An Oversimplification of Her Beauty

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Technically dazzling, "An Oversimplification of Her Beauty" is an exercise in experimental filmmaking and self-indulgent self-analysis. It combines footage of people playing themselves talking about their fictional (or not) interpersonal relations with an astonishing array of different types of animation, underscored by a rumbling narrator who speaks about romantic couplings as if he were a scientist looking at microbes.

I have to give credit to write/director/star/editor Terence Nance, who certainly has an eye for startling visuals and mind-tripping imagery. What this movie has is originality in spades. What it lacks is any sense of coherence or obligation of engagement to its audience.

Nance actually made a short film, "How Would You Feel?", upon which this is an expansion. The narrator tells us this and advises us that the new film will interrupt the shorter one from time to time in order to illuminate it. There are even freeze-frames lit up with "Eject" and "Play" titles to make us further aware of this film within a film.

So what is it all about? Mostly, as near as I can determine, it's about Nance himself — specifically his inability to connect with women in any sort of way resembling permanence. This is all done in a pseudo-intellectual way meant to pretend to show us emotional distance from these events that does not in fact exist.

The first film was presented as fictional, but the latter film reveals there actually was a relationship with his main counterpart, Namik Minter. Later in the proceedings, we see footage of the two of them in an intimate moment (apparently undressed) as Nance films them — asking her questions and hearing her answer how she felt about their relationship being portrayed in the first film.

At one point, he even turns over his camera and editing service to her control, and we see the trailer for her (unmade) film answering his own.

More interesting (but not much) are the long animated sequences, utilizing a variety of different styles from stop-motion to abstract drawing. While interesting to look at, they are merely further extensions of the ongoing self-absorption accompanied by that increasingly grating narration, which turns into a drone that one doesn't even bother to follow after a while.

For example, after Nance resolves to write about his romantic problems, the narrator says thusly:

"In reality, you cannot write about the situation without recalling the emotions it provoked. Unfortunately, the painful ones reconstitute themselves the most firmly, brutally beating all the endless conversations and comfortable silences."

On several occasions, the narrator's voice morphs into Nance's own, further underlining that no matter what we're watching at any given time, we stay firmly inside his head, which is where he seems most comfortable.

1.5 Yaps