Director: Juan Pablo Montagut
Writer: Juan Pablo Montagut
Cast: Hazel Ameli & Dani de Groot
Running time: 6mins
Why does everyone speak in the same way during a perfume commercial? Even when a company springs for a name actor, known for their power to emote through their voice, everything ultimately boils down to the same, cold, lifeless monotony.
In many cases, it boils down to what an advert is actually for: selling you the product, by suggesting its presence in your life will in some way connect you to the ineffable coolness of the people you see in the ad. They need to be aloof, unknowable, aspirational in their anonymity. In the depths of their hidden persona, they could be anybody, and that anybody might as well be you.
The only thing which could shatter this, is the opportunity for the actor to make choices with their performance. Doing so might just reveal that actually the reason we gravitate to these stars is not their charisma, but the miscellaneous bottle of scent they’ve been paid to hawk you; or (because actors do sometimes get things wrong when swinging for the fences in a performance), it might tie the product, and consumers, to some vicarious sense of vulnerability – and who needs that? And as a result, commercials pay big bucks for the likes Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Charlize Theron, Chris Hemsworth or Brad Pitt to turn up, look gorgeous, and all flatly honk the same asinine ad-copy to viewers.
I hate it, but an ad’s an ad – they are built to do a job, and they clearly work to that end.
Capsule is not an ad – it is a short film about the fashion industry, whose only job is to sell me on its story; to make me want to know more about this world, and how these characters interact with it. And for its most interesting minute, it flirts with doing just that – hinting at a challenge to this world’s aspirational blandness for one tantalising moment.
“Indifference is the greatest aphrodisiac,” murmurs Hazel Ameli as Luna – in her best apathetic advert voice. “But no one can resist being vulnerable forever.”
Up until now, the action has been well lit to a fault – the dazzling high definition frame leaving almost nothing to the imagination in every corner of our field of vision. And in that frame, Luna and her photographer Keith (Dani de Groot) have been rigidly bland together – boiled down to the essence of a perfume commercial; two impeccably dressed, good looking people, mumbling in monotones.
But after her latest dissection of the artificial detachment at the heart of the equation, suddenly she finds herself silhouetted against strobe lighting in a dark space, opposite Keith. As the flashing lights dance across their faces, they move together to unite in an irresistible kiss.
It is interesting that, considering the superficial attraction the two could clearly have experienced in the well-lit studio, it is only in the moments where there is a layer of obscurity that they finally seek each other out. The desire is not to engage with the curated image they have each built up, but to explore the hidden depths of the vulnerable person behind that façade. This is also hinted at earlier (albeit, in the context of the fashion industry, in a slightly suspect manner) by Keith taking significantly more interest in his model when she is obscured, just a silhouette behind a curtain.
But just as soon as the film seems to hint that it might be going somewhere more challenging, the wall is hastily reconstructed. Rather than the chance to see how the pair interact once they have moved beyond the smouldering facial expressions and safe indifference of fashion, how they confront the fear and discomfort they now face in their newfound vulnerability, the pair are reframed in all their flat, high-resolution, ultimately bland glory.
The last question from Keith, a toneless “Why’d you come here last night?” hangs over them as they each go their immaculate, separate ways. Strolling through town, basking in the golden-hour light, anonymous forgettable guitar chords cycle on repeat, while Luna and Keith seemingly compete to see who can appear the most unfussed.
All this, blended with the beautifully rendered, yet tedious footage from before the tryst; and the borderline inaudible mumbling of Ameli as she fights back any hint of emotion in her narration; make it feel like there wasn’t really any intent to ask bigger questions about human emotion, or the hopes and fears of budding romance. More, that this was the bare minimum needed for a six-minute showreel for the director to break into advertising work.
If that was the case, I wish the director good luck, and all the best. But even to that end, there is so little invention with the positioning of the camera, its movement, or even the blocking of performers, that it feels much more thought is also needed for anyone to buy what the filmmaker is selling.
There are plenty of ‘bad’ films out there, which misfire because they bite off more than they can chew. But that kind of misadventure is always more forgivable to me than a competent middle-of-the-road affair with disinterest in storytelling all together. Capsule smacks of a skin-deep project more concerned with its looks than its content – and subsequently yields one of the dullest six minutes I have encountered with Indy Film Library.
