2:37 (2006)

Gus van Sant's Elephant is a fantastic movie, but 2:37 proves that copies of its style and content might not turn out as good. Thematically, these films are similar; alienated youth, high school numbness. But the director Murali Thalluri tries to emulate van Sant's film stylistically as well. Kids walking through dwindling corridors are filmed from behind, classical music, some ambient noise, the same moment filmed through the eyes of several different people. That's a bit embarrassing. But what is worse is that 2:37 is so focused on portraying problems that it almost stops being a film. It's more a sociology report, or, perhaps more to the point, an attempt at awareness raising. The characters have little life of their own beyond the problem that comes to define them (we've seen the gay kid who is portrayed as being just a gay kid in films before and, well, it's sad.) It's not a really bad film but one thing really bothered me, and that was the inclusion of quasi-documentary interviews. Those were totally redundant, provided us with excessive explanatory backgrounds and was a cheap way of creating "authenticity". And one might argue that some scenes in it are unnecessarily graphic.