[yasr_overall_rating]
A painter and an art critic who romanticize each other’s obsession with fame decide to collaborate on a project they believe will revolutionize the art world. They are determined to make a painting come to life, even if it kills them.
Art literally comes to life in this film that explores two people’s obsession with making a statement and making it big in the art world. It’s a he and she love story that is your typical amour fou, with conceptual art as their emotional and intellectual bond. She (Tamzin Brown) is Sara Speed, an art critic who falls for him because he, Maximilien Klinkau (Jesse Woodrow), is an artist who has developed a radical art form that magically combines paintings with digital animation. His paintings are in constant motion (or alive, hence the ‘vivant’ of the film’s title) as they echo and interpret the stories he imbues them with using the digital voodoo. This art even draws in the thoughts of those who view the paintings, utterly transfixed by what they see. Uh huh.
The film starts off with a protracted tableau of confusing events relating to the shocking murder of Elizabeth Short, better known as the ‘Black Dahlia,’ an unsolved crime that shook 1940s Hollywood. Our wide-eyed artist becomes fixated with the story in one improbable scene as he paints. And somehow there is a connection between the Black Dahlia and his own muse, Sara, which is clear only to him. This theme crops up a few times during the film, although I’ll be damned if I understood clearly why. Their chemistry is all pretend as their narcissism runs rife and the story unfolds, without adding much to the narrative or any empathy we have for them. The two eventually descend into madness as his art consumes them – but of course. There is plenty of obsession here, in that artsy, anguished way which is the hallmark of any third-rate thriller about artists and their so-called ‘process.’
The less said about the film’s (mis)direction by Kyle Broom, the better. The film is a poor construct and poorly constructed, with a screenplay, also by Broom, that is confused and implausible and the cinematic equivalent of a pre-schooler’s finger daubings. The acting, like the film, is amateurish. Brown is a mannered, self-conscious English actress who is frankly terrible as Sara. There’s a risible scene in which she prances around the chandeliered corridors and darkened ballrooms of an upmarket hotel one night filming herself with a cellphone camera for whatever bloody reason, and it’s textbook cringe-worthy bad overacting. Woodrow is not any better, playing at every tortured, iconoclastic artist cliché. Even the way he slouches around, all paint-splattered and shoulder shrugs, is affected and unconvincing. The music score is an ode to jarring bad choices. What is it with dreary chamber music and ironic country music always appearing in sub-par indie fare? And this film packs in both. The only commendable production values are the visual effects used in the paintings, which are surprisingly effective and well done for a film with so limited a budget and so otherwise devoid of any artistic flair.
It is not enough to try to be bold and experimental in cinema. It isn’t, whatever film festivals and indie filmmakers might wish to foist on us and pass off as ‘arthouse.’ You still need to tell a story, and tell that story well. This tedious and unconvincing little pseudo-thriller fails miserably at both, with a title as pretentious as the film and its characters. There is a lot of talk between Sara and Maximilien about the meaning of art and how his revolutionary art form will change the whole concept of art, only for her to throw it back in his face, reminding him of how fickle the art world can be. Yes, how true that is, not to mention how fickle my attention span became watching this pile of breathless, artless dross.
