MPAA Rating: NR
Director: Terence Nance
FilmPulse Score: 6/10
Terence Nance’s debut feature An Oversimplification of Her Beauty was a standout at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, generating a lot of buzz and critical acclaim – enough to bring on Wyatt Cenec and Jay-Z to executive produce. The film is a idiosyncratic look at (what on the surface seems to be) a banal instance in, writer/director and also star of the film, Nance’s life; told through an artistically imaginative array of live-action and animation styles with doses of self-referential humor An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is not your standard film. It is something uniquely original, which is refreshing in the current landscape of semi-stagnation in independent film.
It’s hard to categorize An Oversimplification… as a film or, better yet, find a category within film to fully encapsulate the film’s intentions. As I said, on the surface and in the beginning, through the use of voice-over narration (of which there are two narrators), Nance lays out the film’s intention – to present the viewer a series of moments in Nance’s life and then asking the question ‘How would you feel?’ The details of these moments are repeated throughout the film and are as follows:
You’ve just arrived home after a bad day. You’re broke and lonely, even though you live in the biggest and busiest city in America. You do, however, have one cause for mild optimism: you seem to have captured the attention of an intriguing young lady. You’ve rushed home to clean your apartment before she comes over. In your haste, you see that you’ve missed a call. There’s a voice mail; she tells you that she won’t be seeing you tonight.
How would you feel?
A seemingly banal occurrence that has probably happened at some point in your life. Most of us would move on with life, but Nance has decided to use this opportunity to obsessively analyze and dissect the moment, plus the moments before and after, or rather the memory of these moments. Which snowballs into an inspired introspection of sorts, wherein Nance over-analyzes his past romantic relationships. In short, he Larry Davids the history of his emotions, his relationships and numerous other minute moments searching for an explanation. Nance plays therapist to himself, but through art and the results range from gentle, enchanting beauty to tiresome, redundant melodrama.
Distinctive styles of animation are employed to recount the individual women in Nance’s romantic past and all are extremely effective in enhancing the look and feel of the film. Through the use of crudely hand-drawn characters, a stop-motion marionette to beautifully crafted watercolors Nance’s film radiates an aura of intimacy and vulnerability; displaying, unfettered, all his fears, failings, emotions and memories. An Oversimplification… is an ambitious and unabashed look at one’s own state of emotional development, past and present.
Once again An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is, by no means, a film for everyone. Is it really even a film? It’s more akin to a journal entry or an artistic, excessive rumination of a fleeting moment in one’s life. Whether you love it or hate it, Nance’s debut is in no way short of ambition or creativity; it is always fresh and original while incorporating numerous techniques and styles – a sort-of cinematic mixtape (soundtracked wonderfully by Flying Lotus, I might add). An Oversimplification of Her Beauty does ruminate to point of exhaustion at certain points, but it is hard to deny an appreciation for Terence Nance’s stylized attempt at emotional transparency through cinematic lyricism.
