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★★★★
Directed by:#NataschaGraham
Written by: #NataschaGraham
Starring: #DelaneyBrown
This 10 minute short relies on a single, static shot of one woman’s monologue about the experiences of being a woman living in a man’s world. She speaks to the camera, telling us directly the difficulties of daily sexual harassment by men towards women, ending the conversation with her striking personal tale of how she dealt with the harassment when it got too much to handle.
The muted backdrop and neutral tones leave no room for the audience’s eyes to flick about or be distracted; we must focus on the words spoken.
The clean and innocuous set-up allows the sole actor, Delaney Brown, to express herself and her frustration at the experiences she talks about. The themes become stronger against this composition, and Brown’s eye contact with the camera as she conversationally speaks her monologue creates a balance between the casual atmosphere and the seriousness of her words.
The monologue did come across as almost too rehearsed at times, although Brown became looser with her tone and movements as the film went on. The static camera also contributed to this stiffer format, almost contrasting too much against the neutral tone and ‘conversational’ feel of the casual sitting-room set-up, which wasn’t helped by the rehearsed monologue. The balance was there between serious theme and informal scene, but the balance of language and scene did not match.
However, this is a very nit-picky point to make; the director Natascha Graham has written a great piece of work and that is the focus of this film. The simplicity of Confessions: The Hours allows for authenticity of character and experience. Every woman can relate to the generalised experiences that Brown’s character speaks, and the final tale is like a realised vision of those same women – what we want to do to make the harassment stop, but instead we must take it.
This film knows what it wants to achieve, making for a coherent and direct piece of filmmaking that draws the viewer in and allows for a true connection between spectator and character, before turning the tables and shocking with the final words. It leads you straight to your internet search bar to look up the director and see if there are other Confessions of similar nature. The film may have been even stronger with a less rehearsed tone of voice from Brown to match the colloquial language and casual setting, maybe with some slight camera movement as if the camera were a person to which she was confessing.
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