Smile, Candid Camera Is on You

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The New York Sun

Conceived by low-budget comedy director Adam Rifkin (“Detroit Rock City”), “Look” uses a highly creative gimmick to turn a chain reaction of seemingly unrelated social transgressions into a kind of dirty joke on humanity. The movie takes as its premise the pervasive gaze of surveillance cameras in every corner of American life. (The film’s trailer would have you believe that the average American is filmed nearly 200 times a day.) To illustrate, almost every shot in the film’s 98-minute running time is viewed as if through one of those cheap, lo-fi cams — often from cocked angles at a clinical remove, with blurry resolution and video artifacts degrading the image. At least, the scenes begin that way. The effect feels a little avant-garde, turning the viewer into a surrogate for the passive eye lurking in the shopping mall dressing room, the parking garage, the convenience store, the hotel corridor, the corporate office break room, the police car dashboard, and the ATM.

Though Mr. Rifkin introduces an array of characters scattered across these locations — individuals defined by the secrets and lies that are captured on tape — plenty of time elapses before their stories kick in: The different cameras assert an unexpected authority, and each has its own peculiar “voice.” Not that the director is shy about exploiting his concept for voyeuristic thrills. The first scene flaunts two suburban teenage girls stripping naked and outrageously flirting with each other in the dressing room of a department store, one managed by a serial sexual harasser who enjoys stockroom quickies with most of the female staff he supervises. Also on display are a married father of two carrying on a homosexual affair; a pedophile stalker; a pair of thieves known as the “Candid Camera Killers”; a convenience store counter jockey; his deadbeat moocher buddy and his estranged girlfriend (shades of “Clerks”), and the high school teacher whose marriage to a very pregnant wife is endangered by a frisky Lolita who won’t take no for an answer.

The interlocking situations are reminiscent of the food-chain anthropology of Paul Haggis’s “Crash,” though played more for smirk and irony than liberal piety. You won’t find any marquee actors gunning for Oscar nominations, nor does the coolly detached mise-en-scène encourage much affection for the characters. They really do seem like chess pieces to be deployed by a dispassionate god. As the various plots twist and turn, so does the viewer’s perception of the film. Is it “The Office” as might have been made over by Kieslowski into a “Decalog”-style moral tragedy? Or is it a sub-Judd Apatow sex comedy by way of Mike Figgis’s “Timecode,” a 2000 digital experiment that used a four-way split screen to follow simultaneous, overlapping stories? “Look” is both — and somehow neither. The conceptual game tends to reduce the actors to stick figures and locks the narrative into a predictable arc in which nearly everyone makes the absolute worst choice and everything ends badly, though the whole thing is tinged with a kind of sophomoric pleasure in the failure of human nature. Imagine a Kevin Smith version of “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.”

Mr. Rifkin possibly means for the heavy turn of events to give us creepy vibes, though in his moral universe it’s the minimum-wage slackers who inherit the world. The director looks after his own. But after seeing his movie, the rest of us will be looking over our shoulders. If it’s less an artistic statement than it appears to be, “Look” is a healthy reminder that paranoia is not always a bad thing. Just because you can’t see anyone doesn’t mean they can’t see you.


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