The Chilean film
Optical Illusions begins with brilliant absurdity, paying direct service to its title:
We start with a blurry image that never manages to focus, the viewpoint of a young man whose sight is restored after more than 30 years of blindness... sorta. That full focus never materializes, and so he is stuck with not being truly blind, and the ostricism he gets from his old friends, while not benefiting from sight, either.
The insurance company that helped fund that inadequate operation is facing financial ruin, and is forced to cut back on employees, while offering them 50% off for plastic surgery as a way of fleecing their own people for extra cash. One of the morose employees we meet finds herself overseeing what will eventually become a halfway house for those on the way to being fired, euphemistically called Outplacement Services.
Her brother finds a job as a security guard in a mall, which is joyfully laid back. Armed with a toy gun, he surveys shoppers until he comes across what seems to be a shoplifter, a woman who will eventually have him fixing her pipes in her miniature mansion.
We get to follow an executive who, naturally because he has a conscience, is one of the people now stuck in out-placement. He is a Jew by blood but not by creed, although his son is eager to recapture the faith of his ancestors, even to the point of chatting with a rabbi in New York over the internet.
These people further interlace through intermediary characters, and there is genuine mirth for the first hour or so as one optical illusion after another passes before our eyes as if in a collage: the ink blot during the security guard's interview and his standard-issue toy pistol, the pretense of affection characters have for another, the seeming nakedness of someone who is shown to be partly clothed once an obstructing head moves out of view, the new ad campaign that hopes to revitalize the failing company (which is based on a lie). All of these and more that I either don't want to spoil or can't remember come parading past you, and it's fun to find them all.
The isolation the characters feel, too, is almost palpable; they seem tortured by their own unmet desires for beauty, attention, love, and sight, and life seems to have punished them for daring to try to meet these desires. But past the hour mark things seem to grind to a halt. We've left some characters alone for far too long, and some of them never get the play they should have to make them truly impact the story. Their zombie-like following of their desires suddenly falls flat when the movie seems to shrug and says "well, there you have it!", never quite rewarding us for our time spent during the building of all these interesting personas.
The last shot lasts only a few seconds, then the credits roll, as if there was a mistake in editing, but it's endemic of my problem with the film: such a strong beginning demanded much more than a final act which is the last gulp of air finally seeping from a once gloriously ostentatious balloon.
If you're willing to be let down by the final act's freely spinning wheels, you will at least be rewarded with some cleverness early on. Otherwise, be warned that the saddest illusion of this film is the same early cleverness.
Since the trailer shouldn't truly affect someone's impression of the film it advertises for, I'll include a comment about it in a postscript: The title of this movie is doubly apt because the
trailer for this film is an illusion, making you feel like it's some 4th wall breaking
sudamericano Wes Anderson at work, when it really is there to sell the movie. There are still strange, isolating shots that are funny and interesting to look at, but they often have little payoff, despite the sharpness of the trailer's editing. This trailer obeys my personal rule about trailers, which is that a bad trailer usually warns you about a bad movie, while a good trailer doesn't mean a damn thing.
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