There’s something admirable about art that doesn’t always take the easy way out. The best art is often complicated and difficult to fully parse on a first experience. They are messy, dirty even. Generation Well, a bold 18-minute short directed by Jack Serra that successfully juggles more than a handful of heavy themes and plays fast and loose with time and memory, takes no shortcuts. Sometimes it almost looks like Serra gives preferential treatment toward the difficult choice. And that’s why it works.
Stevie (Carly Tatiana Pandža) is down on her luck with a mysterious run-in with the law. She has a drug problem, her husband leaves her, and she begins obsessing over a cop who looks like her dead dad. The timelines play overtop of each other and what’s a memory in one timeline becomes a projection into the present in another. Editors Fernando Broce and Jack Serra favor a persistent chaotic tone over continuity. Less careful viewers may even find themselves lost in the fragmented memories and overlapping timelines. It’s not unlike a music video in the rejection of traditional verisimilitude.
The brilliance behind the style choice lay in the subject materials. Substance abuse and addiction, grief, and trauma all distort one’s experience of reality. They remove the afflicted from normality, to an extent. And the removal from traditional editing reinforces the psychology of this distortion. Carly Tatiana Pandža’s rich performance also typifies this psychological interest. She always seems to be distracted and half-present, as if her mind and body are split. She has fun with the role too. Her final outpouring of emotion at the climax comes from a place of truly investing in the role.
Serra denies the easy, cathartic ending too. Instead of everything working out for Stevie and her Protestant work ethic-ing (i.e. enduring) her way back to mundane happiness, when Generation Well ends, she is still in a place of tremendous pain, fear, and loneliness. Her losses are real; they aren’t erased. Her husband doesn’t come back and her dad is still dead. The ending Serra opts for is the more truthful one where not everything makes sense nor needs to. What matters profoundly more to the short film is the authenticity of the pain of Stevie’s grief and substance issues.
We need more films like Generation Well that don’t offer therapeutic solutions to social problems but instead empathetic windows into our own psychological turmoil and suffering.
Generation Well premiered at the LA Shorts International Film Festival.
