Capsule Review: An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (2012)

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty

This movie is that once in a half decade, so aware and determined film that its general ‘otherness’ in style and form is self-defending, any sort of fragmented ‘weirdness’ one would want to mention is instantly normalized, as if cinema had always been and is supposed to be understood this way.

A young man walks through his emotional memories of a young woman, recreating moments in time with humor and self-criticism and empathy, leading her and the audience through his insatiable energy for emotional masochism and crippling fatigue for getting himself together, until she is invited to a showing of his short films about her and asked to comment on them, turning the film into psychodocudrama from a restrained and entrapped singular perspective. Animation, arts and crafts, poetry, and a shitty DIY bed are the frames. The content is his heart, which is malleable from scene to shining scene.

It’s also history, memory, and time travel, the best reasons to watch movies.

–DB

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