Full Frontal

365 Films

Entry #116

Full Frontal (2002)

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

2002 seems to be the year that Steven Soderbergh truly tested audiences’ capacity for his unusual filmmaking proclivities.  Aside from the befuddled reaction that came late in the years from his Solaris remake, 2002 also saw some of the wind going out of his sails with the late summer release of Full Frontal.  Boasting a loaded cast packed with celebrities of every kind of screen, constructed around a worm hole plot revealing several different layers of reality bit by bit, and perhaps what turned out to be its greatest offense, ultimately coming off as one big inside joke.  It has always been my position that Full Frontal is one of Soderbergh’s more intriguing efforts for the plain and simple fact that it is, from its most skeletal concept, an experiment.  To be perfectly frank about it, any movie that attempts to approximate the visual and cinematic equivalent of human vomit is okay in my book.  That may or not be the exact quality Soderbergh was going for, but it’s clear from Full Frontal that his fascination and obsession with digital filmmaking began here.  One gets the sense that this is a director discovering a new medium and the sense of play in the film is undeniable.  Revolving around a group of characters orbiting the mainstream and fringes of the entertainment industry, Full Frontal constantly keeps the viewer guessing as to which level of reality they are actually experiencing in any given moment.  For example, the sequences shot in the low-resolution digital video are supposed to be “real” and there’s even a verite style to the camera work.  Then again, within those sequences are visual punctuations obviously added in post-production to accentuate certain elements of the story.  The black box that covers Mr. Soderbergh’s face during his cameo, the highlighting discoloration on the half-eaten pot brownies, and the literal on screen text that appears during the shot of the money being counted.  This is supposed to be real life, yet Soderbergh goes out of his way to remind us that what we are seeing can be manipulated and distorted at any given moment.  It may be for benign and helpful reasons, but the threat is always there.  Then you take the sequences shot in the crisp and beautiful 35mm format.  Theses are sequences, which, as the credits remind us from an already finished and fabricated product (which is revealed halfway through the movie to be a work in process).  The 35mm scenes are staged flatly and shot in a traditional, uninventive style yet since they were the medium (at the time) most filmgoers were accustomed to; they somehow come off as more real.  I always find it fascinating how relieved I am to go back to the 35mm scenes in the movie, even when the content of those sequences is dull as dishwater.  The question then becomes which is more real, or, which of these people are merely performing and which are presenting their true selves?  How often do any of us present our true selves?  I don’t have an answer for any of these questions, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t think the film does either.  Far from being just a cinematic wank-fest, I think this is one of Sodbergh’s more genuinely explorative efforts into the nature of cinematic reality.