SYSTEM OF UNITS (2004, short, IndieFlix, runtime: 22 mins., director: Richie Mehta)

“In an online world, people have forgotten how to connect…”

System of Units opens with this convincing post-apocalyptic premise. The world’s gone totally virtual, with nary a moment to waste. Human beings are connected exclusively via the Net-Work (yes, written just like that!) and even the merest of muscular exertions, like fashioning words into sentences in one’s mouth, is an extraneous chore which been cleverly evolved out of our bipedal species. Human touch has been rendered non-existent, peoples’ emotions and passions have been outlawed, and human sympathy is a fossilized relic of a now-forgotten bygone era.

The short’s characters now live in pod-like dwellings below ground. They are forbidden from going Topside by the Net-Work, even though rumors abound of the fate of those denizens who dared to defy the omnipresent Net-Work by wending their way through the labyrinthine tunnels and back channels leading towards the surface. While there, they would be relentlessly dogged by the Net-Work’s minions and summarily assassinated, all for the simple crime of craving the warm embrace of the sun, a sighting of color, and a chance to greet those legendary souls who succeeded in shucking off the Net-Work’s monotonous tyranny and had the spherical sac of venom to boldly rebel.

Messing (played by Asim Wali) is our hero. One of the diligent worker drones, he’s lately felt the latent stirrings of his nearly-extinguished humanity. Messing feels something for “the Girl” (played by the lovely Pragna Desai) — a sentiment he can’t yet properly articulate because this “dangerous” word has been purged from his memory banks. He attempts to summon her attentions away from the all-knowing, all-seeing awareness of the Net-Work, but even though she notices the Girl doesn’t seem to comprehend his need to reach out to her; for she, too, is bereft of the necessary emotions that would enable her to appreciate Messing’s gushing ardor. Their colleagues and “friends” at the pod observe what’s been steadily happening to Messing, but for now they chalk it up to a mere “maintenance” problem which can be patched up at the turn of a screwdriver.

Messing’s, though, is one of the exceptionally rare few to have surfaced Topside several times in the past without getting caught. Above-ground, he peels back the layers of that stultifying greyness which is the suffocating burlap uniform he wears while at work, breathing in the fresh air and brazenly daring to use his mouth to “talk,” an act punishable by the Net-Work with an unspecified sentence. During this latest attempt to rendez-vous with Color, a rebel, Color hands Messing the most sublime object imaginable — a daffodil — which he intends to give to his beloved Girl. Stuffing it into his sleeve for the long trek back, he absconds from the abandoned sunny moonscape which is Topside.

Messing’s longings, however, grow more intense and intrusive. He begins to day dream…gingerly, at first, but then at night as well, and vividly. He imagines himself actually speaking to the Girl, ballroom dancing, in fact, dressed in completely different clothes, and deeply in love. When he voices his descriptions of his dreams with the pod-mates, they’re beyond aghast. “You had a dream?!” they spit out. “How is that even possible? You should go and have that fixed,” they admonish him. Yet Messing’s dreams refuse to cease, and he grows more recalcitrant and upstart as the clarity of what he sees while asleep plague him during his every waking moment. He seems no longer under control.

All this builds to a climax one day in the canteen. Messing must have the Girl. He dares to reach out and touch her hand, which everyone can’t help but see, and a collective gasp goes up from the crowd. Sirens and alarm bells shatter the sanitized silence of the room until the cognitive ache — triggered by the Net-Work — of the act he has just inexplicably committed sinks in for all concerned. He suffers a rupture, and all who are present become witness to Messing’s systematic breakdown.

In his act of defiance, Messing has somehow triumphed over the Net-Work, unprepared and incapable it was to process the magnitude of our man’s violation. It leaves the assembled stunned beyond words, an event that will likely affect them forever. Their uneventful humdrum lives as children of the Net-Work will never be the same again.

What I enjoyed most about this short?

