, where the narrative meanders as it follows the characters from location to location){kind=link}
I have not seen Eduardo Williams’ film The Human Surge (El auge del humano), but I imagine it is a lot like his The Human Surge 3 (El auge del humano 3), where the narrative meanders as it follows the characters from location to location. Focusing less on story but instead on the journey between places and the places themselves.
Eduardo Williams’ filmmaking style is a love letter to location/setting. The camera moves through the scene like a bird or an insect on the periphery as things unfold. It takes you on journeys through rural communities where people live in houses that look like gnome homes by their design to traffic-filled urban streets. Food places on streets lined with shops or in empty food halls devoid of activity. It takes you to houses built over the water, to trekking into the jungle. Or even a raging party.
The footage itself is like webcam footage. It is often fishbowl lensed and can be disorienting to watch, especially early on before you get used to it.
Now, just because narrative appears to be secondary to elevating locations to characters that doesn’t mean there aren’t still moments where people express things of weight. There were some nice dialogues, particularly those expressed during the scenes with them in the water.
Around the 1 hour 20 mark, the film moves through all the scenes it’s already been in before resting for a long time on a stationary shot of a boat through some trees. It does this for around five minutes, waiting until a monkey moves through the boat. I’m probably somebody more pro-monkey than some, but even still, it’s one thing to sit and watch a monkey in nature, in real life, to experience that moment. It’s another to be a passive viewer held captive by the film’s run time, unable to leave the scene on your own unless you chose to fully depart the film.
And that leads me to probably my biggest criticism of the film, that many sequences probably could’ve been trimmed. Several beats felt like they lingered beyond where they landed, and that is reflected in the film’s bloated 2-hour running time. That previous scene I mentioned transitions into this cool psychedelic sequence, but it took a while to work up to it. By the time it was done, the film was already at 1 hour 32 minutes. If you are keeping track, that’s about 12 minutes from the introduction of the boat. One sequence later, and that’s twelve minutes of screen time. That’s not very good economy. While there are plenty of tight cuts between scenes too, especially in the early part of the film where there is a lot of fast cutting used to establish many different urban locations, there are also spots like this, where perhaps more trimming could’ve been utilized. That said, perhaps this is Eduardo Williams’ established style and what the fans of his work, including the film’s predecessor and namesake, have come to expect. And if that is the case, there is plenty to enjoy.
The Human Surge 3 has its World Premiere at Locarno 76 in their Concorso internazionale section.
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