Give veteran writer-director Adam
Rifkin (The Chase, Detroit Rock City)
credit for knowing how to hook an audience with a weak gimmick. Rifkin's film Look intends to comment on the lack of
privacy in modern life by presenting a handful of loosely intertwined stories
shot from the perspective of security cameras. The opening scene takes place in
a department-store dressing room, where two high-school girls strip down to
their underpants and talk about whether they should bleach their buttholes. A
few scenes later, Look follows a corporate nerd as he picks his nose and farts in an elevator.
A few scenes after that, Rifkin shows a policeman getting beaten up and thrown
into the trunk of a car. Which all really makes a strong point, because… Wait,
what were we talking about again?
The main problem with Look is that—security-cam shtick
aside—the basic structure of the movie is just another Magnolia/Crash-style narrative tapestry, only with
far cruder strands. One of the half-naked teenyboppers plots to seduce her
teacher. The geeky cubicle-dweller suffers the pranks of colleagues. Two
thrill-killers rampage across the city. A convenience-store clerk dreams of
becoming a rock star. A married lawyer has an affair with another man. A
pedophile stalks a child in the same mall where a floor manager screws all his
female employees. Filmed by security cameras or not, nearly all these
characters behave—and talk—like people in a movie.
Nevertheless, Look's approach has its advantages. The
film has a distinctive look, and the performances play out in extended scenes
with a rhythm more like live theater than cinema. Rifkin clearly means to
exploit the audience's voyeuristic impulse, and when he has two characters ding
a car in a parking lot and mutter, "Did anybody see?", it's fleetingly funny,
but also just a little heavy, philosophically speaking. But aside from a
smattering of irony and a resolution for one of the storylines, the security
cameras aren't really threaded into Look's essential purpose. If the idea is that we're
always being watched, why does it seem that in this movie, no one's really
paying attention?