 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
Open
Water
|
 |
|
For some years we have been hearing about the cultural revolution in movies that the advent of digital video will surely bring about. Films will be made much more cheaply and inventively, theatres equipped with digital projection will show a bewildering variety of new work, and the entire institution of cinema will advance rapidly into an exciting, mixed-media, post-postmodern age. Then, in the cold light of day, you take a look at the kind of digital movies that the major companies (such as Icon) are currently choosing to pick up and promote. And all you see is a lame duck like Chris Kentis' Open Water. Truth is sometimes not only stranger than fiction, but also impossible to render convincingly as fiction. Open Water is an American film based on a true story that occurred in Australia. Two amateur divers, here fictionalised as Daniel (Daniel Travis) and Susan (Blanchard Ryan), were inadvertently left in the water while the rest of their party sailed back to shore, not even noticing their absence for days. Only the sharks were paying attention. Reviewers have been quick to lampoon the line of dialogue – "Oh God, something's rubbing against my leg!" – used in the promotion for this film. Personally, I think "Let's swim away from the puke!" would have been a more appropriate choice. At least since the time of Roman Polanski's debut feature Knife in the Water (1962), canny storytellers have grasped the affinity between the scaled-down plots of tense, enclosed thrillers and the minimal, grating, deliberately unreal situations of the Theatre of the Absurd. And indeed, it is hard to watch two heads bobbing above water for perhaps half the running time of Open Water – and to listen to the banal squabbling of this charmless couple – without imagining, from time to time, that it would be better staged as a cryptic Samuel Beckett play. Matters of plot and character aside, digital filmmakers should be advised not to point their cameras at vast expanses of sea. All pictorial detail is lost, and the projected video image looks worse than ever. Only in a few, welcome moments of scary abstraction, and in a genuinely effective ending, does Open Water raise itself above sheer awfulness. © Adrian Martin October 2004 |