Toronto: System of Units was shot in my hometown, so right off the bat I’ve got something to kvell about. The production values were “big city,” without the big city price tag…a clever choice on the part of the filmmakers, Poor Man’s Productions. I also gather that most of the actors in this piece were friends of the director, with everyone seeming really keen during the shoot.

Acting: For non-professional actors, Wali and Desai played off each other marvelously. Mehta somehow got them to tap into a vein of energy that manifested itself onscreen with electrifying power: again, and as I’ve said all-along, never an easy feat to achieve in such a short period of time with screen minutes weighing in at such a premium. I was moved.

Plot: A very plausible storyline. As we hurtle today mindlessly towards the globe’s virtual future, Mehta was right in demonstrating how we’ve almost forgotten how to actually speak to each other. Words have somehow become a burden and emotions are that heavy anchor which drags us helplessly down a rabbit hole. Human contact — even today — is almost verboten. If you don’t witness hints of this in your daily existence already, then you’re not paying attention to the signs. It almost like society is saying: why confront someone about a problem when you can just as easily fire off a blase SMS? Why deal with challenges when you can just as soon brandish your “fury” through passive-aggressive emails and hidden meanings? Why entangle yourself with unpredictable human relationships when the machine can tie up your intellect for hours on end, animating your day without any of the emotional baggage?

If we’re not there as a society, we’re getting perilously close with the passing of each hyper-developed, meth-ed-up, month.

A quick squizz at Richie Mehta‘s IMDb,com profile shows he hasn’t shot or written anything since 2007! That’s not exactly dog’s years in the film biz, and taking into consideration the average indie project takes about three-plus years to incubate, my synapses are telling me he’s incubating something set to break out soon.

A short personal anecdote: I recall bumping into Richie and his assembled actors and crew at the then-Montreal International Film Festival back in 2004 as they were shopping around their short film, Amal, which was subsequently made into a feature by the same name.  Great job, guys! I didn’t know that…

But if I’m wrong, and both Amal and System of Units mark the end of the line for Richie Mehta, it’s a damn crying shame because by the emergence of these two films, here walked a truly promising talent.

And here’s the Amal trailer, in case you’re curious.

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CATNAPPING (2009, feature, IndieFlix, runtime: 86 mins., director: Thorsten Chris Gritschke, trailer)

It’s not often I watch a European movie which has the capacity to crossover into the film-going mainstream. You know, a film that tells a story appealing not only to an overly-ponderous serious European crowd, but one which is willing to pony up real money to give the film a shot of breaking even and — G.od forbid — making a profit at the box office.

Yet Thomas Chris Gritschke‘s Catnapping is one clever little tale, and his protagonist Otto, played convincingly and hilariously by American actor Ian Lyons, is a leading anti-hero all of us can somehow relate to.

Set bizarrely in Brussels, Belgium, Europe’s sleepy capital with the decidedly infamous reputation for being Europe’s most mind-numbingly boring city, Otto is set to kickstart a ho-hum internship with his uncle Frank’s (played by the deadpanning Ted Fletcher) video-production company, StarVision. This is Otto’s big break into the local Belgian industrial video market. But poor Otto is a dude without a mission: early on, we’re left wondering why the hell he’s even in this do-nothing town in the first instance, and moreover, what exactly does he plan to do with this idiotic job, a position he appears completely unqualified for although no one seems to notice, least of all Frank?

Otto is a dreamer, but an idle one. For now, he’s content to merely coast along, sailing under the radar, happy to humor Frank during their joint editing sessions as the latter waxes poetically about the old days when he didn’t have to bust his butt to earn his daily nut. Now, as Franks recounts, SuperVision has to work twice as hard to land a marketing account, which is the reason why he’s decided to inject fresh talent in this moribund operation. Ah, so that’s why Otto’s here. Now it all makes sense. Or does it..?

Given that Otto has zero marketable skills, save for spinning some mighty convicing yarns and fibbing the pants off of everyone, can this be the end of our movie? Hardly.

