August 26, 2010: Following
Every time I see a movie, as the Half-Assed Movie Reviews reader might have guessed, my brain goes off constructing a spiderweb of dozens of additional movies that I would like to see in order to understand the career stages and personal perspectives and influences of the parties involved in making the film at that tie. Alas, since I don’t live in the movie Groundhog Day (1993), I don’t have the time to follow up on this desire and instead the web is discarded in a few days, replaced by one for the next movie I’ve seen.
On occasion, though, I do manage to at least scratch the surface. I’ve been a fan of Christopher Nolan since I saw Memento (2001), and before going on my summer vacation this year, I made sure to see his new film, Inception. Upon my return, I decided to watch Following (1998), an early feature written and directed by Nolan. It’s a lean film, running only 69 minutes, about a man who falls into a habit of following people, not necessarily stalking per se, but just following them around to see what they do, like television only in real life. When he is caught by one of the people he’s following, it immediately triggers an out-of-control sequence of events as he is drawn into the world of this man he was observing.
The rough editing and episodic structure are a bit jarring but aren’t necessarily out of place in this black and white film which doesn’t follow a linear narrative structure anyway. I found it reminiscent of Pi (1998), the feature debut of Darren Aronofsky, another innovative writer-director who’s starting to find his rightful place in the Hollywood pecking order, having made a stir in the arthouse world with Requiem for a Dream (2000) and achieved more mainstream (if not quite commercial) success with Mickey Rourke’s big comeback The Wrestler two years ago. Getting back to Nolan, he’s known for his departures from linear timelines, most notably with Memento but there are elements of it contained in most of his films, and in Following, we see an early example of his experimentation with the technique.
It may be symptomatic of my skepticism with these kinds of films that I spent the entire run time trying to figure out what was going on, and concluded that it was something far more convoluted than it actually was. At the end of the film, what happened is spelled out pretty clearly, but I didn’t let myself believe it. Reading a summary of the film online, it appeared to take the explanation at face value, so I figured I must have duped myself with this one. I won’t spoil the film by explaining my take on it or the accepted version of the story. I wanted to like Following, and be able to recommend it as an unknown early Christopher Nolan gem, but I don’t think I would tell anyone to bother with it unless they had already seen Memento and Inception and wanted to see the seeds of those films in the rough form of a director’s first feature.
Enlightening but unfortunately not entirely satisfying.
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