Quality Time (Daan Bakker, 2017)
I'm not really sure how I stumbled across this film or what the hell possessed me to give it a try and now that I've seen it, I'm not entirely sure what the hell I just watched or how to go about reviewing it.
Quality Time isn't so much a movie as it is a collection of five shorts about men in their 30s struggling to cope with familial relationships and just... being grown-ups, I guess? Its stories never intersect and are loosely held together by the overarching theme of "masculinity in crisis” (to quote its trailer).
The first part is about a guy and his parents (I think?) on their way to a family gathering that he doesn't really want to attend because he always feels obligated to do a certain uncomfortable thing for the amusement of his uncle. He whines about this feeling of obligation and his mother (I think?) urges him not to do the thing. He, of course, does it anyway once they arrive. What makes this segment truly bizarre, besides the uncomfortable thing he does, is that we never see the characters, because they are represented as dots on the screen with robotic voices. I'd rate this part maybe a 2.5 out of 5 purely for the WTF factor.
The second part nearly made me stop watching. It focuses on a guy who has moved back in with his parents and has taken up a project of photographing meaningful places from his life, relying on his father to drive him around. On the surface, that sounds like it could be interesting, right? It isn't - unless you consider frustrating to be synonymous with interesting. I don't. Nearly every shot of this segment is taken from a far distance, sometimes such a distance that we don't see the character at all because he's inside a building or vehicle and the camera is not. What we also don't get is spoken dialogue. Instead we get words on the screen. And yet, despite the silence and the lack of being able to see him, this character somehow manages to be weirdly obnoxious and unlikeable. I would rate this a very generous 1 out of 5.
The third part is fantastic. Here we see a man with crippling social anxiety travel back in time to his childhood in an attempt to prevent the traumatic event that he believes is responsible for his anxiety. After getting initially positive results, he attempts to take the idea to an extreme, with hilarious and disastrous results. I'd rate this a 4 out of 5.
The fourth part is also really good and really weird. In this, we get tiny snippets of the life of man who lives with his parents and goes along with their mundane existence until a certain medical condition causes things to get weird.
Really weird. Like, it sort of reminded me of
Eraserhead kind of weird. I'd also rate this a 4 out of 5.
Then comes the fifth part, which is a big letdown from the previous two parts and unfortunately takes up about a third of the film. Here a man spends time with his girlfriend's family for the first time ever and tries to make a good impression while struggling with the awkwardness of dealing with people who are very different from him. Which might be relatable, but this section drags terribly and the guy is kind of a dick. A dick who inexplicably pisses in indoor trash cans. I would rate this a 2 out of 5.
As for the film as a whole? Well, if I calculate the mean average of the five segments, I get a 2.7. So I guess I'll round up?