Pink Wall

When reflect­ing on past rela­tion­ships, it’s the lit­tle things that often stick in the mem­o­ry. This is cer­tain­ly true of Tom Cullen’s direc­to­r­i­al debut Pink Wall, which zeroes in on the fin­er points of a couple’s time togeth­er. Inti­mate and brac­ing­ly hon­est, the film is split into six non-lin­ear seg­ments, trac­ing the romance between twen­tysome­things Leon (Jay Duplass) and Jen­na (Tatiana Maslany) across six frac­tious years.

Writer/​director Cullen, who you might recog­nise as one of the stars of Andrew Haigh’s roman­tic dra­ma Week­end, opens four years into the rela­tion­ship as a meal turns from light-heart­ed jokes to point­ed jibes. Cullen com­bines soft­ly lit inti­ma­cy with sharply word­ed shout­ing match­es in vignettes that switch between aspect ratios, with ​‘Year 1’ pre­sent­ed in a home video-style 4:3 format.

Thanks to the cen­tral pair­ing, intrigue is just about sus­tained for the 81-minute run­time. In par­tic­u­lar, Maslany (Cullen’s real-life part­ner) brings a feisti­ness to Jen­na, the more ambi­tious half of the cou­ple. Duplass, mean­while, is a good fit as a shag­gy slack­er and photographer’s assis­tant whose world­view doesn’t extend beyond Jen­na. With strong chem­istry, many of their exchanges appear impro­vised as they make the cou­ple seem believ­able, as is cru­cial for any rela­tion­ship drama.

With nei­ther par­ty shown to be in the right, the raw lovers’ tiffs make for a film more about the com­plex­i­ties of rela­tion­ships than love itself. At a frosty din­ner par­ty Jen­na rejects the label of ​“a hon­ey­moon phase,” ques­tion­ing the idea of monogamy and the cost of undi­vid­ed devo­tion. Sim­i­lar prob­ing of the expec­ta­tion to have chil­dren emerges, although this is lost amid the bick­er­ing. Regard­less, this is an hon­est close-up of a fail­ing rela­tion­ship with a uni­ver­sal ring to it.