Freeze framed

>> Time slows down for the main
character, and the audience, in Cashback

by JOHN CUSTODIO

Cashback opens with a close-up of a woman in the throes of a hysterical fit. Her face is contorted by anger. Her gestures are violent. She’s throwing punches and crockery, and she’s cursing up a storm. We can’t hear what she’s shouting, but it’s all happening in hyper-aestheticized slow-motion, so we can read her lips and make out the juicier bits of her tirade.

Her name is Suzy (Michelle Ryan), and we don’t hear her because her voice is being drowned out by a Bellini aria. No matter, this isn’t her story anyway. It’s Ben’s (Sean Biggerstaff). Those are her glossy lips taking up half the screen, but it’s his voice-over explaining why she’s acting so crazy: he’s just dumped her.

At this point, anyone with even a passing familiarity with feminist film theory should be hearing alarms. Suzy is a voiceless, hysterical, beautiful fetish object; Ben’s is the privileged gaze and voice we’re encouraged to identify with. Unfortunately, Cashback’s retrograde sexual politics are the only interesting thing about it.

The story—Ben succumbs to insomnia after the break-up, takes a graveyard shift in a supermarket, and learns to make the time pass by playing at being able to freeze it—is as thin and pat as the philosophical musings the film proffers. “The bad news is time flies,” he says at one point. “The good news is you’re the pilot.” And as pilot, you’re free to undress the women at work, after you’ve magically frozen them. Happy International Women’s Day.

No surprise, then, that director Sean Ellis, whose first feature film this is, comes to filmmaking from the world of high fashion photography. To his credit, Ellis has visual panache to spare. The closing scene is magical, and it’s easy to see why Cashback, when it was 18 minutes long, garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Live Action Short Film. Unfortunately, an observation like, “With the world on pause, it becomes very easy to understand the concept of beauty” isn’t enough to make this version, at 101 minutes, worth watching. Still, on pause...

Cashback opens this Friday, March 16

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