If you’ve been watching for a long time you will have specific expectations. If it’s a comedy of course you’ll expect jokes, but also weird characters or strange situations. If it’s a drama you expect to be pulled into someone’s life and their story as they deal with a difficult situations. It’s easy to come up with more examples. Most movies follow those expectations as they belong to the specific type of movie. Still there are sometimes movies which do things differently, which use a concept and stick to that. The result will not always work, but taking risks when making movies is something I’m able appreciate.
When it comes to Richard Linklater, he’s someone who has being trying to stray away from conventions of film. One of the ways of doing that is by playing with time. In the Before trilogy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight) the viewer spends a couple of hours with two characters just talking to each other, allowing you to get to know them intimately.
With Boyhood he decided to make a film which he recorded during twelve year with the same actors. The end result is a movie where you actually see them age. Visually he also experimented by the use of rotoscoping (in which drawings are made on top of existing footage) which resulted in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. But he has also experimented with the traditional structure of a movie, which he did in his first well-known movie, Slacker.
If you decide to watch this movie expecting a traditional story than you’ll be in for a huge disappointment. This is a film where it’s not about the narrative. The movie opens with a long monologue (done by Linklater himself) where a character is talking about the choices we have and haven’t made and the parallel universes that come into being because of that. The character steps out of the cab, witnesses an accident and leaves the fram. You meet another character and expect the other character to return, but this never happens. It’s something which is repeated throughout the film. Every character takes the baton from another one that passes the frame. It results in a movie where you witness shards from the life of a big number of people, without ever getting to know them.
Still Linklater manages to keep it all interesting by having great dialogue and several strange events. By presenting a mosaic of characters and settings you are constantly wondering where the movie will go next and you regularly hope the camera will linger in a specific place just a bit longer. You actually get the feeling you would like to know more of specific people or wish they would have their own movie, but it is all restricted. What you do get a sense of is the atmosphere of the town and the time it is set in, without ever going deeper into a specific subject.
When it was released Slacker has a big impact on the indie scene. It showed that you could make an interesting movie on a tiny budget. A director like Kevin Smith for example has said this movie inspired him to make movies. If you are open to a film which is different, than this is a movie worth checking out. It is nice to see that Linklater, despite his success is still willing to take chances and explore the possibilities the medium offers, which might also inspire others to do the same.
