Neglected Aspirations and Mundane Adult Lives
A Review of Shopping Channels
Two housemates, Pete and Mike clean up the aftermath of a house party from the previous night. Mike finds stranger, Maddie, still asleep on the sofa. All three become acquainted and spend the day together. At the day’s end, Mike, now smitten with Maddie, makes an awkward, but grand gesture to drive her all the way to Scotland to attend her mother’s wedding and the two embark on an emotional journey together on a road trip across the country.
The film adopts a combination of the genres romantic comedy and drama, with a filmic style resembling a mockumentary. At times the camera is without a tripod, hand-held and unstable, accompanied with random zooms and the odd disconcerting jump cut. The style distracts from the story and doesn’t match the contrasting mix of genres. The cinematography shows skill with aesthetically pleasing lighting and composition. However, the film suffers at times from poor quality of sound, so that some of the dialogue is difficult to discern. The film mostly consists of dialogue, particularly between Mike and Maddie throughout their journey and is comprised of few events and many laborious, dull conversations as the actors describe in monotonous tones their childhood, work-life and sexual histories. The characters themselves don’t appear to have much depth to them, at least not until the end where they open up to one-another about their unsatisfactory relationships with family members.
The film is very slow-paced and demands a lot of patience from its audience. Many of the conversations do not contribute a great deal to the story. The few that do, however, address some interesting themes concerning the reality of adult life. The protagonist, Mike, tells of his choice to neglect his dream of becoming a professional portrait photographer and instead took a mundane job in management for a car hire company. In addition, Maddie had aspirations of being a literary author, but instead works in a book store selling other people’s works.
The film paints a bleak picture of modern adult life, emphasising its mundanity and the hardships suffered from unsatisfactory family relationships, whilst imparting a message on the importance of relationships between friends and partners and the positive effect they have.
Shopping Channels Trailer
Susanne Hodder, better known as Sue is a film reviewer from North Wales with an academic background and a first class honors degree in film studies. Also a keen filmmaker, Sue has helped produce a number of short films as part of a creative team. She also undertakes independent projects, shooting and editing her own wildlife documentary shorts and photographs.
