Elise

It's easy to view Joel Ferrer's Elise as a run of the mill romantic movie about a guy who falls in love with a girl, but if there's anything local filmmakers are good at these days, it's clever disguises. Elise ends up being something more; it is a film that shines because of the way it tells its tired, old story, such that it  no longer feels tired nor old. It's also a comedy, home to the comedy that one associates with a Livelo/Ferrer collaboration.

Peculiarities begin to pile up from the start. The film is told as a series of recollections. As such, they feel ethereal and floaty, almost incomplete. It bills itself as a film about a person who is fixated on his first love, but the film isn't exactly about that, as she shows up for maybe 70 percent of the movie at best. Elise is not an idealization either, as she is very much her own person with her own wants and dreams, wants and dreams that bleed over into our protagonist's own life. 

The characters in Elise are like you and me. The film serves as an introspective look at what we are: our lives are defined by our interactions with other people, no matter how insignificant these interactions may seem.  The movie makes a point that it is not a one way exchange, either. We are planets floating freely among a sea of stars, with orbits and without, celestial bodies occasionally in transit, our respective gravities influencing each other for a short time, and perhaps never again. Without the stories of other people to shape who we are, what are we but fragile flesh and bone? Yet at the same time, it tells us that we are not solely defined by one person, or one love, but the stories of everyone we have ever met, and will meet, in our short lives. 

The film seems to end abruptly, fixating only lightly on major dramatic arcs. This choice may not sit well with people used to the dramatic progression of romantic films in general, but it feels consistent. Any other film would have spent an entire act an moments like these, but Elise is not that kind of film. By all accounts it should not work, but by this time the viewer is immersed so deeply into the world these characters inhabit that it packs a punch. And with the film's final shots, we learn the film's purpose: perhaps it's not just about a tragic romance as it is about two lost people finding each other, with the symmetry of the first and final shots of the film serving as a testament to that notion, with one thread organically leading into another.

However you want to take it, as a silly love story, or as a comedy, or as a coming of age film, Elise is one of the most interesting movies of the year so far. It may not be the masterpiece people are saying it is, but it manages to cohere so many disparate elements into something deeply profound and resonant. To me, it is a celebration of what makes us what we are - to roads not taken, to stories intertwined, to the totality of ourselves and others. In the poet Aaron Lee's words, "We are all of us star-crossed voyagers, escaping by degrees, eternally at sea."