which is rather confusing. One soon comes to realize that the in-between scenes are flashbacks to set the back story of the characters and the situation that Blair has landed himself in by getting arrested. (For those familiar with the Usual Suspects, they used a similar method of revelation, although it was less confusing in that film than in this one.)
After this, comes a scene in which the police raid one of Riley's hideouts, during which Blair cold-bloodedly shoots and kills Nikki (Riley's girlfriend) – clearly neither of these actions are going to endear him to the boss, who sends his muscle out after Blair. Blair then tells his girlfriend a lie to get her on his side, so when Blair is gunned down at the bar, Asta shoots her brother in a vengeful rage.
While the story is clever, its circularity and roundabout manner is a little confusing. In the opening scene, Blair is playing in the bar band, though with the low lighting it is kind of hard to tell that it is him. And the cutting back and forth between past and present is very confusing without any distinctive transitions or the visual conventions that one is used to – for instance a dip to white transition and a black-and-white (or other stylistic color “look”) flashback. At the very least, there could be use of captions to differentiate where each scene falls in the time line, otherwise the audience is too distracted to enjoy the story.
This movie is one of those pleasant and surprising microfilms that was shot on 35mm. This always adds a whole host of challenges to a film, though much of it here was successful. My favorite was the excellent use of rack focus, due to the shallower depth of field film has available to it in comparison to unmodified digital. One was in the opening shootout in the club which racked from one of the gunman's faces to the gun in his hand; not only did the shot look great, but that type of effect is hard to do under normal conditions – let alone a moving shot in low light! My absolute favorite shot of the movie, though, was when one of Riley's men spot Blair getting his guitar out of his car in preparation for his upcoming show. There is a wide shot of Blair's car as he retrieves his property, then the bad guy's car slowly slides into the frame as the focus racks to him. And the background image with the car – though blurry – remains bright, while the bad guy is in shadow. There's no need at all to light him, as the audience knows instantly what is about to occur. It's an amazing shot that tells the story without a word!
Another visual sequence I really liked in this film was a shootout sequence that takes place between the police and Riley and company, which is where the revelation to Riley that Blair has set him up occurs. There is a great shot with Riley's girlfriend, Nikki, chasing Blair – he ducks around the corner just as she points her gun straight at the camera and fires, the bullet cutting into a tree on the right of the shot. Similarly, there was a shot in which one character was hiding behind a metal shed and there were sparks against the metal from which the bullets pinged off of, as well as shots of dirt being kicked up by rounds – even while the actors were inches away. All amazingly done effects! (My only complaint in this area was with one particular shot during the opening scene in which one of the shooters continues to “shoot” his gun even though the slide had locked back, meaning the magazine was empty. It wasn't terribly obvious, but the more anal gun nerds will probably notice it.)
