On the latest episode of Reel Shorts, guest critic, Cynthia Fuchs of PopMatters looks at writer/director Terrence Nance’s dreamy relationship drama, The Oversimplification of Her Beauty.
I May Never Be Sure of My Disbelief
“How do you salvage that?” asks Namik (Namik Minter). By “that,” she means a broken relationship, one she’s been asked to remember by way of how it made her feel. “Hurt disappointed, confused,” she says, “All the bad adjectives you can attach to a romantic relationship.” The process of salvaging that looks so impossible might only be imagined, she adds, as a balance of logic and emotions. “I don’t think there’s a way,” she sighs.
Namik’s dilemma isn’t precisely of her own making. but is instead a formulation born of her role here, as the fictionalized version of herself (that is, Minter), conjured by her own performance for the film, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, and also conjured by the filmmaker Terence Nance. As they collaborate on this fiction of a documentary, as a means to sort out some truth about who they’ve been and who they might be in connection to one another, both appear in frame. They face the camera and sit back from it, comfortable in their closeness. He’s asking questions that you don’t hear, but see typed over the screen. She answers questions and also poses her own, wondering about what they’re doing as they’re doing it.
Such emphasis on process shapes the film, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, which is less a single film than several films together, broken into sections that are narrated (by Nance, Reg E. Cathey as a version of the Nance character, Minter, and Ruby Amanze as the Minter character), numbered and titled… and sometimes introduced with the quaint device of a “Pause” and then an “Eject” notice, the blue screen evoking that ancient technology, videotape. The mix of times and plots and genres is compounded by another mix, types of imagery that include hand-drawn animation, handheld doc-style footage, grainy video, photos, text, and claymation, particularly striking when models of Minter and Nance watch their 2D fleshly images projected on a screen, puppets imagining themselves at a screening of a version of the very film you’re watching.
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