Tabloid Vivant (2016)
Directed by: Kyle Broom
Written by: Kyle Broom
Starring: Amber Friendly, Jesse Woodrow, Tamzin Brown
Tabloid Vivant is a film starts off with an offbeat mood. There’s some jazz music followed by a brutal murder and then some wacky rear projection car driving scenes. Occasionally graphic inserts of magazines and restaurant menus are thrown in to add a little zest. You might think this sounds like some kind of zany caper about artistic types shacked up in the woods together with a dash of horror just for good measure. But this is only partially true. Tone is a major issue here and while stories like Frank and Inside Llewyn Davis have tackled similar material on the nature of art and artistic temperaments, this doesn’t really have that kind of focus. Instead they’ve opted to throw in all kinds of ideas to see what will stick.
Fame and fortune versus creativity, creators versus critics, art versus audiences… and paintings that are… alive? So it goes without saying that not all of this works. Sara (Tamzin Brown) is a writer for a magazine who finds herself stepping over certain professional boundaries after meeting Max (Jesse Woodrow). He’s a painter claiming to have revolutionary methods but it all sounds a bit like painting by numbers to her. But that’s because his explanation does come across that way. After dropping her current boyfriend to write about the this process she becomes the subject for his radical portrait technique. Both will find they’re putting a little too much of themselves into the project as things progress.
The romantic conflict is dropped early on, which means that in places it feels as if scenes have been cut. Rob (Chris Carlisle) is introduced during a flashback in the first act as Max’s friend during a bit of Valentine’s Day drama. He seems to be a main character initially. But the story forgets all about him until the last minute. The pacing and structure is more than a little off balance here. In terms of style on the other hand it’s also a mixed bag. There are flashes of the script itself appearing on screen in places, while in other moments black and white photography is used. Perhaps the idea is that art is supposed to look arty? The results are just distracting when everything else is played so seriously.
The cast are all fine generally speaking . But it’s as though these visual gimmicks have been added in place of quirky performances that would have made things genuinely feel offbeat. Unfortunately the dialogue isn’t very engaging when it’s half domestic bickering and half technical jargon. As Sara says herself in one easel side discussion ‘who’s gonna care about all this abstract talk about pixels?’ It’s as if she’s asking on behalf of the viewer. Several different debates about digital media and colour theory are included, but this just grinds everything to a halt more than once. Just talk about why the paintings are moving… and what kind of effect it’s having on her grey matter when she stares into the oddly soupy canvas.
In terms of horror the atmosphere is generally lacklustre. It doesn’t help that the sinister artwork itself is just a digital animation effect that looks like they’ve taken Shepard Fairey‘s Hope and merged it with other images by morphing everything into squares. There’s a lot of time spent hiding this off camera with characters reacting to what they see. At first it seems as though they’re imagining things since the pictures Max has created are never shown in frame with the actors. But it really is just a weird mutating picture and it’s never explained beyond all the endless theory dialogue. Something as strange should have been shown having slow effects on the artist and the subject. In the end any sort of conclusion feels rushed.
Putting your heart and soul into a project beyond the figure of speech is a really neat idea. But the execution just isn’t very effective. Max and Sara have some characterisation but it’s not fleshed out beyond surface delineation. The tortured artist complains about his plight as well as his relationship problems, and the fussy journalist struggles to get the drafts down for her publisher in time. The initial murder adds a lot of Black Dahlia imagery to the proceedings, hinting at darker things to come as Sara visits locations linked to the real life crime. However it doesn’t really go anywhere or have a pay off, making Sara’s more obsessive and narcissist side feel like a tangent without enough ties to the story.
The characters might reel off lines about vanity and creativity every so often, so it’s a bit strange when the film itself is ultimately left without that much to say. When things really go off the deep end it seems to finally be heading somewhere interesting, but the last few scenes are pretty brief without having much to add. The love triangle does eventually rear its head for a quick bit of melodrama at least. But the visions, ill health and all of the compulsive behaviour never really form a solid plot line or a memorably creepy experience. If the characters were more deranged and the pacing was more brisk it might have potential. Unfortunately like the experimental canvasses at the centre of the story this all feels a bit messy and unfinished.
Rating: 
Bronson