Stuffed at the office and totally clusterfucked in his personal life, Otto dragoons his childhood buddy Lars (Ran Yaniv) into his plan to shoot and cut “the best industrial video ever!” O. cooks up a cockamamie scheme to break into Frank’s Fort Knox-like office to steal a mayonnaise-producing machine that promises to grant him and Lars precisely the corporate advantage they need to kickstart the money flow at the newly christened Atomium Productions. Yet the moment Otto dons his black balaclava and cracks the seal on Frank’s door with his crowbar is the very instant all hell breaks loose in Catnapping.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, and during one of his frequent jaunts into town looking for a bit of excitement in this one-horse town, Otto takes notice of Maria (played by the ultra-charismatic Valérie Muzzi), an underachieving “Madame Pi-Pi” (Belgian washroom attendant) harboring distant dreams of becoming a sophisticated airline stewardess. Fed up with the pittance she earns cleaning human waste off of the latrines, she’s in desperate need of a new gig. Otto has the eye for her so he proceeds to do everything in his power, short of an outright bribe, during his subsequent visits to the toilet to concince her to go out with him. Yet Maria isn’t even budging. In fact, she couldn’t care less! So bribes her (yep!) with the promise of a sweet job offer as he overhears how Frank’s in search of additional hands-on-deck to help SuperVision process their new overflow after fortuitiously landing several hot accounts. When Maria hammers her interview, Otto’s apparently in like Flynn and yet another step in his plan falls into place. Or does it…?

Out of the blue, Frank shocks Otto with the recorded evidence of Otto’s earlier vandalism. Rather than can him on the spot, Frank oddly congratulates his nephew for his brilliant business coup in helping to land one of Frank’s more recalcitrant clients. Not knowing how exactly to react, Otto, aghast, thanks his uncle profusely, vowing to never attempt similar shenanigans again after fobbing Frank off on some silly excuse about testing the security procedures at the office. Frank buys it.

Back and forth, one thing after another, and Otto, in time, succeeds in doing what he does best, which is totally screw up. In short order, he loses his job at SuperVision, compromises his long-standing friendship with Lars after betraying his trust during one of their jobs, and finally destroys any chance he has whatsoever with Maria following a pair of otherwise promising passionate dates over drinks and sultry conversation. Unable to sink any lower, O. begs the assistance of his pot-smoking (and cuckolded) detective friend Karl (the all-too-funny Stefan Sattler) for some work to shatter his bordeom. Karl quickly puts Otto to work surveiling his ex-wife, while Otto uses this opportunity to enact another plan he has in mind, which is to win Maria back and regain his respectability with her, Lars, and Frank.

As for how he fares in this mission, well, that’s what you’ll have to catch the movie for.

What I enjoyed about this film?

Catnapping was unique in that it marked the first time in a while I’ve seen an all-European non-mainstream picture that I didn’t have the sudden urge to want to flip right off after being cheesed right off. The dialogues were snappy and well-penned and I, for one, appreciated the combination of European actors playing opposite American actors in a casting selection that’s not often attempted on the Continent. When’s the last time European actors were permitted to plainly be and sound just like themselves when starring opposite American ones? Think back now, really…

Gritschke does such a marvelous job with his casting that we’re locked into this story from the get-go. The actors do a stellar job in selling us on the plot, one which hardly seems contrived, and — like I said — rare in its compellingness for a European indie flick.

I found both Stefan Sattler and Valérie Muzzi to be extraordinary underdog finds who deserve a chance to portray roles in even larger productions. Sattler’s asides as Karl were so typically phlegmatically Belgian French — as per my personal experience — that I couldn’t help but admire him. Muzzi possessed that hard to find quality of being totally impossible to peg: where is this girl from? What does she sound like? And, haven’t I seen her before? As Maria, Muzzi was more than the girl-next-door and it’s so clear why Otto falls for her like a blathering fool. She’s so lovely and what a casting score for Gritschke.

After 86 minutes of viewing, the Brussels of Catnapping seems so much more beautiful than the city I’d personally experienced many years ago, and therein lies this film’s magic.

Another sensational IndieFlix find.

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Yes, I realize it’s Saturday…but still!