Cutaways

Cutaways is a lot of things, but one thing it is not is conventional. Were you to go into this viewing experience knowing nothing about the movie, you may very well push back against the audacious conceit, outlandish tone and maximalist moments. Yet that is also what makes this chamber-piece about one idiosyncratic director producing a porn film quite admirable; it hits the audience over the head with its extreme nature, whilst not delving headfirst into pornographic territory itself. Written, directed, produced and edited by filmmaker Mark Schwab, and starring Silas Kade, Fernando and Diogo Hausen, Cutaways is technically refined, though slightly inconsistent narratively and thematically.

There is a technical production value on display in this piece, particularly from a cinematography perspective. This film has been captured using some pretty wondrous lenses – put to excellent use and opened to as wide an aperture as possible. In terms of blocking, scene coverage and general direction, the visual style here is very standard – almost televisual. However, the cinematographer makes clear that there is a specificity of craft; of light and of focus; going on behind that aesthetic consistency.

The themes being explored here are intense and prescient with ideas relating to boundaries of creative intimacy and dynamics of artist-to-subject power positioning themselves at the forefront. You have got to admire any movie which attempts to tackle such subjects, but the question remains: does it go far enough? Unfortunately, the film’s interests are depicted heavy-handedly, because that is just the nature of the story. What it lacks, however, is a really tangible, unsettling undertone; a sense of questioning, of simultaneous excitement and dread. This it lacks not for any particular reason, but more due to the extreme tone of the picture as a whole.

There are plenty of engaging performances throughout – characters that pop and can hold the camera. And yet, a jarring mixture of performance styles means that interactions occasionally come across as unnatural. This is by no means a prominent issue, but even still, an error in tone management.

It was a massively beneficial storytelling decision to have the film take place in one day, with the chronology effectively uninterrupted throughout that runtime (much like a stage play). The main reason being is that it allows the moments to breathe, and the evolution of the scenario to feel more grounded and immersive. But then, at the halfway point there’s a huge dramatic shift as the film enters territory which is never fully resolved at all. Thankfully the natural pacing and structural fluidity means that this open-ended aspect is not too noticeable, but one does wonder if more interesting tensions could have been explored yet again.

One element I have neglected to mention is the number of movie references in the movie; Paul Thomas Anderson, Sidney Lumet, Peter Bogdanovich and especially Gregg Araki (who also has some plot relevance) are just some of the filmmakers name-dropped. This could certainly appeal to cinephiles in the same way that – whist it is pornography – this is a film about filmmaking and artistic pursuits, as damaging as those pursuits sometimes prove to be. To surmise, Cutaways is admirably transgressive and technically refined.

Cutaways releases this week on Amazon Prime, Fandango at Home and Vimeo OnDemand.