An Oversimplification of Her Beauty | Review

Precocious, self-consciously solipsistic, and quixotically ambitious, Terence Nance’s distinctive feature debut is a multimedia essay film about relationships – or, really, one of Nance’s relationships – that cannot adequately resolve nor communicate the complex angst at its core. It’s not for a lack of trying though; Nance employs every trick in his hyper-stylized arsenal to craft a veneer of intellectual auto-critique that is distinctly sprung from Tarnation‘s self-reflexive school of ‘look at my troubles.’ Where Caouette found empathy and tenderness, though, Nance only achieves sardonic lecturing. Ultimately killed by one of the most incessant and obnoxious voiceover tracks in recent memory, not to mention a Brooklyn hipster tendency toward literalness that almost always feels disingenuous, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is a chore from the beginning of the very first monologue.

The structure of Nance’s film is hinged on a conceit that involves the aforementioned narrator playing a chunk of Nance’s 2010 short film How Would You Feel? for several minutes, stopping it, ejecting the VHS tape to allow for a reel of Oversimplification proper to play, and then back to the short, and so on back-and-forth for the entire duration. The distinction between the two films is a bit difficult to discern, since the subject matter and editing style hasn’t changed much in the two-year interim, and this is most likely the point. Still grappling with a bout of unrequited love for his girlfriend-candidate Namik, this feature-length extension of his short is most effective when taken as the embodiment of a young man’s futile pursuit to win over someone’s affection, here magnified – as it so often is when it comes to first-time love – to its overzealous breaking point.

Inhibited by his overzealousness, Oversimplification is so ostentatiously produced that it reveals Nance’s primary concern for achieving creative notoriety in favor of exploring the emotions that spawned its production. Utilizing an rapidly regenerating amalgam of claymation, on-screen bullet notes, collaged stop-motion animation (in countless illustration styles), and a plethora of tacky video filters, the overall aesthetic and tone is akin to a student filmmaker who’s been told to “have fun with this one.” These tactics are applied to footage that is mostly comprised of reenactments of his memories surrounding his time with Namik, or first-hand documentary footage (e.g. video of a Q&A session after a public screening of How Do You Feel?, or Terence interviewing Namik about the experience of watching the short film), the latter of which yields all of the film’s high points because it lacks artifice.

Above all, however, the film is made and broken by its scripted voiceover, which probably runs over eighty percent of the running time. Read in a dry, sarcastic tone by a deep-voiced narrator, and speaking in rhythms that feel inspired by dub poetry as found in every poetry slam, the monologues range from self-help aphorisms to didactic addresses to ‘you’ (these could either be intended for the audience or taken as Nance’s thoughts to himself) to metrical run-on sentences spilling out from the diary of the world’s most pensive and angst-ridden teenager (“All of the rationale you formulate to explain her current disinterest in you is simply a way of ignoring your many faults,” ad infinitum). Intermittent electronic music selections add a bit of spunk as well as welcome respite from the verbal onslaught, and tidies up the wistful, urban tone that Nance is striving for (this is very much the product of an inner-city kid, for better and worse). ‘Personal’ to an overbearing fault, one is left regretting that Nance didn’t actually take seriously the second word of his film’s ironic title.

Reviewed on January, 29th, 2012 at the Sundance Film Festival – New Frontier Section.

94 Mins.

Rating 1.5 stars