WARNING: Contains Spoilers
The love triangle is between Bernal as Kit, Natalie Verbeke as Carmen & James D’Arcy as Barnaby. Carmen is young Spaniard who goes around London from sacking to sacking, showing one talent in dancing which leads to her engagement with the wealthy Barnaby, who gives her a Hen’s night at a restaurant camera-carrying Kit, a Brazilian actor desperate for love, who is dining the same night. A waiter proposes that Carmen should in a new tradition kiss her single life goodbye, so with the restaurant fixed and set, the one most beautiful stranger left for her to choose is Kit, who really takes an extra liking to beyond his obligation, two of friends filming it all on his sponsored handheld cam. I’ll mainly talk about the second half/stage of this Dot the I which kicks in at about the forty minute mark, so Kit is an actor who this assignment/camera to court Carmen who has just been engaged to the assigner, filmmaker-wannabe Barnaby, through flashbacks we see all the seeds planted by him, even making sure the restaurant for Carmen’s hens-night didn’t invite handsome young men like Kit, the stalker that’s hinted to possibly have followed Carmen from Brazil is never revealed, actually Kit is more the stalking one from his home of Brazil along with his mates all equipped with camcorders. For the budget, Dot the I is less admirable as Brick, Primer etc, holding back from any cinematic uniqueness. Like me you may antinational love some of the concepts and turns Matthew Parkhill takes in his script, the more you unfortunately think about the more you wonder most of all how Carmen truly loved Barnaby, given she married him not Kit. Having only viewed it once, I can say Bernal and especially Verbeke capture young loves in London, they are always on the job, Carmen getting sacked every week and Barnaby even more so then Kit keeping his work secret to Carmen, who unfortunately is the only female character in the film, making for rather either a false sense of loneliness or a perplexing hens night because a few days later the Carmen-Barnaby wedding is just the two, signing vows and film release forms. As for now I’m giving the film some benefits over my continued doubt, the fact that Kit and his two buddies are the only stalkers is a good twist, Barnaby somewhat mysteriously commits suicide, its only then that we find out what an asshole he is, James D’Arcy is really good in really one scene, his character is made out rather smug thereafter, just look at his walk to some indie-awards stage as he gets assassinated, which makes for an okay investigation by that could be more secret cameras if truly Parkhill was cheating us with that last scene. Dot the I is the first film to look in a meta way at cinema verite just as it came into vogue, given this film lacks comedy it probably make it a good rewatch, if you at least compare it to its global-opposite This is Spinal Tap, it also runs at 85 minutes yet packs a lot in, making for a good first ride.
The one main weakness of Dot the I is how it eventually adopts the happy ending (though done simply) of other first romances of the Gen-Y like the all-so-fine much weaker love stories of Lost in Translation (Johansson boredom), Garden State (smugly says “way more fucked up when you’re family), at least not going off-the-boil like the pathetic Lars & the Real Girl or the very meek Bernal film The King , if anything Bernal’s first lead-film, Y T Tambien is the best tween-rom-film for maybe the whole decade, maybe since Gus van Sant’s Gen-X-esce My Own Private Idaho/Good Will Hunting, look how the current generation gets a hit-n-miss like Judd Apatow instead of a new Hal Hartley. I don’t know, this movie still lacks another half, though it may only take another ten to twenty minutes to play out some more of Carmen’s life and motivation, that should have been done with the filming was truly show it from the secret-cameras and Kit’s POV, a true auteur even voyeuristic way, instead of playing into standard composition of romance movies, the constant meetings between the two lead loves, the whole film project is deadly for Barnaby, but is he a dispensable character, he breaks the master plan to his wife Carmen, Parkhill doesn’t stop there, in fact conspiring to get those ‘two-guys’ locked up for Barnaby’s assassination. Like many of the scenes, every thing in the foreground, in focus, is entertaining and well executed; much of the background remains fussy, still… Ultimately the film works like this, okay romance that lacks comedy and cinematic bravaro, a twist that makes for many more intriguing ones that abandoned any character development after the 2/3’s mark, this makes for maybe a half great movie, a two thirds good movie, since I’ve done a spoiler review I’ll rate it out of ten because usually reviews I like/love which are 8+/10, so if there’s an option for you the reader to reply go ahead, that’s one way to get a head around some things I may have missed, given that I’ve just written this on the fly, I’ll definitely comment on this review once I’ve seen it again (look at my meta), having seen it probably two months back, for now I’ll give it 6.5/10, you…? Leonard Boulevard |
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Dot the I is a Gael Garcia Bernal movie, if like me you didn’t know the story prior he is the attraction, arguably the actor of the decade on the front of this wondrous DVD cover selling it well as a meta-romance-thriller. Matthew Parkhill’s only feature to date from 2003 was made for $US 600,000 combining film and video by cinematographer Affonso Beato to contentedly tell a “urban love story” with a twist in London, a movie he also said mixed genres, enough to really qualify the film as one of diving opinion, with ambition in storytelling Parkhill’s debut is great discussion for we the audience, bound to differ, a film we can love to hate, deconstruct and/or be swayed to revisit and re-evaluate. 
With the characters one may conclude that all of theme see rather Baumback-dislikeable, of course this has a plot, if you look at how that they all seem to be disconnected from family, it’s a film that does take a realistic view on that if you exclude the wedding scene, which also makes for a cinematic play on all the cinematic wedding crashing, one of too few references made, you fell the movie could have offered more deconstruction, Parkhill shows intuition by getting Almodovar cinematographer Affonso Beato yet his one view outside of his film is that of ‘truelove’, here between Carmen & Kit who do the most perplexing thing of becoming acting stars by the last sequence, be it the movie has gone mainstream you have to ask what Carmen in particular wants, she’s a dancer, an accidentally made movie star, a widow with a new love.
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