About A Girl (Brian Percival, 2001)

About A Girl(Brian Percival, 2001) follows a young girl who talks directly to the audience, telling them about her interests, social life, family and dreams for the future.

An interesting technique the film uses is direct communication by the protagonist to the audience. The girl acknowledges the camera and speaks to us, which gives the audience a very personal understanding of the main character. This brings the audience into the film, and helps them to understand the character more. It is also shot in handheld, and made to look like an observational documentary, as the camera is sometimes far away from the girl, and picks up conversations that she has with other people.

The film also cuts back to points in the girl’s day to give the audience footage of the things she is talking about, such as her relationship with her dad, friends, arguments with her mum, etc. This is also done quite clumsily, as sometimes the girl is interrupted by these sudden and fast flashbacks that do not always give important information away, and this is done to help bring us closer to the main character. The film is clearly trying to create a realistic depiction of a young girl living in her circumstances, and therefore uses her narration and footage to juxtapose how she describes her life and what it looks like to the audience, and the perfect moment where this can be seen is the shock ending. In fact, the twist in this film that comes in the last 20 seconds and completely changes the way we look at the protagonist and the rest of the film, is the main thing I remember from About A Girl. It is extremely shocking and grim, which takes the already realistic subject matter and makes it much more serious and powerful. This and the footage taken earlier used to backup or juxtapose the protagonists narration, and the method of communication directly with the audience are all techniques that stick with me.

There is no particular climax, enigma or conflict set up, just the main character describing themselves to us, the audience. I did not like hoe repetitive this mode of communication felt after a few min utes, as the protagonist constantly talks to the audience, with the only breaks being footage taken from earlier, in which she may also be the only one talking. This brought the film down for me, but the film does use some interesting techniques, and also shows how a short film can be centred around one specific character who can involve the audience in their life and therefore, the film. However, it also shows how you can lose the audiences attention through constant dialogue and the lack of any developing plot or progressing narrative, as the film just follows a character describing their life, with a twist ending to add meaning and peak interest but otherwise no devices to advance the plot and keep the audience interested.