First Per­son Plur­al – first-look review

The open­ing shot of San­dro Aguilar’s beguil­ing, chal­leng­ing third fea­ture, First Per­son Plur­al, sees a suit­ed man wear­ing an eye­less white ski-mask as he del­i­cate­ly pens a note to his spouse. He con­torts his arms, hands, and fin­gers as if he’s con­duct­ing an orches­tra, point­ing with a man­nered effete­ness at domes­tic objects, feel­ing them from a remote dis­tance. He glides through the space, hyper-con­scious of every­thing around him.

When he final­ly prowls upstairs to deliv­er the note, we meet his wife lay­ing in bed, and the pair’s oblique repar­tee sug­gests that the vibe in this house­hold is very much off. Yet it’s nev­er clear­ly stat­ed whether this is a stylised direc­to­r­i­al tic – to have actors’ body move­ments and enun­ci­a­tions chore­o­graphed like they’re play­ing in a Jacques Tati movie – or whether some­thing has hap­pened to pro­voke this enter­tain­ing­ly strange state of being.

Aguilar refus­es to spoon-feed any kind of overt con­text, so the view­er is left to deci­pher the dia­logue for clues as to what’s hap­pen­ing – and it’s not an easy task. What’s more, the oth­er char­ac­ters in the film, the pair’s errant, mys­te­ri­ous son, and two of the father’s acquain­tances, seem also to be light­ly afflict­ed with what­ev­er this cou­ple have wrong with them, but per­haps not to the same bal­let­ic, body-twitch­ing extent. 

I will admit: while watch­ing the First Per­son Plur­al, I was not able to dis­cern any kind of cause or effect for what was hap­pen­ing on screen, and had to lean on a descrip­tion in the fes­ti­val cat­a­logue to gain some light com­pre­hen­sion. Appar­ent­ly, the cou­ple have planned a break on a trop­i­cal island and have both had to take vac­cines pri­or to the trip, and their oth­er­world­ly behav­iour is a symp­tom. It’s def­i­nite­ly there in the dia­logue, but it’s a blink and you’ll miss it type thing.

And yet, not know­ing this key plot detail did not dim the plea­sures of this expres­sive and unique film, and Aguilar weaves move­ments and scenes into a dream-like tapes­try, stitched togeth­er with evoca­tive, late night hotel bar piano music and sul­try, slow cross-fades. It’s the ambi­ent atmos­pher­ics that lock you into the sto­ry, even if there’s lit­tle obvi­ous log­ic to char­ac­ter moti­va­tion. Life out­side of this leafy enclave is allud­ed to but nev­er explained, and so you’re left to mere­ly allow each gor­geous­ly-con­ceived scene to melt into the next.

Spe­cial men­tion must go to Rui Xavier’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy which man­ages to feel but exact­ing and com­plete­ly loose, framed and blocked to per­fec­tion, but also open to the actors’ ran­dom flights of fan­cy. The pro­duc­tion design, too, of the fam­i­ly house help to foment this notion of a dim­ly-lit bour­geois nether­world that’s a lit­tle like a prison you don’t want to escape from.

Yet maybe this is best tak­en as a ​“trip” movie, in which Aguilar explores the inter­sec­tions between the act­ing process and the nox­ious effects of drugs; in both cas­es an out­side force con­sumes our bod­ies and has its wicked way with us. And like many psy­che­del­ic drugs, there are repel­lant qual­i­ties to this film, and many will like­ly want the trip to end before it has prop­er­ly begun.