iheartcandy42493 Review of Violet

Violet (III) (2014)

A beguilingly, beautifully made film about the trauma of a teenage boy told so sparingly he mine as well be a ghost.

[5/10 · 10 March 2020]

Of the many things I was feeling while I literally tried to keep up trying to read the end credits, empty is the feeling I kept going back to. As "Violet" opens, awash in colorful static, and digitized, murky images, we watch from afar, on a security cam, the murder of a teenage boy named Jonas in a mall, his long haired, best friend Jesse beside him, frozen in horror as he bleeds out all over the floor, dying. After time goes by, after the accident, he reenters his life, the grief and loss always simmering under the surface. Told in an, what I'm assuming was meant to be a dreamlike structure, "Violet" losses itself by depicting almost nothing on a canvas that displays almost too much. One of the few elements I took away from this experience was it's richly sustained atmosphere and beguilingly bewitching cinematography. With the camera always wandering through what seems like an eternal suburbia we see through the eyes of the quiet Jesse, and how baring witness to his friend's death has fractured his world. One of the things I kept hearing over and over again was how much it compared to Gus Van Sant's far superior "Paranoid Park" and going even farther, his controversial "Elephant". Indeed the story of a beautiful boy in ruins is prime territory for Van Sant who, through his many works, has worked out perfectly in "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho", but while Van Sant also uses gritty film stock and intimate case studies of kids growing up, he never losses sight of the simpliest fact, there human, this one on the other hand follows a boy who mine as well been a ghost. It"s obvious, even in what little plot was happening, that the director's vision was there, as we slowly walk down a neighborhood street, enveloped in mist, or how the camera choregraphs in and out of a group of boys on bikes, the focal point of the image changing. Even the sound design recalls the idea of a place being haunted. But with so much saturated beauty and gloomy mood on display, as time passes it too peels off the screen. As Jesse walks around doing nothing but breathing through his mouth, and the director and the director of photography finding 101 ways to show how fancy they can frame a boy's face with his hair in his eyes, I found myself more and more aware that this story wasn't really made to show the complex trauma of a boy, but was made to show how well someone could style that trauma and keep it going the whole 80 plus minutes it plays. I found myself in two trains of thought after it ended, one was "wow" even under 90 minutes it felt too long, and two was I was still high from the visual fumes this film burns off. It went out in flying colors with design but fell over with its too organic storytelling.