Igor Yankilevich's "The Rainbow Room" opens with a series of fade-ins and fade-outs, dreamy camera blinks which set up both the sleepy tone of his film and the hazy semi-consciousness of his main characters. They're a gang of agitated drug users, holed up in the scrappy room of a derelict warehouse, waiting on a "friend" to drop them a supply of drugs. It's midnight. The gang struggle to stay awake, torn between the need for sleep and the desire to score another quick fix.
At first glance "The Rainbow Room" seems primed to tap into a certain brand of intolerable cinema; the mid 1990's "drug movie", in which foul mouthed urban youths snort coke, inject heroin, trade hip swear words and pose macho for the camera ("Hate", "Trainspotting", "Reservoir Dogs", "Pulp Fiction", "Clockers", "Requiem For A Dream" etc). Director Igor Yankilevich is up to other things, though. With just a few carefully placed props he conjures up the world of classic noirs, with their sparse rooms, midnight skylines, jazzy ambiance, blinking neon bulbs, street urchins and lonely losers of the night. But more than anything, Yankilevich understands the romance of noir and the camaraderie noir evokes, the genre's pitiable heroes perpetually huddling together in the face of the night.
What Yankilevich's cast are hiding from is never explained, but it needn't be. Noir has always carried a certain, unspoken, existential weight. And so they sit and wait for that which they hope will bring sweet escape. What the film stresses, though – and in this way it recalls Altman's "A Prairie Home Companion" - is not so much the toll such "escapes" take on the body (one kid in the film nearly dies of an overdose) and mind (they're clearly on edge, spiralling out of control), but that human connection, kinship (even the camaraderie of film-making itself) and empathy are what ultimately proves to be the best means of staving off the night.
In this regard, Yankilevich spends most of the film engaging in nice contrasts. Moments of bickering and swearing counterpoint moments of grace, sharing and compassion, an addict's hunger for a fix mirrors a tender dance with his ex girlfriend, and all the while, a picture of Frankenstein's monster, its grotesque body like the extreme real world version of an addict's disintegrating flesh, is paired to what look's like a painting of Christ's Last Supper, disciples huddled together in holy communion. The film's title itself offers an ironic contrast, "The Rainbow Room" alluding to both the famous upscale restaurant in Rockefeller Centre and our cast's shabby room, the decrepit site at which they nevertheless believe all their dreams will come true.
"The Rainbow Room" works well dramatically, which is rare in short films. The cast range from excellent to shaky, but this is normal for such productions. Whether their creaky line delivery is due to novice actors, time constraints or a novice director's uncertainty, is unknown. In any case, such flaws don't distract and Yankilevich's visual command is impressive. His camera is relaxed but confident, and he makes good use of both music (was the Jazz soundtrack the unforeseen result of casting a musician as an actor?) and simple props. The film ends on a note of uncertainty, as such a film should.
8/10 – Worth one viewing. Some more worthwhile, recent short films: Cronenberg's "Camera" and "At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World", Antonioni's "Eye to Eye" and Mark Black's "Nothing Personal".
At first glance "The Rainbow Room" seems primed to tap into a certain brand of intolerable cinema; the mid 1990's "drug movie", in which foul mouthed urban youths snort coke, inject heroin, trade hip swear words and pose macho for the camera ("Hate", "Trainspotting", "Reservoir Dogs", "Pulp Fiction", "Clockers", "Requiem For A Dream" etc). Director Igor Yankilevich is up to other things, though. With just a few carefully placed props he conjures up the world of classic noirs, with their sparse rooms, midnight skylines, jazzy ambiance, blinking neon bulbs, street urchins and lonely losers of the night. But more than anything, Yankilevich understands the romance of noir and the camaraderie noir evokes, the genre's pitiable heroes perpetually huddling together in the face of the night.
What Yankilevich's cast are hiding from is never explained, but it needn't be. Noir has always carried a certain, unspoken, existential weight. And so they sit and wait for that which they hope will bring sweet escape. What the film stresses, though – and in this way it recalls Altman's "A Prairie Home Companion" - is not so much the toll such "escapes" take on the body (one kid in the film nearly dies of an overdose) and mind (they're clearly on edge, spiralling out of control), but that human connection, kinship (even the camaraderie of film-making itself) and empathy are what ultimately proves to be the best means of staving off the night.
In this regard, Yankilevich spends most of the film engaging in nice contrasts. Moments of bickering and swearing counterpoint moments of grace, sharing and compassion, an addict's hunger for a fix mirrors a tender dance with his ex girlfriend, and all the while, a picture of Frankenstein's monster, its grotesque body like the extreme real world version of an addict's disintegrating flesh, is paired to what look's like a painting of Christ's Last Supper, disciples huddled together in holy communion. The film's title itself offers an ironic contrast, "The Rainbow Room" alluding to both the famous upscale restaurant in Rockefeller Centre and our cast's shabby room, the decrepit site at which they nevertheless believe all their dreams will come true.
"The Rainbow Room" works well dramatically, which is rare in short films. The cast range from excellent to shaky, but this is normal for such productions. Whether their creaky line delivery is due to novice actors, time constraints or a novice director's uncertainty, is unknown. In any case, such flaws don't distract and Yankilevich's visual command is impressive. His camera is relaxed but confident, and he makes good use of both music (was the Jazz soundtrack the unforeseen result of casting a musician as an actor?) and simple props. The film ends on a note of uncertainty, as such a film should.
8/10 – Worth one viewing. Some more worthwhile, recent short films: Cronenberg's "Camera" and "At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World", Antonioni's "Eye to Eye" and Mark Black's "Nothing Personal".
