FLAIL | Omeleto
A woman prepares for her boss's party.
FLAIL is used with permission from Ben Gauthier. Learn more at / benchgauthier .
Allie is an overworked, distracted assistant. She does everything from picking up cat litter to picking up cakes and balloons for her boss's birthday party. Throughout it all, she's bombarded by texts, notifications, FaceTime calls and nagging from the other assistant, which makes navigating through her day even more difficult.
As her quest to get through her to-do list becomes ever more urgent, she finds herself distracted and making errors that derail her from finishing anything on her growing to-do list. As the barrage increases in intensity and she faces a harsh reprimand, she hits a breaking point that forces her to reconsider it all.
Directed and written by Ben Gauthier, this sharp, astringent short comedy is both a challenging yet accessible formal experiment and a well-observed snapshot of contemporary life in the age of distraction. Both aspects dovetail perfectly, creating a sense of how frayed we are with the constant bombardment of "noise" in our lives, often to a bitingly humorous effect.
Allie is introduced as a kind of everywoman, beleaguered and overworked, and we're dropped in the middle of a particularly frazzled moment in her life as she's trying to wrestle a group of balloons into a car. The action seems ordinary, but the opening image of it is disorienting and even surreal, made even more off-kilter by the buzz of relentless phone calls, phone buzz and notification dings. The film is shot with a low-key, even simple sense of naturalism that emphasizes the mundanity of Allie's job. But through the constant invasion of texts and notifications on the screen and a dense, often discordant sound design and score, it assaults the viewer with the same information and stimuli that Allie is subjected to during her day.
Along with her phone, this constant din of noise is Allie's most constant companion through the day, where she's sent scurrying from one errand to the next. Through it all, she tries to break up with a Tinder date, takes a call from her mom and picks up her brother David from a fish store. And she can't get anything right, which sends her scurrying once again to fix her mistake. Actor Allie Levitan in the lead role is frazzled and stressed, conveying a growing desperation as her day -- and her sense of autonomy and control in it -- gets away from her. All the small messages, mistakes and distractions compound into a major mess-up, leading to a crisis and outburst that puts things into perspective for her.
Cerebral, relatable and formally audacious, FLAIL is as stressful an experience for the viewer as Allie's life is for her, an effect created by its fragmented, frazzled approach to image and sound. But part of its accomplishment is its ability to remind us how alienating and depleting being constantly "online" truly is, especially when many of us are used to the constant pings from our phones and perhaps numb to distraction. But seeing Allie's day and even life slip away from her is an invitation to consider it for ourselves, especially as the expectation of constantly being "on" and available has become embedded in our workplaces and lives. The film's poetic ending image then becomes a relief, a still point of contemplation in a world badly in need of rest and reflection.
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